Wednesday, May 12, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

India to develop its own OS?

Posted: 12 May 2010 03:41 AM PDT

The Indian IT ministry has floated the idea of developing a made-in-India operating system to reduce the national dependence on foreign software and increase resilience to viruses and IT-based attacks.

My reaction to this wavers back and forth depending on how I think about OSes: if they're a resource, like oil, then "reducing dependency on foreign OSes" makes a certain kind of sense. But if OSes are machines or standards -- like engines, or metric -- then "reducing dependency" on them is ridiculous. A country that "reduces its dependency" on using the same classes of invention as are used abroad is literally vowing to reinvent the wheel.


The government formed a high-level taskforce in February to devise a plan for building indigenous software, said a senior intelligence official who is a member. The panel will also suggest ways to conduct third-party audits on existing software in government offices to prevent online sabotage attempts until the software's launch, he said.

The overwhelming belief among government bosses is that an indigenous low-grade, but clean, software could nix the chances of foreign states infiltrating the computers of key Indian establishments and compromising the country's security. "A sanitised, lower level operating system and application software may be preferred to the advanced versions, which necessarily require access to internet for upgrades," the official said. The new software could be deployed in key departments that have been under constant cyber attacks. The taskforce also includes officials of the Prime Minister's Office as well as defence, home and telecom & IT ministries.

The move to constitute the taskforce comes after the defence ministry raised concerns over use of anti-virus products of foreign vendors in the wake of a series of attacks on its systems by China-based hackers.

Govt to develop own operating system (via Silklist)

(Image: Keyboard Layout)

Previously:


Stormhammer Deathclaw Firebrand (n&eacute Richard Smith)

Posted: 12 May 2010 03:29 AM PDT

Richard Smith, a 41-year-old care worker from Carlisle, England, has legally changed his name to Stormhammer Deathclaw Firebrand: "It's just a strange name I like the sound of." English and Welsh name-changing procedures are much simpler than US equivalents: the ancient tradition of "deed-poll" name change has made it possible for people to change to all kinds of wonderful and wacky things.

Man renames himself 'Stormhammer Deathclaw Firebrand' (Thanks, Kendra!)

Previously:


IT in developing nations makes women and poor people happier

Posted: 12 May 2010 03:17 AM PDT

A study by BCS, the UK Chartered Institute for IT, concluded that the introduction of technology to developing nations disproportionately improves the happiness of women and poor people. This runs contrary to the anti-IT-development argument that runs, "The world's poor need civil rights and food, not phones and laptops."
It found that women in developing countries, and people of both sexes with low incomes or poor education, were most influenced emotionally by their access to technology.

It is partly because women tend to have a more central role in family and other social networks, said researcher Paul Flatters of Trajectory Partnership, which conducted the research on behalf of the BCS.

"Our hypothesis is that women in developing countries benefit more because they are more socially constrained in society," he added.

Technology linked to happiness, study claims

(Image: Connecting India, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from t1tan's photostream)

Previously:


Optical illusion: impossible anti-grav ramps

Posted: 12 May 2010 02:42 AM PDT

Koukichi Sugihara's "Impossible motion" -- a cunning arrangement of cardboard ramps carefully skewed to create the illusion that balls roll up them -- won top honors at the Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences' Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest 2010. It has a delightful 3D physicality, being a real object made out of atoms, that makes it especially wonderful.

Impossible motion: magnet-like slopes (via Neatorama)

Previously:


Heinlein freaked out at "invasive" review of STRANGER IN A STRANGER LAND

Posted: 12 May 2010 02:36 AM PDT

Science fiction legend Frederik Pohl continues his memoir-in-blog-form, HOW THE FUTURE BLOG. Today, he's got a post about how Robert A Heinlein reacted to an early look at AJ Budrys's detailed and highly critical review of the major novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

It's a great little anaecdote, but Pohl's being somewhat coy or elliptical in explaining the incident: apparently Budrys's review was viewed by Heinlein as an invasion of his privacy (despite the fact that Budrys and Heinlein didn't know each other). Reading between the lines, it sounds to me like Pohl is saying that Budrys speculated that Heinlein was polyamorous (Stranger is one of the most influential sources of inspiration for the poly movement). I don't know if Heinlein was or not, but I could see how, in 1961, this might be an upsetting thing to have said about you in print.

Happy ending: Pohl introduced Heinlein and Budrys to each other at the Seattle Worldcon and the two became good pals.


So there was a dilemma. I didn't want to deprive AJ of an audience for a piece of good, hard work. I also didn't want to get Robert mad at me. I stewed over the problem for a while, finally decided to leave the decision up to Robert himself and shipped off a copy of the review to him, pleased with myself for having solved the problem.

Then, a week or two later, the mailman handed me a large and heavy manila envelope with Heinlein's return address on it and, "My God," I said out loud, "Bob has written me a novelette!"

I was wrong about that, though. The twenty or thirty closely typed pages in the envelope weren't fiction, they were an impassioned denunciation of the review, of invasive reviews in general and of the person who had written it -- who, Robert conjectured, was some effete New York bookworm who had never traveled more than a few dozen miles from his home and had no knowledge of what the real world was like.

Robert A. Heinlein, Algis Budrys and me

(Images: File:Algis Budrys 1985.jpg, Bill Shunn/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA; File:Heinlein-face.jpg, Dd-b/Wikimedia Commons, GDL)

Previously:


2.5 dimensional optical illusion bookshelf

Posted: 12 May 2010 02:20 AM PDT

AT-AT jungle gym from a lost and golden age

Posted: 12 May 2010 02:16 AM PDT


This old AT-AT Walker jungle-gym looks like it would be so goddamned fun! I don't care how unsafe and overbalanced it is: plummeting to the cold hard ground is a small price to pay for something this wicked.
Previously:


Prime Minister Cameron was in a rich Oxford brats club that destroyed restaurants for fun

Posted: 12 May 2010 03:10 AM PDT

Here's an 1987 photo of Prime Minister David Cameron (back row, 2nd from left) with fellow members of the "notorious" Bullingdon Club, which Martin Lewis describes as "a UK equivalent of Yale's exclusive Skull & Bones Society ... an ultra-exclusive clique that admits only the nation's richest and brattiest trust-fund kids."

The New York Times reported in 1913 "The Bullingdon represents the acme of exclusiveness at Oxford; it is the club of the sons of nobility, the sons of great wealth; its membership represents the 'young bloods' of the university." (Source: Wikipedia)

What do these sons of nobility do for fun? The same thing they've been doing for centuries -- terrorizing peasants with impunity:

201005120306A well-documented typical evening while Cameron was a member in the late 1980s consisted of the members taking over one of Oxford's fanciest restaurants for the night, eating the priciest food on the menu, ordering and quaffing copious quantities of the most expensive wines and champagnes -- and then totally trashing and destroying the entire restaurant, furniture and fittings. The coup de grace at the end of each such excursion was to go up to the traumatized, distraught restaurant owner and, in a gesture that dates back to the aristocrat-peasant relationship of centuries passed, contemptuously throw wads of banknotes at the hapless owner as recompense for the massive damage caused.

UK Election Winner! Meet the New Toff (Same as the Old Toffs)

Map of Europe (Financial)

Posted: 11 May 2010 10:22 PM PDT

europe_financial.jpg The NYT quotes economist Carl Weinberg: "Lending more money to already overborrowed governments does not solve their problems. Had we any Greek bonds in our portfolio, we would not feel rescued this morning."

Sir Ian 'Gandalf' McKellen mistaken for homeless, given a dollar

Posted: 11 May 2010 09:45 PM PDT

homelessmckellan.jpg As if you needed proof Sir Ian McKellen is a damn fine actor:
The 70-year-old actor is rehearsing Waiting For Godot in Melbourne, Australia, and was sitting in his tramp costume having a break when a passer-by gave him an Australian dollar. He said: "During the dress rehearsal of Godot, I crouched by the stage door of the Comedy Theatre, getting some air, my bowler hat at my feet (and) seeing an unkempt old man down on his luck, a passer-by said, 'Need some help, brother?' and put a dollar in my hat."
Sir Ian McKellen mistaken for tramp outside theatre (via Sci Fi Wire)

Kill your wallet

Posted: 11 May 2010 08:42 PM PDT

Great tips for keeping your wallet clean of junk. For example, take cellphone photos of those special "reward cards" you use to get discounts at the store, so you don't need to take them with you. [mnml]

Leaked: Telcos' secret plans to use fake "citizens groups" to kill Net Neutrality

Posted: 11 May 2010 07:47 PM PDT

ThinkProgress has a leaked copy of a telcoms industry PowerPoint presentation laying out their plans to use astroturf to kill Network Neutrality. The industry is hiring the same turfers who work with the Tea Party movement to carry their message to the people.

What the telcos want to do is reduce your access to websites and services unless those services have paid a bribe for "premium carriage" to you. So Google buys its bandwidth from its ISP. You buy your bandwidth from your ISP. Then your ISP goes to Google and says, "If you want to send your bits to our customers when they ask for them, you'll have to pay us too." If Google doesn't pay, the ISP slows down its bits when you ask for them.

They call this "free and unregulated internet access for content flow and connectivity speed free and unregulated internet access for content flow and connectivity speed."

Here's how I see it: the telcos and cable operators got a huge public subsidy when we agreed to let them use our public sewers, tunnels and streets (not to mention our houses and basements) for their wires. We give them all this for free or far below the market costs. They put their wires in our dirt.

Now they're saying they don't want to give us the service we want. Literally. That's what fighting Net Neutrality is about: it's ISPs fighting for the right to slow down or discard the bits you, the customer, ask for.

I say, it's our dirt, so we make the rules. If they don't like those rules, let them get their goddamned wires out of our dirt, off our streets, out of our basements. Let's give them 60 days, and if they haven't pulled up their wires by then, we'll buy them for the scrappage price of the copper. Then we'll turn over those wires to companies that are willing to give us the bits we want in exchange for the billions (trillions?) worth of public subsidy these greedy corporate welfare bums are currently enjoying.

Nowhere in the Constitution does it say, "Congress shall give away the public's priceless assets to companies and then sit around sucking its collective thumb while the companies screw the public." If AT&T and Comcast don't want to give us the service we want, let them buy every inch of conduit and right-of-way at market prices. Until then, they can STFU and give us the network we demand.


This morning, representatives from various front groups launched a new coordinated campaign to kill net neutrality. Speaking on Capitol Hill, these front groups took turns decrying the evils of the principle of a fair and unbiased Internet. LULAC, which is funded by AT&T, called Net Neutrality "Obamacare for the Internet." Americans for Prosperity -- a corporate front group founded by oil billionaire David Koch but also funded by telecom interests -- unveiled a new ad smearing net neutrality as a "government takeover" (the initial ad buy is $1.4 million dollars). And Grover Norquist, representing his "Americans for Tax Reform" corporate front group, said net neutrality is like what China does, "putting policemen on every corner, on the street or on the Internet."
Telecoms' Secret Plan To Attack Net Neutrality: Target Video Gamers And Stoke Fear Of Chinese Censorship (via /.)
Previously:


Explained: Ball lightning, fairies, aliens, glitches in the matrix

Posted: 11 May 2010 04:45 PM PDT

Ball lightning is in your mind's eye: real-world transcranial magnetic stimulation, to be exact. [Tech Review via JWZ]

NYT Q&A with Facebook exec: lametastically lame

Posted: 11 May 2010 04:47 PM PDT

construct2_e0.gifThis NYT Q&A with Facebook exec Elliot Schrage, VP for public policy, has about as much teeth as a chicken. Maggie blogged the call for reader questions last week, but what was published today feels like a big wank for Facebook, and no real answers for anyone. Pathetic. Why was there no attempt by the NYT to poke at what's bogus or unfair in this guy's wiggle-words? Facebook's bottom line seems to be: "If you're using our service to share intimate details of your life with friends and family, you'll take whatever we give you, and we'll change that whenever we want without warning. Hey, you asked for it, privacy and user rights be damned." (via Dan Gillmor)

Follow-up public radio piece on "Poster For An Awesome Dog" on BB in 2007

Posted: 11 May 2010 04:21 PM PDT

Geoff Brown says:
201005111620 I'm a public radio producer for WYPR 88.1 FM in Baltimore, MD, and I recently reported a story about how the "LOOK AT THIS DOG" poster (featured by you on Boing Boing back on Oct 24 2007!) became an Internet meme, even though the Baltimore artist who made it never intended it to be one.

It's a 23-minute piece for the May 7 edition of "The Signal" program on WYPR; it features interviews with the artist, a folk historian, an anthropologist of new media, and mention's Boing Boing's role in the poster's rise to underground fame.

Link to 5.07.10 show (Look at this Dog is first story).




Buy this awesome glass pyramid

Posted: 11 May 2010 04:12 PM PDT

Glass-PyramidFL.jpg

My husband and I went looking for salvaged radiators, we found this, instead—a 65-foot-high glass pyramid with a 90 square-foot base. Baker—that would be my husband—thinks it would make a fabulous Northwoods cabin. Or maybe a BoingBoing world headquarters.

Going to Mars—sort of

Posted: 11 May 2010 04:03 PM PDT

marssorta.jpg

You know who deserves to be sent lots and lots of fan letters: The six people who will spend 520 days locked inside a mockup spacecraft in Moscow, simulating the psychological experience of a mission to Mars.

Figuring out how humans respond to this kind of captivity is something you have to test out before you can responsibly send up the real thing. But, oh my god, what a bum deal. You get all of the inter-personal stress, all of the isolation from family and friends, all of the crappy food, all of the monotony ... minus space, minus the thrill of visiting Mars, minus the adulation of school children. It reminds me of Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book: "Do you want to visit the wonderful far-off Land of Oz? Well you can't, because there is no Land of Oz, and there is no Tin Woodsman, and there is no Santa Claus! Maybe someday you can go to Detroit."

With that in mind, I'd like to give a shout-out to Romain Charles and Diego Urbina, two stand-up guys doing important work—and the first two crew members chosen for the depressingly Earthbound mission. They'll enter the capsule June 3. In the meantime, I plan on finding an address where we can all send cute, home-made, crayon thank-you cards so these guys can experience another side of what it's like to be a space explorer. I will keep you updated.

Humble Indie Bundle hits $1m, goes open-source, gets 4 day extension

Posted: 11 May 2010 04:10 PM PDT

humbleindiebundle.jpg There'll be a lot of good, necessary beard-stroking over the next few weeks to figure out exactly what the organizers of the Humble Indie Bundle -- a six-game pay-anything collection that's just managed to top a million dollars in sales in a week -- did right, because it's something that seems it could and should be repeated. The nitty gritty: as of the time of writing, nearly 116,000 people have donated nearly $1.05 million, nearly 31 percent of which will be going to the Bundle's selected charities the EFF and children's hospital focused Child's Play. Full techie stats are available here, but that amounts to roughly $137,000 to each developer in a week, all of whom had seen sales of their years-old games dwindle. To celebrate the landmark, the devs are extending the sale for the rest of this week for any latecomers, and are beginning to make good on their GPL-licensed open source promise, beginning with Wolfire's Lugaru HD. Gish and Penumbra will soon be following suit, and Aquaria has made the surprise announcement that they're coming on-board with the open source promise, as well. See Wolfire's breakdown at the top of the project's page, their tech stats here, and click here to continue to donate to the cause. The Humble Indie Bundle [Wolfire]
Previously:


"Experiences of the Anomalous" photo exhibit

Posted: 11 May 2010 03:54 PM PDT

Ja Artist Img Ts 0910 Ja Artist Img Murayama W056
Japanese artists Tetsuya Satoh and Macota Murayama will exhibit their stunning work at the Novosibirsk State Art Museum in Russia this summer as part of the city's Festival of Contemporary Photography. Titled "Experiences of the Anomalous," the artists' very different but equally surreal works are meant to "turn the experience of daily things into something unusual or even frightening." See more of their art at the Frantic Gallery Web site. (Above left, Tetsuya Satoh's "Back Alley"; above right, Macota Murayama's "Chrysanthemum-vi-w.") From the Gallery:
Tetsuya "implants" in banal city landscapes metal figures, which reflect the surrounding landscape. Murayama creates "Inorganic Flora" presenting the images of different plants in the way they look like highly technical devices with electro-mechanical content. "Experiences of the Anomalous" offers to the viewers another look on usual things triggering their own experiments with turning ordinary things and landscapes into oddities.
Experiences of the Anomalous

U Texas/Austin's ACTLab to close

Posted: 11 May 2010 02:28 PM PDT

Ludwigvan968 sez, "ACTLab at the University of Texas Austin is threatened with closure. I've highlighted current projects by the Extreme Freestyle Hacking course that showcase cutting edge work in New Media, such as a Grand Circuit Bending Box, Rave LED Gloves and a Dissertation utilizing Wordoress to explore the world of high performance automobiles in Central Texas."
As reported in the Daily Texan, classes for the ACTLab program in New Media at the University of Texas at Austin, for which I helped both build as a student and as a teacher, have been cancelled effective Fall 2010. This unfortunate event has come due to the retirement of its founder, Professor Allucquére Sandy Stone. Professor Stone is retiring from active teaching, however she will become a Professor Emerita, thus retaining the ability to teach courses at the University of Texas at Austin. Myself and other students have formally requested both the Radio-Television-Film Department and the College of Communications to reconsider their decision and retain ACTLab courses. The impact of the ACTLab's closing is not limited to the RTF department, but to the art and technology community in the city of Austin and around the world.

The ACTLab has a proven track record of advanced New Media research practice that combines media theory, media production, intermodal art and ever-evolving technology which has been recognized around the world in both academic and the professional circles. From its early 1990's virtual world research into the creation of collaborative spaces (both text-based and three-dimensional worlds) and behavioral research of the inhabitants to the early 2000's exploration and development of peer-to-peer video streaming systems, and its most recent work with BarCamps and social-media based interaction phenomena, the ACTLab has long existed at the cutting edge of New Media.

I lectured at ACTLab once, on EFF's behalf, and was struck by the incredible creativity and verve of the program.

UT ACTLab shutdown amid record courses and enrollment. (Thanks, Ludwigvan968!)

Why are dolphins such a$*holes?

Posted: 11 May 2010 02:48 PM PDT

Dolphins kill porpoises. (And humans add insult to injury by getting the two species confused.) Nobody knows exactly why, but researchers in Wales are trying to get an idea by spying on the daily routines of both dolphins and porpoises with underwater listening devices.

Pew pew! For science! Lasers map ancient Mayan temples

Posted: 11 May 2010 02:21 PM PDT

pewpewscience.jpg

Archaeologists using a sort of laser-based radar were able to map 80 square miles of jungle-covered terrain around Caracol—an ancient Mayan city in Belize—in just four days. Compare to decades' worth of bug-beset, physically grueling on-the-ground mapping, which failed to turn up evidence of house mounds, roads and farms the laser mapping spotted with ease.

I will give you a moment to "Woah".

Lidar (light detection and ranging) is a fun-to-say technology that uses information gathered via reflected laser pulses to produce 3-D images. To map Caracol, researchers rigged lidar up to a plane that flew back and forth over the site. Enough of the laser pulses reached the ground and pinged back to the plane that copious trees couldn't get in the way of accurate maps.

This isn't the first time archaeologists have used remote sensing technologies to study ancient civilizations, or the first time lidar has been used this way. (I'd recommend checking out the cool work Payson Sheets from the University of Colorado has done with NASA since the 1980s, using satellite and infrared photography to find Central American villages buried under volcanic ash.) What is different is scope of this project. In the past, particularly in tropical areas, remote sensing was something you used to spot features, like an indentation that could mark a roadway, which might not be visible from the surface. Then, you'd take that information and go do some proper digging. Remote sensing helped you find a site, but shovels and eyeballs did the real mapping.

Caracol is different. Here, technology isn't just augmenting traditional archaeology, it's kind of replacing it, to a certain extent. Now, we can know more, faster, and with less backbreaking labor.

NYT: Using lasers to map ancient civilization in a matter of days

Image courtesy Flickr user dmuth, via CC

Cool animated cartoon: Love & Theft

Posted: 11 May 2010 02:17 PM PDT


This 7-minute cartoon of morphing faces by Andreas Hykade would have been perfect on Night Flight (remember this great clip with Ron and Nancy admitting their drug addiction? More Night Flight clips here).

Watch it full screen for maximum effect.

AP story about Made by Hand

Posted: 11 May 2010 01:30 PM PDT

Erin Conroy of Associated Press interviewed me about my forthcoming book, Made By Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World.
201005111329 In the months that Make magazine editor-in-chief Mark Frauenfelder lived on a remote island in the South Pacific with his family, he found that the most memorable and rewarding experiences involved collecting, extracting and cooking coconut with his young daughter.

When he returned to Los Angeles, he promised himself he would find an equivalent to "coconut day."


Doing-it-yourself may add meaning to your life

Tyra Banks, aspiring sf/fantasy novelist

Posted: 11 May 2010 01:31 PM PDT

tyra.jpg Model, reality TV star, and (megalo)maniacal talk show host Tyra Banks is making her foray into the glamorous world of fantasy novel writing. No, I'm not kidding. ABC News reports that she has "already finished the first, called Modelland, which is about a teen girl in a make-believe society at an academy for exceptional models called Intoxibellas." It's due out later this year. Looks like she's pretty good at fantasy already.

Hey, if you've read the galleys, why don't you "leak" a few lines from the book in the comments? "Slowly I turned... in my Louboutins..."

(via @nerdist)

Literary sports jerseys

Posted: 11 May 2010 01:12 PM PDT


Novel-T sells literary sports-jerseys whose backs are emblazoned with surnames of famous writers or their characters and whose breasts bear an insignia emblematic of their work.

Novel-T (via Super Punch)

Report: Go ahead, quit Facebook, but they'll retain and data mine your info

Posted: 11 May 2010 04:10 PM PDT

construct2_e0.gif John Moe and the new public radio show Future Tense did a segment this week about people quitting Facebook over privacy concerns. They report that quitting doesn't really resolve those concerns. First, deleting is different from deactivating, and the deletion process isn't easy for everyone to figure out. Still, even if you do manage to truly delete your account once and for all, John reports: "You'll never see that data again. But Facebook will. They still have that information and will continue to use it for data mining." Will the data at least be anonymized, the reporter asked? The Facebook rep wouldn't say. Caveat Facebooker.

Ten Commandments of Rock 'n' Roll Roadies

Posted: 11 May 2010 12:08 PM PDT

roadiessm.jpg

Boing Boing reader Simon tells us, "I found this stuck to a wall in the house of an old roadie, as he told me stories of working with The Who and Iron Maiden." Click here for larger size.

CIA releases Pentagon docs on MK-ULTRA origins, secret LSD tests

Posted: 11 May 2010 11:55 AM PDT

Over at Wired Danger Room, the contents of a newly-released Pentagon report detailing the origins of MK-ULTRA, the notorious CIA program that dosed thousands of unwitting participants with LSD and other drugs.

Gas surge shut BP's oil well down a few weeks before Gulf spill

Posted: 11 May 2010 11:54 AM PDT

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune, a report that a particularly intense burst of natural gas caused the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to be shut down over fears of an explosion "just weeks before a similar release succeeded in destroying and sinking the platform and sent millions of gallons of oil on a collision course with Louisiana and the rest of the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico."
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