The Latest from Boing Boing

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• Early distributed computing video, 1959, prefigures the net
• Furniture made from rusted Soviet naval mines
• New Facebook privacy breach involves apps leaking user data
• Gene Simmons of KISS vs. Anonymous
• What's the best way to preserve a Jack O'Lantern?
• G20 Toronto cop who was afraid of girl blowing soap bubbles sues YouTube for "ridicule"
• How (not) to exterminate a book.

Early distributed computing video, 1959, prefigures the net Posted: 17 Oct 2010 09:51 PM PDT Rogue archivist Rick Prelinger sez, "Simon Ramo (the 'R' in TRW Corp.) commissioned this film in 1959 to describe his concept of 'polymorphic computing,' which means distributing computer power over many generic machines. With friendly moving wooden blocks, charcoal drawings, acoustic guitar and a German-accented narrator, this is the best unknown film-prefiguring-the-Net I've ever seen. Please download, show and propagate this gift from Prelinger Archives." Simon Ramo's 1959 film on "polymorphic computing" anticipates the Net (Thanks, Footage, via Submitterator) 1970s humor mag predicts future 1952 comic predicts Bush/Cheny Iran policy

Furniture made from rusted Soviet naval mines Posted: 17 Oct 2010 09:49 PM PDT Estonian sculptor Mati Karmin creates furniture and other housewares (woodstove, prams, chairs, etc) from rusting naval "Blok" mines recovered from an ex-Soviet fortress on Naissaar Island, an Estonian island off the Finnish coast. This desk gives me the desiderata shivers. Marinemine - The Mine furniture: Furniture made from reclaimed wine-barrels Furniture made from aviation salvage Enormous library desk made of books Furniture made out of used books Chairs made from crates that are better than the chairs shipped in ... Chairs made from Coca Cola bottles Furniture made from old bicycles Salvage bench made from old chairs and a headboard Furniture from factory waste High-end skateboard furniture Furniture with partial humans supporting it Birdhouses made from VHS and cassette tapes Arborsculpture: furniture made from living trees Furniture from reclaimed wood

New Facebook privacy breach involves apps leaking user data Posted: 17 Oct 2010 06:20 PM PDT Results of a Wall Street Journal investigation published today show that many of the most popular Facebook applications have been transmitting personally identifying information—in some cases, even your friends' names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies. The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to be completely private. The practice breaks Facebook's rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users' activities secure. The WSJ says affected apps include... Zynga Game Network Inc.'s FarmVille, with 59 million users, and Texas HoldEm Poker and FrontierVille. Three of the top 10 apps, including FarmVille, also have been transmitting personal information about a user's friends to outside companies. Again, this means you may have been compromised even if you yourself didn't use the apps, but your friends did. Facebook in Privacy Breach (Photo: Facebook, a Creative Commons-licensed photo from the Flickr stream of Franco Bouly)

Gene Simmons of KISS vs. Anonymous Posted: 17 Oct 2010 05:51 PM PDT This will either end in tears or LULZ. Gene Simmons vs. Anonymous (via Sean Bonner).

What's the best way to preserve a Jack O'Lantern? Posted: 17 Oct 2010 11:16 AM PDT My kids and I are carving Jack O'Lanterns today. This year, I didn't want them turing into saggy mold farms, so I went online for a solution. One of the top hits was Cory's post from 2006, What's the best way to preserve a Jack O'Lantern?

G20 Toronto cop who was afraid of girl blowing soap bubbles sues YouTube for "ridicule" Posted: 17 Oct 2010 11:14 AM PDT Godott sez, "A Toronto police officer whose thuggish behaviour against a young girl blowing bubbles (reported here on Boing Boing) made him an inadvertent YouTube sensation and a symbol of police heavy-handedness at the G20 protests has launched a $1.2-million defamation lawsuit against YouTube." The target of Constable Josephs's lawsuit isn't the original video, but a series of cartoons posted on YouTube over the following weeks that depict a policeman resembling the officer engaging in various acts of police abuse of power. In his statement of claim, Constable Josephs alleges the cartoons have subjected him to ridicule, and have resulted in threats against himself and his family. He also seeks to compel YouTube to reveal the identities of the person who created and posted the cartoon - identified by the moniker "ThePMOCanada" - and the identities of several people who posted comments in response... The animations in question depict a policeman identified as "A. Josephs" arresting various people - including Barack Obama and Santa Claus - and beating up a news photographer while funk music plays in the background. 'Officer Bubbles' launches suit against YouTube (Thanks, Godott, via Submitterator!) Arrested for blowing bubbles at the G20 in Toronto? Toronto cops justify extreme G20 measures with display of LARPing ... Toronto's secret ID law used to arrest G20 protestor Globe and Mail journalist arrested and kettled at G20 Toronto ... Canadian cops' history of agents provocateurs and the G20 - Boing ... G20 police used imaginary law to jail harass demonstrators and ... Just a mellow afternoon at the G20 Shopper angered at Toronto mall closure

How (not) to exterminate a book. Posted: 14 Oct 2010 07:38 PM PDT As a book freak (bibliophile is just too refined to describe my love for certain bound publications) I have been researching the case of a particular poetry volume for a few years now. Recently, Xeni posted on the U.S. government's purchase and destruction of upwards of 10,000 books that reminded me of the case I am researching and I found the parallels between the two instances eerie. I am going to request a suspension of Godwin's law for the time that you read this piece as the unintentional but unavoidable comparison to the Nazis cannot be hidden. Gottfried Benn: German poet, medical doctor, and Nazi sympathizer, published a collection of his poems in May 1936 entitled "Selected Poems - Ausgewählte Gedichte". Although authorized for publication under the Nazis, upon a closer reading of the poems the authorities quickly changed their minds. The Black Corps - Das Schwarze Korps, the official weekly propaganda newspaper of the SS, vilified the publication by calling Benn a Selbsterrreger (Self-agitator or Masturbator). Some of his early expressionist poems were deemed to be inappropriate for a Nazi audience and the newspaper advised him, "Give it up, poet Benn, the times for such disgusting things (Ferkeleien - literally 'acts of piglets') are permanently gone". This created such a furor over the poetry volume that the book was banned at the beginning of the summer of 1936. The copies in existence were systematically rounded up and destroyed by the government. Unlike previous instances of Nazi book burning that were largely symbolic but did not represent a complete extermination of a particular work, this instance of publication, review, recall, and destruction eliminated almost all of the original first editions printed. However, despite this swift and sharp reaction on behalf of the authorities, Benn's book was not simply erased from memory as one might expect, but replaced. As early as November, a new first edition with the same title appeared that subtracted five poems from the collection and added seven other poems. It was not Benn's poetry alone that was offensive, but merely a number of poems (Zipped PDF). They were: "D-Zug", "Mann und Frau gehen durch die Krebsbaracke", "O Nacht", "Synthese", and "Untergrundbahn". Gottfried Benn remained in Germany during WWII but was forbidden to publish on his own until after the war. For years, his Nazi sympathies have been juxtaposed with his poetic contributions. Despite that larger debate on the merits of his work, the case of his 'exterminated' book remains a truly interesting example of how Government control of publication is both horrifying and strange. Despite the desire of the Nazi government to exterminate the book and replace it with a revised version, a number of copies of the original 1st edition have of course survived. However, I would currently estimate the number to be under twenty. Army Reserve Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer stated recently, "Someone buying 10,000 books to suppress a story in this digital age is ludicrous." Even without the digital age, it has always been ludicrous to believe that one can to control the flow of information.

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