The Latest from Boing Boing

Russian cops use excuse of pirated Microsoft products to raid dissidents, newspapers, and environmentalist groups
On the wearing of satchel-bags
Sub-$1 plasticized cellulose curtains of 1947
Vintage ads from fictional futures photoshopping contest
Galileo was wrong - Earth is the center of the universe
Games not art after all, say angry gamers
American flag burqas for sale
Authorities take note of Pedobear
Twitter's @BPGlobalPR interviewed
Chiptune-style Trolololo cover

Russian cops use excuse of pirated Microsoft products to raid dissidents, newspapers, and environmentalist groups

Posted: 12 Sep 2010 10:10 PM PDT

Russian police use the pretense of enforcing Microsoft's copyrights as an excuse to raid the offices of human rights, environmental and dissident NGOs, and Microsoft has not intervened to stop it, even when the groups are using legitimate, licensed copies of Microsoft software. Police often claim to have discovered pirated software on seized computers even before examining them, and claim that the investigations come at Microsoft's requests. Microsoft lawyers have cooperated with raids on opposition newspapers, whose editors say that the raids would not have taken place without Microsoft's complicity. During raids, police have been spotted removing Microsoft "Certificate of Authenticity" stickers on confiscated PCs. Microsoft's lawyers testified in support of police claims that pirated software was found on PCs, even though the court later found that the PCs were never examined.

Interviews and a review of law enforcement documents show that in recent cases, Microsoft lawyers made statements describing the company as a victim and arguing that criminal charges should be pursued.
The lawyers rebuffed pleas by accused journalists and advocacy groups, including Baikal Wave, to refrain from working with the authorities. Baikal Wave, in fact, said it had purchased and installed legal Microsoft software specifically to deny the authorities an excuse to raid them. The group later asked Microsoft for help in fending off the police. "Microsoft did not want to help us, which would have been the right thing to do," said Marina Rikhvanova, a Baikal Environmental Wave co-chairwoman and one of Russia's best-known environmentalists. "They said these issues had to be handled by the security services."
Microsoft executives in Moscow and at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Wash., asserted that they did not initiate the inquiries and that they took part in them only because they were required to do so under Russian law.

Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent

Statement by Microsoft (Thanks, Danny!)

On the wearing of satchel-bags

Posted: 12 Sep 2010 09:58 PM PDT

Pithy fashion advice from The Guardian on how to wear this year's hot accessory, the satchel-bag: "You are the small child, standing in the parade, pointing at the empress of fashion, Alexa Chung, and crying: 'Look! A bag that crosses a lady's chest is only going to look good on the particularly lithe! On everyone else it's going to smush one's boobs until one points north, one points south, and one's chest resembles a busted compass. Can no one else see this? I feel like I'm eating crazy pills!'"

I wore a messenger bag with my laptop in it for several years, and all I've got to show for it is weirdly disproportionate psoas muscles, mild spinal curvature, and back pain.

How are you supposed to wear a satchel bag?

Sub-$1 plasticized cellulose curtains of 1947

Posted: 12 Sep 2010 09:55 PM PDT

What America clearly needs is a good, $0.39 plasticized cellulose window-dressing. Look at how goddamned happy it's made these two.

Clopay

Vintage ads from fictional futures photoshopping contest

Posted: 12 Sep 2010 09:53 PM PDT

Mark Rayner is running another "Vintage Ads of Fictional Futures" photoshopping contest: "find a vintage ad, and then create a product from a created world -- it can be from a book, movie, TV, etc. It doesn't have to be science fiction; you could go with a fantasy world, an alternate reality, whatever. The only proviso is that it has to have been written by someone else, so none of your own bizarre fictional futures."

Here's a great source for raw materials: the LiveJournal Vintage Ads group.

Vintage Ads of Fictional Futures, Mark II (Thanks, Mark!)

Galileo was wrong - Earth is the center of the universe

Posted: 12 Sep 2010 06:49 PM PDT

Finally, the truth about geocentricism can be told, thanks to Robert A. Sungenis, Ph.D., "founder and president of Catholic Apologetics International Publishing," who is heading up a conference next month with a day of presentations, such as "Geocentrism: They Know It But They're Hiding It."

Did the Catholic Church make a grand and embarrassing mistake when it condemned the heliocentric system under Pope Urban VIII in 1633 as "formally heretical" and "opposed to Scripture"? Has modern science proven that heliocentrism is the correct system of cosmology? Did John Paul II officially concede that Galileo was right and the Church was wrong? To the surprise of many, the answer to all three is no. Now, abridged from the original two volume set of over 1200 pages, the essential facts and figures of one of the most controversial events in the history of man has been distilled down to 700 pages (350 pages of science and 350 pages of ecclesiastical history) and put in a comfortable 6 x 9 book frame in a less expensive paperback version.

Conference includes a free luncheon. Galileo was wrong

Games not art after all, say angry gamers

Posted: 12 Sep 2010 06:51 PM PDT

Gamers are often characterized as wanting the medium to be taken seriously as art. But what happens when critics look at games less as consumer products and more like movies or books? In the case of G4's review of Metroid: Other M, anger and confusion reigned. Though reviewers often address the artistic attributes of mainstream games, the focus usually remains on less subjective measures of quality. Critic Abbie Heppe, however, slammed the game despite the title's high technical standards, identifying problems that had nothing to do with gameplay. Among other things, Heppe was appalled at how it infantilized the series' heroine, Samus Aran, depicted in earlier outings as a tough female marine veteran. Gaming's answer to Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor, Aran first did battle in her desexualized military armor in 1986. Come 2010, however, and much has changed. "You're asked to forget that Samus has spent the last 10-15 years on solitary missions ridding the galaxy of Space Pirates, saving the universe and surviving on her own as a bounty hunter," Heppe wrote. "Instead, Other M expects you to accept her as a submissive, child-like and self-doubting little girl that cannot possibly wield the amount of power she possesses unless directed to by a man." And on goes Heppe's write-up. Though she also covered gameplay issues in her review, responses from G4's readers were often negative. Of the hundreds of comments published, many attacked the author directly. Amid the predictable misogyny and hostility, a pattern emerges: it's just a game. Some even claimed that it was unprofessional to talk about such matters in a game review. Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer sees this as a backlash against the idea of games as art: "All too often, the greatest resistance to thinking critically about games comes not from academics, luddites, or old-school critics like Roger Ebert. The most vocal resistance comes from gamers." True! But as far as we accept the angry constituency as representative at all, we should also admit that some gamers only cared about 'art' because acceptance as such amounted to a form of validation. To see a backlash here assumes a level of engagement that was never actually in evidence. Critical assessments of games -- at least mainstream ones -- remain a hard sell to most of the people buying them.

American flag burqas for sale

Posted: 12 Sep 2010 03:11 PM PDT

The burqas at Zarinas.com are reasonably priced. This one, decorated in American flag colors, costs just $49.99. A couple of happy customers wore them to a Tea Party rally recently.

Zarina's American flag burqas for sale

Authorities take note of Pedobear

Posted: 12 Sep 2010 03:12 PM PDT

Californian cops think Pedobear is a mascot used by pedophiles to signal their predilections: "Disguised as innocence, this underground community that would make victims of our children teasingly reaches out in to the light of day." [Gawker]