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- Design for Privacy contest: make free software for personal privacy with the ACLU, TOR and IPC!
- German police raid German Pirate Party's servers two days before election
- The Apocamix end-of-the-world montage
- Matt and Trey interviewed on "Book of Mormon" for NPR's "Fresh Air"
- Police in Germany seize Pirate Party servers, in search of Anonymous
- Extremely mundane places in Minecraft
- Angry Beaver vs. German Shepard
- Judgment Day Open Thread: How are you planning to celebrate The Rapture on May 21?
- Friday Freak-Out: Electric Lucifer
- Mystery clocks and projection clocks
- Targeting Neopets.com users for credit cards
- Homes for sale with bomb shelters / zombie apocalypse bunkers
- Vindictive game company invites employees to pan reviewer's novel after bad review
- Nested "Inception" chair sculpture
- Rebooting Library Privacy in the Age of the Network: getting privacy right in 21st century libraries
- Cool, interactive weather website
- History of the computer mouse & what it teaches us about business and innovation
- Satellite view of flooding in Louisiana
- 1943 color photo of a Topeka, Kansas, train yard
- Machine of Death II open to submissions
- CDC unprepared for Zombie Apocalypse traffic apocalypse
- Buy the "Bought This Bitcoins Badge With Bitcoins" badge with Bitcoins
- Vice speaker of Ukrainian Parliament throttles deputy
- Why Texas tried to hide drinking water radiation from the EPA
- GOP legislative aide works on punitive voter ID bill, boasts of illegally voting in another district
- France lobbies G8 for Internet control and censorship
- Watch a landslide happen at 50 cm per hour
- Battlestorm: league game to help kids recover from hurricanes and prepare for the next one
- Talking Turing tests with a fraudbot
- Budweiser nunchucks: American Ninja
| Design for Privacy contest: make free software for personal privacy with the ACLU, TOR and IPC! Posted: 20 May 2011 10:25 PM PDT Jacob Appelbaum sez, Take the Challenge (Thanks, Jacob!) |
| German police raid German Pirate Party's servers two days before election Posted: 21 May 2011 12:40 AM PDT  The German police raided the German Pirate Party's servers; they claimed that the GPP was running an EtherPad instance that was being used by Anonymous activists to plan an attack on French energy giant EDF*. The German elections are coming up soon, and the German police seizure went well beyond taking the EtherPad instance for forensic purposes; the GPP (who had a member in the last German Parliament) have been severely put out at a critical juncture. Rick Falkvinge, who heads the Swedish Pirate Party, came to the defense of his piratical brethren today, writing, "Doing this to a democratic party--Germany's sixth largest, actually--two days before an election is nothing short of a democratic sabotage. This shows why we must introduce understanding of information policy into the justice system all across Europe. A computer is not just something you can carry away; doing so has consequences. It is not a wrench, and yet the law (and police) treat it like any tool, just like a wrench." *If they were, I wouldn't shed a tear. EDF provides the power to our flat here in London. Last year, during the "big freeze" (when temperatures plummeted to subzero levels), our power went out. My wife and daughter were in Toronto, but I was home -- and freezing. I called EDF to report the outage, and they explained because my wife's name was on the bill, the Data Protection Act prohibited them from accepting a report of a power-outage. This is, of course, complete bullshit -- and the fact that they were prepared to let me freeze rather than take note of my service outage has left me pretty unsympathetic to their woes. |
| The Apocamix end-of-the-world montage Posted: 20 May 2011 10:06 PM PDT In celebration of the end of the world, beginning tomorrow, please to enjoy "The Apocamix" by Eclectic Method. (Thanks, Nick Philip!) |
| Matt and Trey interviewed on "Book of Mormon" for NPR's "Fresh Air" Posted: 20 May 2011 03:30 PM PDT  Listen: Fresh Air host Terry Gross interviews Matt Stone and Trey Parker about their excellent Broadway musical, The Book of Mormon (previously reviewed here on Boing Boing). Download audio, or read the transcript. |
| Police in Germany seize Pirate Party servers, in search of Anonymous Posted: 20 May 2011 02:45 PM PDT Nate Anderson at Ars Technica reports that police in Germany today confiscated servers belonging to the German Pirate Party, "apparently hoping to search the prominent collaboration tool widely used within Anonymous to select targets for attack." |
| Extremely mundane places in Minecraft Posted: 20 May 2011 05:59 PM PDT  People are always showing off the spectacular places they've found in Minecraft, or their latest epic creations: a 1:1 scale model of the Starship Enterprise; the world of Studio Ghibli; and vast mechanical computers among them. But I feel there is a glaring omission here that needs to be corrected: no-one is making anything boring. What gives? Here are a few of the extraordinarily characterless things I have created in Minecraft. A nondescript streetWelcome to a drab town in northern England. This housing was thrown up to accomodate workers in the late 19th century.  The closure of the shipyards has taken its toll on this once-thriving community. Pictured at the top of this post is the boarded-up corner shop. A rural strip mallHave you been to K-mart in the last few years? This one could be somewhere in rural Oklahoma or West Texas. From this angle you can't see the adjacent strip mall, which has an Applebees. It's the only restaurant in town. They keep talking about an Olive Garden, though. Fingers crossed!  A highway intersectionHere is a highway intersection.  A rockRockall is a tiny, uninhabitable islet in the Atlantic ocean off the coast of Scotland, covered in bird poo. Here it is in Minecraft.  Do you have any mind-cripplingly humdrum things to show off from your Minecraft adventures? UPDATE: BB reader HappySmurfday presents this office, where exposed brickwork and expensive flooring serve only to highlight the ineluctable Ballardian vacuity of the modern workplace.
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| Angry Beaver vs. German Shepard Posted: 20 May 2011 02:14 PM PDT  CBC News reports that "a large, agitated beaver attracted a crowd in Fort Smith, N.W.T., this week when it meandered through town and got hissy with a German shepherd." Local gentleman Mike Keizer, a longtime resident in of this small town of 2,400, told a reporter he hopped on his bicycle as soon as he heard there was a beaver on the loose. Who can blame him for wanting to get a close-up look at a beaver? "It looked huge. I always thought beavers would be smaller," he said. The CBC item continues, "Keizer said in his 17 years living in Fort Smith, he has never seen a beaver -- never mind a beaver so large -- come into town." (Via BB Submitterator, thanks MPB) |
| Judgment Day Open Thread: How are you planning to celebrate The Rapture on May 21? Posted: 20 May 2011 01:44 PM PDT Judgment Day is upon us: tomorrow, Saturday May 21, at 6pm local time, according to this gentleman. Are you planning to leave this earthly plane and join The Lord, or are you planning to observe the day in some other fashion? |
| Friday Freak-Out: Electric Lucifer Posted: 20 May 2011 01:55 PM PDT
DF Tram has just released this re-interpretation of the unreleased Bruce Haack masterpiece, Electric Lucifer Book III I.F.O., on a very limited-edition CD with original artwork by Smyle. For a taste, check out "When A Man Becomes Electric" in the player above. Dylan has been my favorite DJ for years, seamlessly mixing electronica, jazz, avant-garde, contemporary classical, and pioneering computer music into an immersive flow that's fresh, inspiring, and provocative. Electric Lucifer Book III I.F.O. is $12 on CD from Dylan's site. Electric Lucifer Book III by Bruce Haack/SoundCapsule (DF Tram Blog) The Electric Lucifer by Bruce Haack (Amazon)
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| Mystery clocks and projection clocks Posted: 20 May 2011 01:11 PM PDT   Roger Russell, who is known among hi-fi enthusiasts as the former director of acoustic research at McIntosh Laboratory, is also fascinated by curious clocks. Specifically, Russell created Web pages about "mystery clocks," in which the hands seem to be suspended without any obvious driving mechanism, and "projection clocks," that surprisingly date back to the early 1900s. When I shared a bedroom with my big brother as a kid, I sometimes suffered from insomnia and would occasionally wake him to complain about it. He threatened to buy a projection clock for our room so I could stare at the ceiling all night and watch the minutes... tick... by....
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| Targeting Neopets.com users for credit cards Posted: 20 May 2011 12:55 PM PDT Neopets.com won't tell Beverly Blair Harzog how her daughter's user's name for the site ended up on credit card solicitations. It was in November 1999 that Neopets.com hit the scene. Kids loved it. I mean, really, really loved it. The computer game allowed them to create and take care of virtual pets in Neopia, a virtual world, and interact with each other on boards. Kids had to register, which involved giving personal information. Like other kids, Ashley, my then-10-year-old daughter, wanted to sign up and participate.They should make a Neopets branded credit card! |
| Homes for sale with bomb shelters / zombie apocalypse bunkers Posted: 20 May 2011 12:45 PM PDT  Be safe from the latest food riot / government-engineered plague / Michelle Bachmann tweet in one of these backyard underground bunkers. |
| Vindictive game company invites employees to pan reviewer's novel after bad review Posted: 20 May 2011 11:30 AM PDT  Mike Murdock sez, I write as a freelance reviewer for Joystiq.com, one of the largest video game website/blogs. AOL owns them. I wrote a review of a video game called "Conduit 2", by High Voltage software, published by Sega. The review was very negative. I gave it 1/5 stars. I was...very harsh. But it was justified. The game is, in my professional opinion, terrible.UPDATED: Conduit 2 Developer Calls for Internal Retaliation Against Author of Negative Joystiq Review (Thanks, Mike!) |
| Nested "Inception" chair sculpture Posted: 19 May 2011 10:16 PM PDT  Vivian Chiu's "Inception" chair is a series of nested chair-like objects, inspired by the nested realities in the eponymous film: Taking the chair archetype and placing within it chairs that are progressively smaller. Each chair has hand cut grooves on the inside edges of its seat frame as well as notches in the seat back. These grooves range from 1/2" wide to 1/8" wide. The mechanism works so that the pegs fit into the grooves of the chair one size bigger and slides into place so that the horizontal edge between the chair seat and back line up. The simple mechanism allows the chairs to be taken apart and put together with ease.Inception Chair (via Geekologie) |
| Rebooting Library Privacy in the Age of the Network: getting privacy right in 21st century libraries Posted: 19 May 2011 10:10 PM PDT David Weinberger's manifesto, "Rebooting Library Privacy in the Age of the Network," is a beautifully written explanation of the different mechanisms that have traded under the name of "privacy" and "disclosure" over the centuries in libraries, and how these are changing, thanks to the net and the new capabilities of networked books and reading. Weinberger makes a very good case for the importance of preserving intellectual privacy for library patrons, but finds room in this for knowledge sharing and collaboration. It's part of Harvard's upcoming Hyper-Public, "A Symposium On Designing Privacy and Public Space in the Connected World" (Jun 9-10). Social norms about privacy are obviously changing. No one knows yet where they will end up, but clearly we are undergoing a generational transformation.Rebooting Library Privacy in the Age of the Network (via JoHo) |
| Cool, interactive weather website Posted: 20 May 2011 09:55 AM PDT Weatherspark is a really neat site that allows you to create interactive graphs of weather forecasts and long term trends. So, for instance, I can compare three different weather forecasts for my weekend. I can also go look at long-term climate changes in my region—where the mean temperature is on track to increase by more than 3 degrees F (and probably closer to 4 degrees) between 1949 and 2049. There's lots more neat stuff you can do with this this site. It looks like it could easily be a rabbit hole of random fact generation. It does, however, seem to require Flash. (Via Dan Zarrella) |
| History of the computer mouse & what it teaches us about business and innovation Posted: 20 May 2011 09:41 AM PDT "It's difficult for a company to be both a true innovator and one that can readily bring consumer products to market." — From a neat post by Brian Mossop, Community Manager at the Public Library of Science blogs, about the history of the computer mouse. |
| Satellite view of flooding in Louisiana Posted: 20 May 2011 09:19 AM PDT  This NASA Image of the Day does a really good job of helping to visualize how a large-scale flood control system works. To prevent the rising Mississippi from flooding downstream cities like Baton Rouge and New Orleans, authorities opened some of the bays in the Morganza spillway, allowing water from the Mississippi to flow out into a levee-defined floodplain.
The same levees and spillway you see here also prevent the Mississippi from changing course. Without them, the River would probably take a more direct course to the Gulf of Mexico, likely through the same basin region that is the floodplain now. For the people who live in the floodplain, well, life is weird and depressing right now. CNN has a really interesting story about a town where residents were told, days in advance, "the depth of water from right here will be 15 feet," and had to pack up their homes and lives—some taking everything, including the kitchen sink. Thanks to Tim Heffernan for the CNN story! |
| 1943 color photo of a Topeka, Kansas, train yard Posted: 20 May 2011 08:46 AM PDT  This color photo, dating to 1943, is part of a Library of Congress collection that I've posted shots from before. This one is just lovely. And I'm also pretty sure that I know where this train shop building is located. If I'm right, it's one of the massive Santa Fe RR buildings near Topeka's Oakland neighborhood, right across from Our Lady of Guadeloupe church. Today, there's a road bridge that takes you over the top of the rail yards, so you drive into Oakland at almost the level of those upper windows. I always did want to see what was inside! |
| Machine of Death II open to submissions Posted: 20 May 2011 09:04 AM PDT Machine of Death editor David "Wondermark" Malki sez, MOD Volume 2 Submission Guidelines (Thanks, David !) |
| CDC unprepared for Zombie Apocalypse traffic apocalypse Posted: 20 May 2011 01:30 PM PDT  The CDC's "Zombie apocalypse guide," linked yesterday by Cory, was a clever way to get people to learn the basics of disaster survival. Unfortunately, the CDC's website crashed due to the traffic, suggesting that it might need a few survival tips of its own. |
| Buy the "Bought This Bitcoins Badge With Bitcoins" badge with Bitcoins Posted: 20 May 2011 08:21 AM PDT John Young, co creator of Nerd Merit Badges, says: Buy the "Bought This Bitcoins Badge With Bitcoins" badge with Bitcoins
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| Vice speaker of Ukrainian Parliament throttles deputy Posted: 20 May 2011 08:20 AM PDT  Photo: REUTERS/Tatyana Bondarenko Vice speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Adam Martynyuk, on the right, throttles deputy Oleg Lyashko during a session in the chamber of the Ukrainian parliament in Kiev on Wednesday, May 18, 2011. According to reports, Lyashko had just asked Martynyuk to let him make a speech, which Martinyuk refused to do on procedural grounds. Lyashko then apparently called his interlocutor a Pharisee, at which point it was on. Martynyuk's impassive, heartbeat-at-60 professionalism is to be admired. Vulcan nerve pinch and ninja movie pressure point manueover? Just imagine the world of hurt Lyashko would have been in if Martynyuk had three hands. UPDATE: Here's video, courtesy of Ukranian TV! |
| Why Texas tried to hide drinking water radiation from the EPA Posted: 20 May 2011 08:00 AM PDT  The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has been caught helping some state water systems to falsely lower their reported radiation levels*. The Commission was, apparently, trying to make sure the systems didn't have to report a federal violation, which would have required those systems to inform people who drank the water about the radiation levels they were being exposed to. So, to recap: The TCEQ helped water systems lie to the feds and withhold information from local water consumers. Why do that? Here's where things get interesting. In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear crisis, we've talked a bit about the fact that assessing radiation dose and risk isn't necessarily a clear-cut thing. Dose might be relatively easy to measure in an individual, but there is debate about what that dose means. Especially on an individual basis. This is why the World Health Organization, Greenpeace, the TORCH report commissioned by the European Green Party, and a group of Russian doctors all report very different estimates for how many people were killed as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. Those differences don't necessarily mean that one group is lying or trying to cover something up. Instead, they reflect different ways of assessing risk, and it really is not clear who is right. You can't just assume the lowest estimates are the correct ones, and likewise, you can't make the same assumption about the highest estimates. There's space for reasonable people to disagree. This matters in Texas, because the TCEQ decided they didn't agree with the way the federal Environmental Protection Agency assessed risk. Here's what Kathleen Hartnett White, who was chair of the Commission when the decisions were made, told Texas TV station KHOU:
In this specific case, I honestly have no idea whether TCEQ's position is a reasonable one. I don't know enough about EPA water radiation level standards, or how TCEQ evaluated dose and risk. This very well could be a case of putting budgetary considerations before public health. But, it could also very well be a case of reasonable people disagreeing on how to evaluate radiation dose and risk. Either way, the tactic the TCEQ chose to take was pretty underhanded, and it shows you how complicated science can become when you have to start applying data to real-life public health concerns. Read the full report on this case — includes links to emails and Commission meeting minutes that document the conspiracy. *The KHOU article doesn't specifically say, but I'm getting the impression that the radiation in the drinking water wasn't coming from a power plant or any man-made source. Rather, we're likely talking about places in Texas that just naturally have high levels of uranium and radium in the ground, and the radiation from those sources is getting into local water supplies. Just FYI. Thanks to MrHarley for Submitterating! Image: Water, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from traftery's photostream |
| GOP legislative aide works on punitive voter ID bill, boasts of illegally voting in another district Posted: 19 May 2011 09:51 PM PDT Saljake writes, "A GOP legislative aide votes in her home district even though she lives in Madison full time. She also forced her mother to sign a false affadavit claiming that she had been living back at home for two months. This from a party that JUST TODAY passed a heinously restrictive voter ID bill, using (you guessed it) voter fraud as their excuse." Petryk, Malszycki's boss, is one of several co-sponsors of the controversial voter ID bill that passed the Senate Thursday.GOP legislative aide under investigation for voter fraud |
| France lobbies G8 for Internet control and censorship Posted: 20 May 2011 07:26 AM PDT Sarkozy's French government is hosting an "EG8" summit on Internet policy and have invited lots of technical people to attend in the guise of coming up with recommendations on Internet governance. But as documents reveal, the Sarkozy agenda is control and censorship. Jeremie from La Quadrature du Net sez, A detailed analysis of exchanges between the French President and his former Minister of Foreign Affairs on G8 related matters appears in tomorrow's edition of the French magazine Marianne. La Quadrature du Net has had access to sources that confirm the existence of a control-oriented policy, explicitly hostile to the support to the freedom of expression on the Internet, in blatant contrast with the farcical 'G8 forum' smokescreen. Governments must be made accountable for the positions they take on these issues when they speak behind close doors.France's G8 Focuses on Control and Restrictions to Online Freedoms (Thanks, Jeremie!) |
| Watch a landslide happen at 50 cm per hour Posted: 20 May 2011 07:13 AM PDT  This is a photo of a landslide. But it's not a landslide that happened, it's a landslide in progress. Very, very slow progress. At Snake River Canyon, Wyoming, this flow of dirt is moving down a hillside and across a highway at a rate of 50 centimeters per hour, says Dave Petley on the American Geophysical Union's Landslide blog. The Snake River Canyon landslide is slow enough that Wyoming Department of Transportation workers can climb around on it, as it's moving. In fact, they took a video of themselves doing this. When the film is sped up, you can see the landslide in action—and see that it is actually two separate landslides moving alongside each other! You also get a delightful sequence of fast-moving DOT workers that's just waiting to be paired with Yackety Sax. |
| Battlestorm: league game to help kids recover from hurricanes and prepare for the next one Posted: 20 May 2011 08:36 AM PDT Margaret sez, Games company Area/code are just about to launch Battlestorm, a new live game/new sport to empower kids who live in areas affected by hurricanes. The kids play the game in school, and compete in a league to get through to the big final, which is played against a crack team of grown-up pros. They would therefore be at a total disadvantage, but they get bonuses in the game depending on how many other kids send in photos of their hurricane preparedness kits.Battlestorm Big Event: the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Gulf Coast vs The Hurricane |
| Talking Turing tests with a fraudbot Posted: 19 May 2011 09:55 PM PDT  Clive Thompson got hit on by a pornographic, credit-card harvesting chatbot, and bored it into submission with a brief dissertation on the Turing test. "Let's get this party started!" My evening talking to "babygurl01475" ... |
| Budweiser nunchucks: American Ninja Posted: 20 May 2011 06:46 AM PDT  This shitkicker version of a ninja's nunchucks made from cement-filled Budweiser cans was created by Chen Chen and Kai Tsien-Williams. American Ninja (via Neatorama) |
We're looking for a few good Boing Boing'ers to submit privacy preserving applications in a joint Tor/ACLU/IPC contest. The "Develop for Privacy Challenge" is a call for free software hackers to submit privacy enhancing technology applications and win an award. 
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