Monday, July 26, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Federal judge says you can break DRM if you're not doing so to infringe copyright

Posted: 25 Jul 2010 10:47 PM PDT

Here's some remarkable news: a judge in a New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Appeals Court has ruled that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on breaking DRM only applies if you break DRM in order to violate copyright law. This is a complete reversal of earlier rulings across the country (and completely opposite to the approach that the US Trade Representative has demanded from America's trading partners). In the traditional view, DRM is absolutely protected, so that no one is allowed to break it except the DRM maker. In other words, a film-maker isn't allowed to take the BluRay DRM off her own movie, a video game programmer can't take the iPad DRM off her own game, and an audiobook author can't take the DRM off his own Audible book.

So this ruling is pretty interesting news, as it constitutes a circuit split with pretty much the rest of the nation's courts, which is often a precursor to a Supreme Court challenge. What's more, the defendants here are General Electric, not hackers in black t-shirts or sketchy offshore Xbox-modchip vendors (theoretically the law shouldn't care if the defendant is a hobo or a billionaire, but in practice, billionaires usually get better precedents, and not just because they can afford better lawyers).

It's up to the plaintiff, MGE, to appeal to the Supremes, but even if they don't, it's only a matter of time until there are new cases in the Fifth Circuit (or other circuits that follow its lead) that lead to highest court handing down some new law on this. Let's hope they see the sense of Judge Garza: "Merely bypassing a technological protection that restricts a user from viewing or using a work is insufficient to trigger the (Digital Millennium Copyright Act's) anti-circumvention provision."

Court Backs Dismissal of Digital Copyright Claim (via /.)



SPECIAL FEATURE: The Birthing of Estee Longah

Posted: 25 Jul 2010 10:46 PM PDT

Estee Longah, a fabulous vintage queen and founder of a semi-pro all-Asian drag troupe called the Rice Rockettes, puts on lavish, highly sexualized performances... They're empowering a population of gay men to experiment with a mode of self-expression that is often taboo and sometimes even non-existent in their own cultures.

Read the rest



Green Giant ad, 1947

Posted: 25 Jul 2010 10:31 PM PDT


From the most excellent Vintage Ads LiveJournal group, this smashing look at the alternate Green Giant universe of 1947, in which the GG looks decidedly satanic, and enjoys a cannibalistic corn-cob pipe.

NEW PACK'S IN!

Existential D&D comedy: when characters realize they are trapped in adolescents' imagination

Posted: 25 Jul 2010 10:27 PM PDT

Carlton Mellick, III, the king of Bizarro fiction, has a new one out -- a kind of Dungeons and Dragons meets The Matrix. The Kobold Wizard's Dildo of Enlightenment +2 is "an absurd comedy about a group of adventurers (elf, halfling, bard, dwarf, assassin, thief) going through an existential crisis after having discovered that they are really just pre-rolled characters living inside of a classic AD&D role playing game. While exploring the ruins of Tardis Keep, these 6 characters must deal with their inept Dungeon Master's retarded imagination and resist their horny teenaged players' commands to have sex with everything in sight. "

OUT NOW: The Kobold Wizard's Dildo of Enlightenment +2 [CarltonMellick.com]

The Kobold Wizard's Dildo of Enlightenment +2 [Amazon]

(via Super Punch)



Terrified guardians of public safety protect kids from rocks, other imaginary dangers

Posted: 25 Jul 2010 10:22 PM PDT

Lenore "Free Range Kids" Skenazy's editorial in Forbes aims at the excessive regulatory zeal in kids' product safety -- where even the faintest whiff of danger is grounds for a recall:
Michael Warring, president of American Educational Products in Fort Collins, Colo., had his shipment all ready: A school's worth of small bags, each one filled with an igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rock. Then the school canceled its order. Says Warring, "They apparently decided rocks could be harmful to children."... The children will study a poster of rocks instead...

Well, there's the Graco Harmony High Chair. The commission warns parents to "stop using product immediately." Yikes! Scary! Is it ejecting kids? Spontaneously combusting? Not quite. Of the 1,200,000 units sold, the CPSC received "24 reports of injuries, including bumps and bruises to the head, a hairline fracture to the arm, and cuts, bumps, bruises and scratches to the body." In other words: For every 50,000 chairs sold, a single child has suffered a bruise, bump or--once--a hairline fracture. Now look: Nobody likes to see a sweetheart suffer. But the Harmony high chair does not exactly sound like baby's first Pinto.

Students Aren't Allowed To Touch Real Rocks (via JWZ)


16-bit waterfalls in Canvas

Posted: 25 Jul 2010 08:43 PM PDT

Beautiful, old-school Amiga-style pallette cyling with HTML5. [Effect Games via Digital Tools]

Wikileaks releases classified Afghanistan war logs: "largest intelligence leak in history"

Posted: 25 Jul 2010 05:34 PM PDT

An archive of classified U.S. military logs spanning six years, more than 91,000 documents, and 200,000 pages, was today made available by WikiLeaks. The papers show a picture of the war in Afghanistan that is far more grim, and far less hopeful, than previously portrayed.

The New York Times, London's Guardian newspaper and Der Spiegel in Germany were offered early access to the archive, the contents of which show "why, after the United Sates has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001," according to the NYT.

This classified military information release by WikiLeaks is its first since publishing a video in April that shows a 2007 US Apache helicopter attack which killed a dozen people in Baghdad, including two Reuters photojournalists.

The NYT notes the following focal points in this massive leak:

* Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan's military spy service guides the Afghan insurgency that fights American troops, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion in U.S. aid.

* The C.I.A.'s paramilitary operations are expanding in Afghanistan.

* The Taliban has used portable, heat-seeking missiles against Western aircraft -- weapons that helped defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

The archive is not yet published (or referenced) at Wikileaks.org at the time of this blog post, but The archive is available here at Wikileaks, and links to coverage in the aforementioned three newspapers follow. By those news reports, it would appear that this cache was part of what Pfc. Bradley Manning is believed to have leaked to Wikileaks.

The "War Diary" page at Wikileaks states:

We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be released, with occasional redactions, and eventually, in full, as the security situation in Afghanistan permits.


The White House has issued a response. The statement from national security adviser Gen. James Jones emphasizes two points: first, the administration asserts that this leak of classified information endangers the lives of Americans and America's war allies. Second, the administration points out that the logs cover actions between January 2004 (when Bush was in power) and December 2009 (when President Obama announced a "new approach" to the war in Afghanistan).


"Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010" in CSV, SQL, KML formats. (Wikileaks)


"The War Logs" (NYT)


"Inside the Fog of War: Reports From the Ground in Afghanistan" (NYT)

"Text From a Selection of the Secret Dispatches" (NYT)

"In Disclosing Secret Documents, WikiLeaks Seeks 'Transparency'" (NYT)

"Piecing Together the Reports, and Deciding What to Publish" (NYT)

"Julian Assange on the Afghanistan war logs: 'They show the true nature of this war'" (Guardian)

"Wikileaks Afghanistan files: download the key incidents as a spreadsheet" (Guardian)

"Afghanistan war logs: Story behind biggest leak in intelligence history" (Guardian)

"Afghanistan war logs: the glossary" (Guardian)

[video] "Secret files: Wikileaks exposes 'unseen war'" (Channel 4 News)


Image: An interactive map available at the Guardian website shows locations and dates tied to documents in the leaked Afghanistan war logs.

Funny, smart commentary about burqa bans

Posted: 25 Jul 2010 08:17 AM PDT

Observer columnist David Mitchell (half of the comedy team Mitchell and Webb is in fine form today with this column on the absurdity of burqa banning. It was one of those bits of the Sunday paper that had me stopping to read a passage aloud to my wife every ten seconds or so until she snatched it out of my hands and read it herself.
Governments and legislatures shouldn't tell people what they can and can't wear. By doing so, they would, in every sense, be taking a massive liberty. As long as people aren't wearing crotchless jeans outside primary schools or deely boppers with attached sparklers on petrol station forecourts, we've all got the right to wear exactly what the hell we like and I can barely believe that we're having this debate.

But we are. Stupid people are thinking about an issue that doesn't need to be thought about and a YouGov survey says 67% of us want full-face veils outlawed. Just when I thought my estimation of humanity couldn't fall any further, I discover that two-thirds of my fellow countrymen are, or at least were for the duration of taking a survey, morons. I'm so glad the Conservatives are committed to local referenda...

There's altogether too much harping on respect and banning these days. If you can't respect something, you should ban it. If it's not banned, you should respect it. Bullshit. There is a huge gulf of toleration between respect and banning. In a free society, people should be allowed to do what they want wherever possible. The loss of liberty incurred by any alternative principle is too high a price to pay to stop people making dicks of themselves. But, if people are using their freedoms to make dicks of themselves, other people should be able to say so.

If Britain decides to ban the burqa I might just start wearing one

(Image: IMG_1763, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from kansai's photostream)



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