The Latest from Boing Boing

Bunnie explains the technical intricacies and legalities of Xbox hacking
How Pac Man's ghosts decide what to do: elegant complexity
Fictional story of a flash mob gone terribly wrong
Glorious, elaborate, profane insults of the world
A is for Akbar: a Star Wars alphabet for the wee ones
Newspapers are dead as mutton -HG Wells, 1943 (No, they're not)
Paypal bans Wikileaks just before midnight Friday
Calling Time on Assange
Short links: Fark News Quiz
"Anander Mol, Anander Veig" Hanukkah album: electronic re-imaginings of holiday and Jewish classics
Wikileaks.org blocked, but mirror sites proliferating: here's a partial index of indexes
Walt Disney World castmembers speak about their search for a living wage
Gingerbread house Fenway Park
All I want for Festivus is an electric eel
There's more than one way to wreck an airship
Wikileaks cables reveal that the US wrote Spain's proposed copyright law
Extravagant all-star cover of "Let It Be" for Norwegian TV show
Casio F91W Wrist Watch
Maps: Google vs. Bing vs. Yahoo
The Maccabeats' "Candlelight"
Mary Shelley's remix-art kids' book as a modern remix YouTube
Generate your own funny, bland, generic PAC name
Second tragedy strikes Disney death town
SPECIAL FEATURE: Willie Nelson, Richard Branson, gorgeous flight attendants, cowboys, and longhorn cattle at Virgin America's Dallas launch
Autocannibalistic Hot Dog (Boing Boing Flickr Pool)
Recent Billboard Liberation Front project in New York City
The other face of Wikileaks: Kristinn Hrafnsson
To Serve Man (Drinks): Roböxotica 2010 opens in Vienna

Bunnie explains the technical intricacies and legalities of Xbox hacking

Posted: 04 Dec 2010 02:56 AM PST

Andrew "bunnie" Huang, who literally wrote the book on hacking Xboxes, was to be a witness in last week's first-of-its-kind trial for Xbox modding. However, the government prosecutor bungled his case so badly that he was forced to withdraw the charge and walk away, leaving the defendant unscathed.

However, Bunnie had already prepared an exhaustive briefing explaining the use-control system in the Xbox 360 that Crippen, the defendant, was on trial for modifying. It was intended to explain to a lay jury the fundamentals of crytographic signatures and scrambling, and to point on the subtle and important ways in which Xbox modding is different from other reverse-engineering that courts have already ruled against, such as breaking the DRM on a DVD.

I've been following this kind of thing closely for years, but I'm not a technical expert -- not in the sense that Bunnie, a legendarily accomplished reverse engineer is, anyway. Bunnie's explanations always leave me with a more thorough understanding of the subject than I had when I started, and this is no exception. Highly recommended reading.

The common use of "encryption" or "scambling" is tantamount to an "access control" insofar as a work is scrambled, using the authority imbued via a key, so that any attempt to read the work after the scrambling reveals gibberish. Only through the authority granted by that key, either legitimately or illegitimately obtained, can one again access the original work.
However, in the case of the Xbox360, two technically different systems are required to secure the authenticity of the content, without hampering access to the content: digital signatures, and watermarks (to be complete, the game developer may still apply traditional encryption but this is not a requirement by Microsoft: remember, Microsoft is in the business of typically selling you someone else's copyrighted material printed on authentic pieces of plastic; in other words, they incur no loss if you can read the material on the disk; instead, they incur a loss if you can fake the disk or modify the disk contents to cheat or further exploit the system).

USA v. Crippen -- A Retrospective

How Pac Man's ghosts decide what to do: elegant complexity

Posted: 04 Dec 2010 12:49 AM PST

Game Internals's description of the way that the Pac Man ghosts use incredibly simple rules to emerge complex, difficult-to-defeat anti-Pac Mac strategies is a great reminder of the power of recursion and iteration to produce complexity out of the simplest starting points.

The next step is understanding exactly how the ghosts attempt to reach their target tiles. The ghosts' AI is very simple and short-sighted, which makes the complex behavior of the ghosts even more impressive. Ghosts only ever plan one step into the future as they move about the maze. Whenever a ghost enters a new tile, it looks ahead to the next tile that it will reach, and makes a decision about which direction it will turn when it gets there. These decisions have one very important restriction, which is that ghosts may never choose to reverse their direction of travel. That is, a ghost cannot enter a tile from the left side and then decide to reverse direction and move back to the left. The implication of this restriction is that whenever a ghost enters a tile with only two exits, it will always continue in the same direction.
However, there is one exception to this rule, which is that whenever ghosts change from Chase or Scatter to any other mode, they are forced to reverse direction as soon as they enter the next tile. This forced instruction will overwrite whatever decision the ghosts had previously made about the direction to move when they reach that tile. This effectively acts as a notifier to the player that the ghosts have changed modes, since it is the only time a ghost can possibly reverse direction. Note that when the ghosts leave Frightened mode they do not change direction, but this particular switch is already obvious due to the ghosts reverting to their regular colors from the dark blue of Frightened. So then, the 1/60-of-a-second Scatter mode on every level after the first will cause all the ghosts to reverse their direction of travel, even though their target effectively remains the same. This forced direction-reversal instruction is also applied to any ghosts still inside the ghost house, so a ghost that hasn't yet entered the maze by the time the first mode switch occurs will exit the ghost house with a "reverse direction as soon as you can" instruction already pending. This causes them to move left as usual for a very short time, but they will almost immediately reverse direction and go to the right instead.

Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior (via JWZ)

Fictional story of a flash mob gone terribly wrong

Posted: 04 Dec 2010 12:40 AM PST

Tom Scott's Ignite London talk "Flash Mob Gone Wrong" is a fictionalized account of just how badly a flash mob could go. It's got an eerie ring of plausibility, largely because each of the steps leading up to the disastrous ending actually happened, just not all together. It's a freaky way to spend five minutes.

Flash Mob Gone Wrong by Tom Scott, Ep 77

Glorious, elaborate, profane insults of the world

Posted: 04 Dec 2010 01:53 AM PST

An open Reddit thread entitled "What are your favorite culturally untranslateable phrases?" rapidly degenerated into a collection of rollicking, profane, grotesque insults, each more alarming and delightful than the last. Read the whole thing, of course, but here are some of the less profane examples:

* The Dutch phrase for giving too much attention to insignificant details is "ant fucking".
* Afrikaans: "Jou mammie naai vir bakstene om jou sissie se hoerhuis te bou Vieslik!" your mother engages in prostitution in order to raise funds for the building materials necessary to construct a brothel from which your sister will operate.
* German: "backpfeifengesicht" - a face in need of slapping
* Finnish: "Kyrpä otsassa" - a vulgar way to say you're incredibly annoyed. It means that you have a dick in your forehead (should be visualized as hanging forward, rather than actually in your forehead, for some reason).
* Finnish: "pilkunnussija" - a comma fucker; someone who corrects little or meaningless things.
* Spanish: "Está tratando de cagar mas alto de lo que le da el culo" - He's trying to shit higher than his ass can reach.

What are your favorite culturally untranslateable phrases?

(Image: Okay, so it's funny., a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from andrewbain's photostream)

A is for Akbar: a Star Wars alphabet for the wee ones

Posted: 04 Dec 2010 12:05 AM PST

When Brandon Peat and his wife Emma discovered that they were going to have a baby, they decided that they wanted a better kind of alphabet -- a geeky, Star-Wars-inflected one. So they drew "A is for Akbar," a delightful, pastel illustrated alphabet from the Star Wars universe. And now that the kid, Tycho, is born, they're raising money for his college fund: donate $15 to little Tycho's tertiary education and you'll get a copy of the alphabet in book form as a thank-you.

A is for Ackbar | brandonpeat.com (Thanks, Brandon!)

Newspapers are dead as mutton -HG Wells, 1943 (No, they're not)

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 11:55 PM PST

Here's a clip of HG Wells in 1943 predicting the demise of the newspaper, as people abandon print journalism in favor of using their telephones for up-to-the-minute news.

In one way, it's very prescient -- "using the telephone to get the news" isn't so far off from what we do on the web today. But in another way, it's exactly wrong (after all, it's been nearly 70 years and there are still newspapers), And it's wrong in a way that futurists are often wrong: it assumes a clean break with history and the positive extinction of the past. It predicts an information landscape that is reminiscent of the Radiant Garden Cities that Jane Jacobs railed against: a "modern" city that could only be built by bulldozing the entire city that stood before it and building something new on the clean field that remained. Every futuristic vision that starts with a clean slate has a genocide or an apocalypse lurking in it. Real new cities are build through, within, around, and alongside of the old cities. They evolve.

As Bruce Sterling says, "The future composts the past." What happened to newspapers is what happened to the stage when films were invented: all the stuff that formerly had to be on the stage but was better suited to the new screen gradually migrated off-stage and onto the screen (and when TV was invented, all the "little-screen" stories that had been shoehorned onto the big screen moved to the boob-tube; the same thing is happening with YouTube and TV today). Just as Twitter is siphoning off all the stuff we used to put on blogs that really wanted to be a tweet.

So with the advent of television, radio, telephones, mailing lists, the Web, wikis, Twitter and other new media and platforms, the important-but-ill-fitting stuff that we put in newspapers because it had nowhere else to go moved off to the new, more hospitable turf.

The experiment that we are presently conducting as a society is aimed at discovering what kind of information and transactions are really and truly "newspaper material" and not material that we stuffed into the margins of a newspaper because we needed it and newspapers were the only game in town. It may be that there's nothing left when we're done, that there's a better way of delivering every word and every picture in the newspaper than to print it on broadsheet and fold it in eighths, in which case, newspapers may die, or they may end up being the territory of newspaper re-enactors, the equivalent of hobbyists who knap their own flint or re-enact the Battle of 1066.

Or it may be that newspapers do have a small and important and moving clutch of information and stories and images that really, really are better on paper. Maybe the audience for that will be too small and specialized to support a large business, and maybe the audience will club together and treat newspaper like a charity, the way that opera (another medium that lost a lot of its stories to more popular and hence cheaper successor media) functions today. Or maybe the cost of producing a paper will dip so low that we won't particularly need a business to support it (Clay Shirky: "Will we still read the New York Times on paper in the future? Sure, if we print it out before reading it").

Or maybe there is a large and substantial and popular insoluble lump of newspaperstuff that no successor medium is better at hosting, a critical mass of popular material that sustains newspapers in a diminished but substantial niche, perhaps like vinyl records.

Bruce Sterling and Richard Kadrey's Dead Media Project collects hundreds of dead media, but as Sterling and Kadrey admit, most of these aren't really dead -- someone, somewhere is still using them. These are media that discovered a new niche or outcompeted an ancestor for an old niche, flowered and filled the whole niche and its neighboring territories, and then got outcompeted by their own descendants. These descendant media came into being because their ancestors got people thinking about new ways of framing and transmitting the stories they wanted to tell, ways that were more hospitable than the present state-of-the-art. The more successful a medium is, the more it will attract attention from inventors who chafe at its limits and want to invent a new system that lacks those limitations.

But a medium that has contracted after a great flowering isn't dead or dying: it's merely being whittled down to size, proudly hosting the material that it hosts better than anything else. Not dead as mutton -- alive as a lamb who's found the corner of the paddock where she thrives best.

The newspaper is 'dead as mutton', says HG Wells.

(Thanks, Chris!)

(Images,: Dead Sea newspaper, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from inju's photostream; Old newspaper, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from shironekoeuro's photostream)

Paypal bans Wikileaks just before midnight Friday

Posted: 04 Dec 2010 12:04 AM PST

PayPal's blog:

PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We've notified the account holder of this action.

The rationale seems more convincing (at least from PayPal's perspective) than Amazon's wheedling about rights and redaction. But the timing, at 11:29 p.m. EST on Friday evening, suggests they do know the decision is something to be buried, not boasted of. Update: In a tweet, Wikileaks says it was the result of government pressure.

Calling Time on Assange

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 09:38 PM PST

Dec. 12's issue of Time casts Wikileaks in a positive light, echoing a classic image of American censorship and pointing out that harm is not yet evident in the candor forced upon an unwilling government. Imagine how sad it would be for Fareed Zakaria's lovely smile to be covered thus! America's mainstream media often seems resentful of Wikileaks' beating it, bullying it and spoon-feeding it, but has perhaps rediscovered something it loathes far more: Joementum. Here's the cover story, by Massimo Calabresi. [via @kaepora]

Short links: Fark News Quiz

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 05:18 PM PST

"With Thanksgiving behind us and only a month of 2010 roundups and endless War on Christmas stories ahead of us," now might be a good time for a Fark News Quiz about weird things on the internet.

"Anander Mol, Anander Veig" Hanukkah album: electronic re-imaginings of holiday and Jewish classics

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 04:40 PM PST

Marc Weidenbaum of Disquiet points us to a lovely Hanukah music remix project he put together for Tablet Magazine, Anander Mol, Anander Veig (Another Time, Another Way). "It's an attempt at kitsch-free holiday music that channels the past," says Marc. I really dig it. Marc's intro to the project is lovely, too. Snip:

The album's content ranges widely, from the kid-friendly (the "Chag Yafe") to lush ambient-pop renditions of "Maoz Tzur" and "Sivivon Sov Sov Sov" to hip-hop-derived takes on three klezmer favorites ("Od Yishama," "Ose Shalom," and "Die Goldene Chasene") to an original by the New Klezmer Trio, "Thermoglyphics," reimagined as a feat of traditional Eastern European android folk music. And of course it wouldn't be a Jewish festivity without "Hava Nagila," heard here moving back and forth between heavy synthesis and a piano/guitar performance.
As the project was nearing completion, I got in touch with a wise friend, one who knows far more Yiddish than I do--which is to say, he knows more than just words involving disappointment, food, bodily functions, and relatives. I asked my friend, "How would you say 'remix' in Yiddish?" Being wise, he thought better than to come up with a new word; he thought better than to reply with some snazzy neologism, some antiquated-sounding yet entirely newly created term, some ersatz steampunk Yiddish.
Instead, he sent me a steady stream of short phrases, each an attempt to probe, in Yiddish, what a remix is at its heart. The best of his probings, "anander mol, anander veig," became the title of this set. It means, in a literal translation, "another time, another way"--old ways, reconsidered; old modes, remodeled; old music, remade.

Anander Mol, Anander Veig (Tablet Magazine)
Download the entire album. [.ZIP file, 47 MB]
PDF version of album cover artwork [Brian Scott/Boondesign]

Wikileaks.org blocked, but mirror sites proliferating: here's a partial index of indexes

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 04:18 PM PST

In response to the "killing" of Wikileaks.org by the US, countless mirror sites are springing up all over the world. It's impossible to authoritatively catalog them all—too many mirrors, and too fluid of a situation. But here are some active indexes, which appear to be dynamically updating as new mirrors pop up.

• wikileaks.ch
• wikileaks.de
• wikileaks.fi
• wikileaks.nl
• Wikileaks.info
• Anapnea
• etherpad.mozilla.org:9000/wikileaks
• A Google search string
• [[wl-mirror]] at AnonWiki

Man, it's DeCSS all over again. Readers are invited to catalog others in the comments.

(thanks, Nadim, Kathy, Dan, Jens, jchillerup, and others)

photo: "I think I'll call it the internet," by WarmSleepy, from the Boing Boing Flickr Pool.

Walt Disney World castmembers speak about their search for a living wage

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 03:03 PM PST

The Services Trade Council workers at Walt Disney World are still negotiating for a fair contract and a living wage. They've released a longer version of the "MouseTrapped" video they put out earlier this week. It details more the living conditions for long-time Walt Disney World castmembers, some of whom are forced to supplement their groceries with donations from church food-banks.

MouseTrapped 2010 - part 1 of 2

Gingerbread house Fenway Park

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 04:02 PM PST

What's the best thing about working at Harvard Business Review? Some days it's improving the practice of management. Other days it's discovering that one of your colleagues has a family with a history of creating gingerbread structures. This year: Fenway Park. (Thanks, Justin!)

Here's another look:

All I want for Festivus is an electric eel

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 02:51 PM PST

A few years ago, Pesco wrote about a Christmas tree at a Japanese aquarium that is lit by the power of an electric eel. Now, thanks to Discover magazine's DiscoBlog, we have video of that amazing holiday miracle.

Sadly, the eel does not look nearly as thrilled with this situation as I am.

There's more than one way to wreck an airship

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 02:38 PM PST

Well. That looks a little off, doesn't it?

The USS Los Angeles was a Navy airship, built as part of German war reparations from World War I. Early in her career, the Los Angeles was drained of hydrogen and refilled with non-flammable helium. Good idea, that. But it wasn't enough to make her accident-proof. This photo was taken on August 25, 1927, after a sudden change in the wind direction caught the back end of the moored Los Angeles.

Within moments, she was completely vertical.

The Naval History and Heritage Command doesn't say whether anyone was on board at the time. It would have been a hell of a ride, if there were. The Los Angeles only sustained a small amount of damage from this accident, but it was enough to prompt the Navy to switch to a safer mooring system.

This photo is public domain, and given to the Naval History and Heritage Command by Richard K. Smith, author of the book "The Airships Akron & Macon", 1974. But I ran across it thanks to reader lazzo51, who posted the photo to the BoingBoing Flickr Pool. Much appreciated!

Wikileaks cables reveal that the US wrote Spain's proposed copyright law

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 10:44 PM PST

Spain's Congress is about to vote on a new and extremely harsh copyright/Internet law. It's an open secret that the law was essentially drafted by American industry groups working with the US trade representative.

But it gets gets more interesting: 115 of the Wikileaks cables intercepted from the US embassy in Madrid were tagged with "KIPR" -- that is, relating to "intellectual property," The big question has been: will El Pais, the Spanish newspaper that has the complete trove of Wikileaks cables, release them in time to affect the vote on the new law?

Well, now they've started. The first 35 of the 115 cables have been released, and they confirm the widespread suspicion: the Spanish government and the opposition party were led around by the nose by the US representatives who are the real legislative authority in Spain.

So here's the new question: when the Spanish Congress votes on America's copyright law this month, will they vote for their sovereignty, or act like a US puppet state?

La prioridad que los estadounidenses otorgan a la cuestión se manifiesta en el nivel de los interlocutores elegidos. La vicepresidenta María Teresa Fernández de la Vega es uno de los primeros objetivos. Un agregado de la Embajada habla del tema con ella el 22 de febrero de 2005. El cable 27536, elaborado por el agregado al día siguiente de la conversación con De la Vega, se cierra así: "Dada la cantidad de estrellas de la industria del entretenimiento con una abierta preferencia por el Gobierno socialista (es significativo, por ejemplo, que Zapatero acudiera al equivalente español de los Oscar), es posible que este Gobierno sea especialmente sensible a hacer algo en este sector. Necesitaremos un año o así para ver si esta sensibilidad se traduce en resultados".
El 10 de noviembre de 2005, el embajador se entrevista con la ministra de Cultura, Carmen Calvo: en el cable 45583, el propio embajador concluye que en el Gobierno español hay buenas intenciones, pero no hay resultados.
La tónica se mantiene. La potente Motion Pictures Association, que agrupa a las majors de Hollywood, presiona desde EE UU. La industria local española también se queja de la permisividad con las descargas, sobre todo la musical. En 2007 se produce el punto de inflexión: el 28 de diciembre, la delegación estadounidense en Madrid emite un cable (135868) que contiene un minucioso plan. Asunto: estrategia para los derechos de propiedad intelectual en España. El despacho despliega un detallado plan a corto, medio y largo plazo plagado de citas con responsables políticos, con mandos intermedios de los ministerios de Cultura e Industria, encuentros con las operadoras de telecomunicaciones, visitas a España de expertos norteamericanos... y anticipa, ya, la medida que hay que tomar a medio plazo: colocar a España en la lista negra.

EE UU ejecutó un plan para conseguir una 'ley antidescargas' (Thanks, Javier!)

Extravagant all-star cover of "Let It Be" for Norwegian TV show

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 01:49 PM PST

This very long promo for Norwegian show Gylne Tider (Golden Times) features a bunch of people I have not thought about in a while, greenscreened onto a Santa Monica beach background, covering The Beatles' "Let It Be." It made me feel simultaneously amused, perplexed, and old. Video link. (via Jimmy Kimmel)

Casio F91W Wrist Watch

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 12:51 PM PST

This $11 watch is the simplest and most utilitarian timepiece I have ever worn. It is easy to read, has an adequate (not blinding) illumination, is small, light and comfortable but also tough, and has a battery that will last up to 8 years (with many other reviewers noting that it lasts even longer). The F91W is a distillation of a digital watch. It has three features: tells date and time, has an alarm clock, and works as a stop watch (only up to an hour before it turns over). The functions are easy to use, and aren't distracting. I originally purchased this watch to use while running, but found that I liked it so much that I now wear it all the time. It has replaced my larger, more expensive Citizen Eco-Drive which is now reserved for dressier occasions. After swimming and showering while wearing the watch I trust its "water resistance" and am impressed with its durability. It's also cheap enough that I don't worry about it breaking or getting stolen. If you are looking for a simple, capable digital watch that will last for years, this is the one to get. -- Oliver Hulland Casio F91W Digital Watch $11 Comment on this at Cool Tools. And don't forget to submit a tool to the Cool Tools Holiday Contest!

Maps: Google vs. Bing vs. Yahoo

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 11:28 AM PST

Justin O'Beirne takes a close look at the most popular online map sites to try and figure out just why Google Maps is more readable. It comes down to the finest of details: Google adds white outlines to city names that are just thick enough to conceal what is behind the text, has a finely-tuned contextual hierarchy of type sizes, and a carefully selected color scheme. As an aside, it's intriguing how each service's maps artistically reflect their corporate operators' natures. Google's is perfectly organized and functional, devoid of embellishment. Microsoft Bing's is beautiful and overdesigned, with a subtle palette of lavender and teal. Yahoo's looks like someone vomited a spaghetti dinner in Carrot Top's hair. Google Maps & Label Readability [41Latitude via DF] Update: Wow, Tumblr has a bandwidth limit? Here's a cached version of the site if it's down for you.

The Maccabeats' "Candlelight"

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 10:41 AM PST

From Yeshiva University's a capella group The Maccabeats comes this reimagination of Taio Cruz's "Dynamite." Happy Hanukkah!

Mary Shelley's remix-art kids' book as a modern remix YouTube

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 10:09 AM PST

Dave from the New York Public Library sez, "The NYPL has animated the first book Frankenstein author Mary Shelley ever worked on - a kid's story called Mounseer Nongtongpaw, or the Discoveries of John Bull in a Trip to Paris. It was published by Shelley's anarchist philosopher dad William Godwin in 1808 when she was a mere 10 years old. The story was originally based on a comedic song from the early 1800s. Shelley remixed it into the book. Since the book and its lavish artwork are part of the public domain, we were free to remix that and create our little animated adaptation. Some things never change."

Mounseer Nongtongpaw, or the Discoveries of John Bull in a Trip to Paris

Generate your own funny, bland, generic PAC name

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 10:04 AM PST

Nicko from the Sunlight Foundation says:

I thought Boing Boing fans would be interested in this funny little widget the Sunlight Foundation launched that generates PAC names. Some possibilities seem very realistic 'Americans for America PAC'...or a tad on the ridiculous side like 'Somber and Sober Citizens for and against Contradictions' or 'Mustachioed Tycoons for Short, Pithy and Informative Names for Political Action Committees'.
PAC names are often so agreeable, so reasonable, so inclusive, so damned American and yet they reveal nothing about who funded these groups. The Citizens United Supreme Court ruling that led to the explosion of independent expenditures in the midterm elections also spurred a growing list of meaningless titles for organizations. Here at the Sunlight Foundation we will continue to advocate for strong disclosure laws, but we also thought we could have some fun with these vacuous names that simply serve as filing fodder. As we trolled through the spending records from the midterm elections we were shocked at how many people seem to $peak out in favor of common sense, families and the future! Political Action Committees often have bizarre names, but as more and more groups pop up to shield the identity of the donors, the names seem to get even more off topic.
We created this handy (and oh-so embeddable) widget that generates possible PACs and illuminates the absurdity of these inane hollow names. The PAC Name Generator includes more than 28,000 possible fictional names and mixes in links to a hundred real PACs. Since the real ones are difficult to spot, weâ€™ve linked more info on them from our Influence Explorer project and Follow the Unlimited Money site.

Sunlight's Political Action Committee (PAC) Name Generator (Thanks, Nicko!)

Second tragedy strikes Disney death town

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 10:08 AM PST

Tamara Lush writes:

CELEBRATION, Fla. — The owner of a failed security business barricaded himself in his soon-to-be foreclosed home, shot at deputies and then killed himself in this well-groomed Central Florida town built by Disney. The 14-hour standoff came just days after the town's first-ever homicide, unsettling residents who moved to the community for its safety and small-town values even though authorities said the two were not connected.

Disney town sees death for 2nd time in a week [MSNBC]

SPECIAL FEATURE: Willie Nelson, Richard Branson, gorgeous flight attendants, cowboys, and longhorn cattle at Virgin America's Dallas launch

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 04:06 PM PST

Highlights of the evening: Sir Richard wearing a "Free Willie" t-shirt to introduce Sir Nelson, and asking, "Wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a world where they decriminalized [marijuana]?" And, sitting so close to the stage, I could read the tiny words carved into the face of Willie's beat-up guitar. He tossed one of his bandannas to me during the show, and I got a kiss and a handshake.

Read the rest

Autocannibalistic Hot Dog (Boing Boing Flickr Pool)

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 09:43 AM PST

"Dingo Dog," a photograph contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr pool by SLM of Winnipeg, Canada.

Recent Billboard Liberation Front project in New York City

Posted: 03 Dec 2010 09:51 AM PST

Somehow, I missed this Billboard Liberation Front improvement project that took place in New York City on September 30th. Fortunately though, BLF founder and BB pal Jack Napier updated me as to the various BLF efforts currently underway, including a planned documentary film directed by Olivier "Dust & Illusions" Bonin! As all of the BLF's projects, this one at the corner of 38th Street and 8th Avenue is an instant classic. The BLF dramatically enhanced the Stella Artois messaging simply by removing the words "of beauty." From the BLF:

We at the BLF have been assisting fatigued advertising copywriters to strengthen their corporate messages for over thirty years. Advertising is the language of our Culture, as BLF CEO Jack Napier noted almost as many years ago. And the primary use of language is to to communicate ideas. The most efficient and direct communication of an idea comes through the most elegant use of the least amount of words to communicate that idea. It's quite clear from the image in this Stella Artois billboard ad what the message IS. The BLF merely wishes to assist this campaign by paring down the words in order to match that message most perfectly.

"Stella Artois, A Thing of Beauty" (Thanks, Jack Napier!)