By Cory Doctorow at 11:51 am Thursday, Feb 16 • Comments • Share ![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fboingboing.net%2Fwp-content%2Fthemes%2Fbb%2Fsundries%2Fshare.png)
A Canadian Conservative MP has asked for an end to medium-wide camera shots in the broadcasts of Parliament on Friday afternoons. Fridays are when many MPs travel to their home ridings (districts) and Parliament empties out. The medium-wide shots used by Parliamentary broadcasts reveals a largely empty House of Commons. Worried about how bad this looked, Conservative MP Tom Lukiwski chaired a committee to revise the broadcast rules, and asked the CIO's office to end medium-wide shots, because it reflected badly on Parliament. The CIO turned him down.
Tom Lukiwski said he has heard concerns from colleagues that the empty seats picked up on camera make politicians look bad. "That kind of concerns a lot of members that it frankly doesn't look good for Parliament," he said. Friday is usually a light day in the House, as many MPs vacate Ottawa to return to their constituencies. A House of Commons committee reviewing the broadcasting rules this week heard from Parliament's chief informa-tion officer, who said wide-angle shots have been permitted since 1992 to provide some context for viewers at home. "You are on camera," Louis Bard told the committee. "If I have to focus on the chair and the member behind is sleeping, there's not much I can do."
Conservative MP worried empty seats make the House of Commons look bad (via As It Happens)
In 1982, famed author Martin Amis published a book about arcade games:
Invasion of the Space Invaders
. He's since become reluctant to discuss this curiosity, which poses the question--
why? Was it rendered silly by gaming's progression from the cutting-edge to mass entertainment? Was it written only for a quick buck? Alas, the right answer is the obvious one:
the book is mostly a mere strategy guide with "sickly" literary affectations. [The Millions via
Metafilter]
— Rob
By Cory Doctorow at 11:00 am Thursday, Feb 16 • Comments • Share
[ http://player.vimeo.com/video/36573140?byline=0
Indie documentary maker Michael McMahon sez,
The year is 2036. Decades after the second American Civil War and the global nuclear strike known as 'N-Day', an American soldier named John Titor is assigned a top secret mission: travel back in time to the year 1975 and retrieve an IBM 5100 computer. During this mission, John would make an unauthorized stop in the year 2000 for 'personal reasons.' There he would connect with his family, including his then 2-year-old self, and begin interacting online with a group of open-minded time travel enthusiasts. John would share information about the future and a detailed description of his time machine and how it works.
While some question the veracity of John's claims, others believe he was truly a man from the future. How to Build a Time Machine is a genre bending 'non-fiction, science-fiction mystery' that will explore the story of John Titor through interviews and detailed recreations based on John's original Internet posts. To accomplish this, the filmmakers need yo ur help! Hot Docs has announced their brand new Doc Ignite crowd sourcing initiative and have chosen How to Build a Time Machine as their first project to support. In exchange for a number of great incentives (including a DVD of the finished film, a limited edition poster, and a one-of-a-kind 'Zoetrope Time Machine' lamp), the campaign encourages people to contribute towards the $25,000 goal, which will be used to pay for props, costumes, and actors for the film's detailed, cinematic recreations.
How to Build a Time Machine
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:33 am Thursday, Feb 16 • Comments • Share
Do you want to add a more "human element" to your next project? The
Pulse Sensor, available in the
Maker Shed, measures subtle changes in light from expansion of the capillary blood vessels to sense your heartbeat. Gently place the sensor on any area of skin (such as a finger or earlobe) and it will transmit pulse data to your
Arduino for processing. The downloadable sample Processing / Arduino code lets you visualize your pulse data right on your computer. It's a simple, non-invasive, inexpensive way to incorporate biofeedback into your projects. Need some great project ideas? Check out Becky Stern's
Beating Heart Headband project from
MAKE: Volume 29!
NEW - Maker Shed now carries a
3.3V version of the Pulse Sensor that's perfect for
Lilypads and other 3V Arduinos!
The Colbert Report is
off the air and no one knows why, or if they do, they're not saying.
— Cory
Kim Zetter in
Wired: TSA agents in Dallas singled out female passengers to undergo screening in a body scanner, according to complaints filed by several women who said
they felt the screeners intentionally targeted them to view their bodies.
— Rob
By Cory Doctorow at 9:47 am Thursday, Feb 16 • Comments • Share
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcraphound.com%2Fimages%2Fsoviet-space-program-propaganda-poster-10.jpg)
RussiaTrek's DeIntegro has assembled a marvelous gallery of mid-century Soviet space-program propaganda posters, showing brave and noble Russians ascending to the heavens on the back of sound socialist rockets.
Propaganda posters of Soviet space program 1958-1963 (via How to Be a Retronaut)
By Glenn Fleishman at 9:42 am Thursday, Feb 16 • Comments • Share
The foundation of Web security rests on the notion that two very large prime numbers, numbers divisible only by themselves and 1, once multiplied together are irreducibly difficult to tease back apart. Researchers have discovered, in some cases, that a lack of entropy—a lack of disorder in the distribution of prime numbers—means by analogy that most buildings on the Web would stand in spite of gale winds and magnitude 10 earthquakes, while others can be pushed over with a finger or a breath. The weakness effects as many as 4 in 1,000 publicly available secured Web servers, but it appears in practice that few to no popular Web sites are at risk.
Read the rest
OS X is to go onto a yearly release schedule, a la iOS,
starting with this summer's Mountain Lion. Highlights include deeper iCloud integration and document storage; renamed core applications; the removal of interface inconsistencies and oddities; and an antimalware app-certification system of the sort likely to generate debate. [Daring Fireball]
— Rob
By Cory Doctorow at 8:43 am Thursday, Feb 16 • Comments • Share
Writing on 21k12, Jonathan Martin offers up a thoughtful response to the "plague of cheating" in secondary and postsecondary education. The right way to reduce cheating is to make education about more than test-scores and extrinsic measures, he argues. Cheating will only go down when students are told that they are in education to accomplish the satisfaction of mastery, and when they trust their teachers to be fair and honest. This jibes with my experience, and the business about trusting teachers is very important, and fraught with difficulty in a world where teachers' salaries depend on test-scores and arbitrary benchmarks are used in place of thoughtful, in-depth assessments.
First, Promote healthy school culture and authentic learning. We must recognize that the roots of cheating lie too often in the culture of the school and the perception by students of their academic enterprise. If we convey to students that we think their job is exclusively to get good grades, if we frame their success as being defined by their GPA, if we demand or exact their compliance by issuing extrinsic rewards, our school cultures will become cheating cultures.
APA: Ohio State University educational psychologist Eric Anderman found that how teachers present the goals of learning in class is key to reducing cheating. Anderman showed that students who reported the most cheating perceive their classrooms as being more focused on extrinsic goals, such as getting good grades, than on mastery goals associated with learning for its own sake and continuing improvement. High school students cheat more when.. their motivation in the course is more focused on grades and less on learning and understanding.
Edweek: Moreover, the more students learn to focus on grades for their own sake, rather than as a representation of what they have learned, the more comfortable they are with cheating.
Beating the Cheating: Five Ways to Combat the Plague (via Uncertain Principles)
By Rob Beschizza at 8:12 am Thursday, Feb 16 • Comments • Share
Our thanks go to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our once-daily delivery of headlines by email.
Check out the most controversial watches of the Mr. Jones Watch Collection: the Fuck Cancer Watch and The Accurate Watch.
Mr. Jones Fuck Cancer Watch - Cancer is a terrifying disease that touches most of us, and this watch's message aggressively asserts that we will not let it overshadow our lives or overwhelm the human spirit. 10% of the sale price of each watch will be donated to charities that fight Cancer: Stand Up To Cancer.
Mr. Jones The Accurate Watch - This is the most accurate wristwatch you can buy, with an hour hand that reads "remember" and a minute hand that reads "you will die". The dial and rim of the glass are mirrored, so the wearer is reflected in the watch face—there is no ambiguity about who the message is aimed at! The Accurate is a link to the tradition of the memento mori, an object designed to remind us that life is brief and that we should seize the moment while we are here. It's available in steel, limited edition black and ladies versions. See the entire collection of Mr. Jones Watches at Watchismo.com
By Cory Doctorow at 8:00 am Thursday, Feb 16 • Comments • Share
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcraphound.com%2Fimages%2Fplayfic.gif)
Andy Baio and his 15-year-old nephew Cooper McHatton created PlayFic, "a community for writing, sharing, and playing interactive fiction games (aka 'text adventures') entirely from your browser, using a 'natural language'-inspired language called Inform 7." Basically, it's a site for making your own Zork-style games, sharing them, critiquing them, and collaborating on them. It includes a "view game source" button that, like the "view source" item in browsers, can be used to kick-start your own progress into creation by seeing how the work you admire is put together. Waxy sez,"
My hope is that Playfic opens up the world of interactive fiction to a much wider audience — young writers, fanfic authors, and culture remixers of all ages.
While the language can be tricky, building simple games is surprisingly easy. Cooper had never coded anything or made a game before trying Playfic, and within 30 minutes of futzing around, he'd made his first game.
Some stuff is broken and missing, but I'd love to hear what you make of it. Open to any and all feedback. Go make some games!
Playfic (via Wonderland)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:00 am Thursday, Feb 16 • Comments • Share
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcraphound.com%2Fimages%2Ffinfisher1.png.jpg)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has begun to publish a series of informative corporate biographies of technology companies that make network spying equipment and sell it to torturing dictators like Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Qaddafi. These companies' publish sales material advertising their use of tools created for the express purpose of breaking domestic and international law, and operate from countries like the UK (FinFisher) and France (Amesys). EFF urges prosecutors in these countries to investigate the spyware companies for complicity in human rights abuses.
The Wall Street Journal has since reported about FinFisher’s techniques and its technology’s dangerous capabilities. It works much the same way online criminals steal banking and credit card information. Authorities can covertly install malicious malware on a user’s computer without their knowledge by tricking the user into downloading fake updates to programs like iTunes and Adobe Flash. Once installed, they can see everything the user can. The FinFisher products can even remotely turn on the user’s webcam or microphone in a cell phone without the user’s knowledge.
FinFisher doesn’t pretend to market their products for solely lawful use. In 2007, they bragged that they use and incorporate “black hat (illegal and malicious) hacking techniques to allow intelligence services to acquire information that would be very difficult to obtain legally,†according to a report by OWNI.
Spy Tech Companies & Their Authoritarian Customers, Part I: FinFisher And Amesys
By Mark Frauenfelder at 7:00 am Thursday, Feb 16 • Comments • Share
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmakezineblog.files.wordpress.com%2F2012%2F02%2Fcarol.jpg)
Here's the 5th episode of MAKE's podcast, Make: Talk! In each episode, I'll interview one of the makers featured in the magazine.
Our maker this week is Carol Reiley (@robot_MD and @tinkerBelleLabs). She's a surgical roboticist at Intuitive surgical and the founder of Tinker Belle Labs. Carols's on the cover of the current issue of MAKE, Volume 29, and is the co-author of two how-to projects in this issue: Air Guitar Hero, which is a way to control video games with the electric signals from your muscles, and an easy to use electronic blood pressure monitor.
By Cory Doctorow at 6:00 am Thursday, Feb 16 • Comments • Share Surfing the Gnarl - http://boingboing.net/2012/02/16/rudy-ruckers-outspoken-aut.html" title="Email to a friend/colleague" target="_blank">
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcraphound.com%2Fimages%2F9781604863093.jpg)
Surfing the Gnarl is the latest volume in PM Press's wonderful Outspoken Authors series: a collection of slim, handsome chapbooks curated by Terry Bisson that combine essays, stories and interviews (I've previously written here about the Kim Stanley Robinson volume, as well as my own).
This one is devoted to one of the world's happiest and most mutated happy mutants, Rudy Rucker, the prolific mathematician, computer scientist and psychedelic transreal science fiction writer. Rucker's addition to the series is a very worthy one, with two very weird, characteristically ruckerian stories. The first, "The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club," is a quintessentially transreal story, a kind of shaggy dog piece that outweirds itself with every successive sentence, playing what Rucker calls a "science fiction power-chord" in the guise of an alien invasion tale. The second story, "Rapture in Space," is a drugged out sex story about the slackers who use a robo-caller-driven Ponzi scheme to finance the world's first orbital pornography video, and it, too, is a perfect capsule of what makes Rucker Rucker.
In between these stories is an essay, "Surfing the Gnarl," which posits a theory of literature that ties approaches to fiction in with the mathematics of complexity and randomness, and is an illuminating piece of literary critical thinking. As with the other volumes in the series, this one concludes with an interview between Terry Bisson and Rucker, in which Rucker is his charmingly oblique and uncompromising self on subjects from the history of cyberpunk to the nature of the universe.
I really like the Outspoken Authors series -- these skinny little books seem to distill the essence of each of their subjects into perfect capsules.
Surfing the Gnarl
By David Pescovitz at 8:29 pm Wednesday, Feb 15 • Comments • Share
Just this morning, I was thinking that I needed an accordion file to slip into my laptop bag. The GAMAGO gods heard my prayers and responded this afternoon with a handsome Accordion File that certainly beats manila. It is $10. GAMAGO's Accordion File
The Beastie Boys' Michael "Mike D" Diamond is part of an AT&T investor group
seeking to put a net neutrality question on the shareholder ballot: "The shareholder resolution would recommend each company 'publicly commit to operate its wireless broadband network consistent with network neutrality principles,' the letter said. The companies should not discriminate based on the “source, ownership or destination†of data sent over their wireless infrastructure." (
via Consumerist)
— Cory
By Cory Doctorow at 6:09 pm Wednesday, Feb 15 • Comments • Share
[ http://player.vimeo.com/video/36579366?byline=0 ]
Bret Victor was once a "Human Interface Inventor" for Apple, and was apparently key to the iOS/tablet efforts at the company. In this hour-long presentation to CUSEC (Canadian University Software Engineering Conference), he delivers a stirring manifesto for interaction design and relates it to having a principled stand on technology and ethics. It's an extraordinary presentation, first for the dazzling technology on display, and second for the thoughtful way Victor connects it to a larger question of human ethics and life.
Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle (Thanks, Danny!)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 5:49 pm Wednesday, Feb 15 • Comments • Share
[
Video Link] Adafruit's
Circuit Playground looks like a major update to Collin Cunningham's earlier circuit design assistant app.
Circuit Playground simplifies electronics reference & calculation so you can have more fun hacking, making, & building your projects! This app is designed for both iPhone and iPad.
Decipher resistor & capacitor codes with ease
Calculate power, resistance, current, and voltage with the Ohm's Law & Power Calc modules
Quickly convert between decimal, hexadecimal, binary or even ASCII characters
Calculate values for multiple resistors or capacitors in series & parallel configurations
Store, search, and view PDF datasheets
Access exclusive sneak peaks, deals & discounts at
Adafruit Industries
All that, plus updates with additional features & enhancements.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 5:24 pm Wednesday, Feb 15 • Comments • Share
[ http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/primerist/code-hero-a-game-that-teaches-you-to-make-games-he/widget/video.html ]
"Code Hero is a game that teaches you how to make games so you can learn to code while you play with a Code Gun that shoots Javascript in Unity 3D." I was very impressed with the demo of Code Hero that Alex Peake showed me at Maker Faire last May. It's on Kickstarter now.
Code Hero on Kickstarter
By Cory Doctorow at 5:03 pm Wednesday, Feb 15 • Comments • Share
Ant sez, "Cory kindly
posted about Dimensions, a 1920s/30s sci-fi drama filmed in Cambridge, England, when we were in pre-production. At the time we were trying to round up steampunk props for our main character's workshop. We are incredibly excited to announce
our U.S. premiere! Dimensions screens on Saturday 18th February as the Closing Film for the 37th Boston Science Fiction Film Festival." Here's the
trailer.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 3:40 pm Wednesday, Feb 15 • Comments • Share
Today Cartoon Movement launches the first monthly installment of
Army Of God, an ambitious 100 page work of comics journalism by David Axe and Tim Hamilton focusing on the Lord's Resistance Army in the Congo, the people they've terrorized, and the people fighting back.
Read the
first chapter on Cartoon Movement. Chapter two will published on March 14.
By Cory Doctorow at 3:00 pm Wednesday, Feb 15 • Comments • Share
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcraphound.com%2Fimages%2FFictions-by-Filip-Dujardin-16.jpg)
Belgian photographer Filip Dujardin shoots buildings around his town of Ghent and then mashes them up into impossible (and beautiful) structures he calls "Fictions."
Dujardin's website is a bit cumbersome (all Flash, all the time), but Freshome has a flat gallery of the photos.
Filip Dujardin Photography (via Cribcandy)
By Brendan Byrne at 2:28 pm Wednesday, Feb 15 • Comments • Share
"When I see an old movie, like from the '40s or '50s or '60s, the people look so calm. They don't have smart phones, they're not looking at computer screens, they're taking their time. They'll sit in a chair and just stare off into space. I think some day we'll find our way back to that garden of Eden."
Rudy Rucker has had an exhaustingly full life. He helped define cyberpunk with a series of novels beginning in the early '80s. He earned a Ph.D in mathematics and has taught computer science for over twenty years. He's written over thirty books, both SF and nonfiction focusing on computation, the fourth dimension, and infinity. In his new memoir, Nested Scrolls: The Autobiography of Rudolf von Bitter Rucker, he details these accomplishments, as well as their attendant travails.
You state in Nested Scrolls that, as a kid, you learned a lot about the craft of story-telling from comic books, specifically Carl Barks' Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge.
Yes, those Carl Barks comics were the first things I ever read that seemed truly unfiltered, with no traces of goody-goody grown-up lecturing mixed in. They were clever stories, really well designed, and Donald Duck was a true anti-hero: selfish, lazy, greedy, irascible, and not overly kind to his three nephews. I loved him as a boy, he was the kind of adult I could see myself becoming. And those comics told me it was okay to be like that. When I became a father I got reprints of the Carl Barks comics for our three children, and they of course enjoyed thinking of me as the bumbling Donald Duck, while they were the clever ducklings. In my own fiction, I'd say that I like writing about characters who aren't in any way idealized. People whom you can see as being like yourself. Another important thing about those old-school cartoons is that the characters in them are rubbery. Here I'm thinking particularly of the black-and-white 1940s and 1950s toons that I'd see on that weekly Cartoon Circus TV show in Louisville. I've always liked things that are curved and soft, as opposed to hard, rectilinear things. So when I began writing science-fiction about robots, I immediately found ways to make them snaky like Silly Symphony cartoons or like Dali's melting watches.
There are similarities to your favorite painter, Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
Bruegel's my main man. The one non-SF novel that I've published is a novelized version of Bruegel's life. I called it As Above, So Below. That's the book of mine that I give to, like, friends or relatives who say they can't possibly read SF. One of these days I'd like to write a life of Bosch as well. A first thing about Bruegel is that his style is very bright and poster-like. And I like my writing to be like that. Everything clear and easy to see. A second thing with Bruegel is that the characters in his paintings seem to be modeled on actual people. Nothing is idealized or stereotyped, it all feels real. This shades into a writing practice that I call transrealism -- where I try and base my fictional characters on people I've actually met, sometimes folding several people into one character. A third aspect of Bruegel is that his pictures evoke a sense of the divine nature of the physical world. Everything is alive. We're in paradise, if only we pay attention.
Read the rest
By Cory Doctorow at 2:00 pm Wednesday, Feb 15 • Comments • Share
Julian Oliver's "Transparency Grenade" is a surveillance device shaped like a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, stuffed with network sniffers and other technology. It is intended to be hidden in smoke-filled rooms where secretive and corrupt meetings are taking place, so that all the material therein can be widely viewed.
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcraphound.com%2Fimages%2F0tg-witthuhn_med.jpg)
Most importantly however it is the hyperbole and fear around containing these volatile records, of the cyber burglary, that increasingly yields assumptive logics that ultimately shape how we use networks and think about the right to information. Just as record companies claim billions in losses due to file sharing, the fear of the leak is being actively exploited by law makers to afford organisations greater opacity and thus control.
This anxiety, this 'network insecurity', impacts not just upon the freedom of speech but the felt instinct to speak at all. All of a sudden letting public know what's going on inside a publicly funded organisation is somehow 'wrong' -Bradley Manning a sacrificial lamb to that effect. Meanwhile civil servants and publicly-owned companies continue to make decisions behind guarded doors that impact the lives of many, whether human or other animal.
The Transparency Grenade (We Make Money Not Art)
Transparency Grenade (project page)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 1:36 pm Wednesday, Feb 15 • Comments • Share
[Video Link] Neal Stephenson talks about "our society's inability to execute on big stuff, to get big stuff done. In the first two thirds of the 20th century we went from not believing that heavier-than-air-flight was possible to walking on the moon."
Solve for X is a forum to encourage and amplify technology-based moonshot thinking and teamwork.
G+.
For thousands of years the imagination of storytellers has been a guiding light for people trying to change the world. In the last decade or two science fiction has almost fallen behind the work of technologists and entrepreneurs. For the sake of a more interesting tomorrow, we need to get the proverbial horse back out in front of the cart with our imagination professionals building a vision of the future to inspire the builders of the new world.
Neal Stephenson is the author of the three-volume historical epic "The Baroque Cycle" (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World) and the novels Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac.
(Via Kevin Kelly's G+)
By Cory Doctorow at 1:26 pm Wednesday, Feb 15 • Comments • Share
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcraphound.com%2Fimages%2F3491192647_2327150b0a_z.jpg)
Writing in The Atlantic, Megan McArdle analyzes the societal cost of requiring a doctor's visit to get a prescription for Sudafed, in order to make it harder to acquire materials used in fabricating meth. She makes a compelling case that, as bad as meth labs are, and as much as they cost society, cracking down on basic, useful medicine also entails horrendous expense.
But this is sort of a side issue. What really bothers me is the way that Humphreys--and others who show up in the comments--regard the rather extraordinary cost of making PSE prescription-only as too trivial to mention.
Let's return to those 15 million cold sufferers. Assume that on average, they want one box a year. That's going to require a visit to the doctor. At an average copay of $20, their costs alone would be $300 million a year, but of course, the health care system is also paying a substantial amount for the doctor's visit. The average reimbursement from private insurance is $130; for Medicare, it's about $60. Medicaid pays less, but that's why people on Medicaid have such a hard time finding a doctor. So average those two together, and add the copays, and you've got at least $1.5 billion in direct costs to obtain a simple decongestant. But that doesn't include the hassle and possibly lost wages for the doctor's visits. Nor the possible secondary effects of putting more demands on an already none-too-plentiful supply of primary care physicians.
Of course, those wouldn't be the real costs, because lots of people wouldn't be able to take the time for a doctor's visit. So they'd just be more miserable while their colds last. What's the cost of that--in suffering, in lost productivity?
Perhaps it would be simpler to just raise the price of a box of Sudafed to $100. Surely that would make meth labs unprofitable--and save us the annoyance of a doctor's visit.
Do We Need Even Tighter Controls on Sudafed? (via Schneier)
(Image: Project 365 #121: 010509 The Spy That Came In With A Cold, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from comedynose's photostream)
By Rob Beschizza at 1:23 pm Wednesday, Feb 15 • Comments • Share
"Large group of smiling business people. Teamwork." by Kurhan. Courtesy of Shutterstock
If you want to understand why Silicon Valley startups keep tripping into privacy-related PR disasters, you could not do better than reading this attack on online privacy from Silicon Alley Insider editor Matt Rosoff.
Each time [a data breach] happens, bloggers and privacy zealots scream and yell and pull their hair out. In some cases, the companies are forced to apologize and cancel the offending feature. Sometimes, a few politicians grandstand so they can look like they're solving real problems and maybe the government gets involved and forces the companies to change a little bit.
But these flaps had exactly zero effect on Facebook's and Google's business. No effect. None. Nada. User growth, engagement, revenue -- all kept going up without a blip. Normal people don't care.
By "normal" people, Rosoff means people like him, who must endure rather than hope for obscurity. But the assumptions clouding his rather privileged viewpoint expose themselves at once, as he embarks upon a classical dialogue between himself and a straw-man interlocutor angry at a hypothetical data breach.
Read the rest
By Cory Doctorow at 11:16 am Wednesday, Feb 15 • Comments • Share
[ https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Z4SqzLBthdw?rel=0 ]
More dominoes are falling in the global fight to kill ACTA -- Bulgaria and the Netherlands have joined Germany and many other EU nations in refusing to move further on the secretive copyright treaty that was negotiated without transparency, oversight, or civil society participation.
"I will table a proposal to the Council of Ministers to stop the procedure of Bulgaria's signing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement," Traikov said.
The decision means Bulgaria will not take any action concerning Acta before European Union member states come up with a unified position.
Meanwhile, the Dutch Lower House has backed a motion from the Green Left party which says the Netherlands should, for the time being, refrain from signing Acta, according to a report at Radio Netherlands Worldwide.
The RNW report says that the parliament is seeking clarity about whether the treaty threatens the rights and the privacy of internet users.
On a related note, Redjade submitteratored this video shot at Saturday's anti-ACTA march in Budapest.
Acta loses more support in Europe
Read the rest
By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 11:11 am Wednesday, Feb 15 • Comments • Share
So. That happened.
Interesting tidbit for those of you too horrified to watch: Hissing cockroaches apparently give birth upside down with their lady parts up in the air.
Another thing I learned: Animals giving birth is apparently a fairly popular YouTube genre. Check out the sidebar for cats, snakes, and more cockroaches.
Video Link
A hearty thanks to Amos Zeeberg, without whom I would never have seen this horrible thing.
PREVIOUSLY:
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:45 am Wednesday, Feb 15 • Comments • Share
[Video Link] This is pretty much what all spoken directions sound like to me, and why I depend on my GPS. (Via Cynical-C)
Yesterday, the Canadian Conservative government introduced a "minor" change to its sweeping domestic spying bill. Instead of being called the "Lawful Access Act" it is now called the "
Protecting Children From Internet Predators Act." (
Thanks, Robbo!)
— Cory
Terri Luanna DaSilva is the daughter of science fiction writers Spider and Jeanne Robinson. Readers will remember that Jeanne
died of cancer in 2010. Now the family has been visited by cancer again: Terri has Stage IV metastatic breast cancer -- and a two-year-old daughter. She's fighting it, and Spider is
asking his fans and friends to send her good wishes,
read her excellent blog, and help
cover her expenses.
— Cory
Vic Toews is the controversial Canadian Minister of Public Safety whose spying bill will require ISPs to log and retain an enormous amount of your online activity, and then make that available to police without a warrant. Yesterday, Toews
drew criticism when he said that opponents of his bill "stand with child pornographers." Today an anonymous party has created a
VikileaksUpdate: looks like
publishing court records is kosher in Manitoba.
— Cory Twitter account that is publishing embarrassing personal details culled from affidavits filed in Mr Toews's divorce, saying, "Vic wants to know about you. Let's get to know about Vic." It's not clear to me whether these affidavits were under seal, or part of the public record (they seem to come from this case: FEHR, LORRAINE K. vs TOEWS, VICTOR E. (FD
08-01-86932) Mantioba Queen's Court of Queens Bench). This is an awfully ugly tactic and will likely be counterproductive. It does demonstrate that once material is stored, it is likely to leak, and that the best way to protect private information is to refrain from gathering and aggregating it in the first place.
By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 9:16 am Wednesday, Feb 15 • Comments • Share ![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fboingboing.net%2Fwp-content%2Fthemes%2Fbb%2Fsundries%2Fbug.png)
Before the Lights Go Out
is Maggie's new book about how our current energy systems work, and how we'll have to change them in the future. It comes out April 10th and is available for pre-order now. (E-book pre-orders coming soon!) Over the next couple of months, Maggie will be posting some energy-related stories based on things she learned while researching the book. This is one of them.
Steve_Saus submitterated this video that combines 14 years of weather radar images with a soothing piano concerto. It's a neat thing to watch a couple minutes of (though I'm not sure I needed to sit around for all 33 minutes of the video). It also reminded me of something really interesting that I learned about U.S. weather patterns and alternative energy.
Weather data, like the kind visualized here, can be collected, analyzed, and turned into algorithms that show us, in increasingly granular detail, what we can expect the weather to do in a specific part of the United States. Today, you can even break this information down to show what happens in one small part of a state compared to another small part. And that's important. As we increase our reliance on sources of energy that are based on weather patterns, this kind of information will become crucial to not only predicting how much power we can expect to get from a given wind farm, but also in deciding where to build that wind farm in the first place.
Take Texas as an example, which has the most installed wind power capacity of any U.S. state. That's great. Unfortunately, most of those wind farms are built in places where we can't use the full benefit of that wind power, because the wind peaks at night—just as electricity demand hits its low point. A simple change in location would make each wind turbine more useful, and make it a better investment.
It works like this ...
Read the rest
By Cory Doctorow at 9:02 am Wednesday, Feb 15 • Comments • Share
The Man Who Prints Houses is a documentary about Enrico Dini, an Italian roboticist who switched tracks to design and build enormous 3D printers capable of outputting houses:
Having built his printer – the world’s largest – from scratch, there’s no shortage of work offers for this highly-skilled and imaginative engineer. Throughout the course of the film, we see Enrico embark on an array of innovative projects: constructing the tallest printed sculpture in existence, working with Foster + Partners and the European Space Agency on a programme to colonise the moon, solidifying a sand dune in the desert, and printing the closest thing to an actual house: a small Italian dwelling known as a trullo.
The long-term nature of these projects and the current financial climate take their toll on Enrico and his team of workers, as contracts fail to be honoured and the infant technology stutters. Travel back to 2008 and it’s a different story, as Enrico describes how he was staring a €50m investment in the face. Just as he’s about to sell up and move to London, the stock market crashes… he must rebuild his business all over again.
The Man Who Prints Houses (Thanks, gaiapunk!)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 8:33 am Wednesday, Feb 15 • Comments • Share
Hot on the heels of Adam "Ape Lad" Koford's Unizilla T-shirt comes this piece of formal attire: Skullcap. Designed by Sarina Frauenfelder, the design represents the relationship between the universality of myth and life as performance. With influences as diverse as Rousseau and Roy Lichtenstein, new variations are synthesized from both mundane and transcendent meanings. What starts out as triumph soon becomes finessed into a cacophony of power, leaving only a sense of unreality and the chance of a new beginning. As shifting forms become undefined through wavering derivatives, the viewer is left with a glimpse of the corners of our culture. (For the full artist's statement, please click here.)
Babies! Get your Skullcap garment here!
Boing Boing Skullcap T-Shirt
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