The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Showy purchase-bagging
- Watch Shuttle Endeavour's final return to earth tonight, at Kennedy Space Center
- Pentagon has list of "cyber-weapons" for use in computer warfare
- YouTube unblocks video of 13yo Syrian boy allegedly tortured, killed by government thugs
- Yelp review for $8 billion Kansas Abortionplex (after the viral Onion article on same)
- PBS Hack and LulzSec: Xeni on The Madeleine Brand Radio Show
- This Guy Has My Macbook: to catch a laptop thief, in photos (update: CAUGHT!)
- Lodsys files lawsuits against app developers
- The World Health Organization, cell phones, and cancer—what's actually going on
- Early 20th century solar panel
- What is a jellyfish?
- Video of waterspouts off Australia
- SPECIAL FEATURE: ADAPT: An interview with Tim Harford and an excerpt from his new book
- Politics + science = fun
- Meanwhile, scientists are still debating arsenic-based life
- Viktor Wynd's cabinet of curiosities shop
- US Supreme Court rules Ashcroft can't be held responsible in case of detention and abuse of innocent Muslim-American
- Pentagon: Hacking can count as an act of war
- An overpass is not a tornado shelter
- Twitter Gun
- Android's YouTube Store lockout is textbook copyright extremism
- The Red Market: book on the criminal trade in orphans, organs, bones, skin, eggs, hair, and other human flesh
- Padfone
- Electric bear, riding an electric shark, riding a lighting bolt
| Posted: 31 May 2011 10:53 PM PDT According to the video description, this gentleman is Rajni, who bags purchases at Chennai Silks Sarees. He is a virtuoso in this regard. |
| Watch Shuttle Endeavour's final return to earth tonight, at Kennedy Space Center Posted: 31 May 2011 10:59 PM PDT Above, a video embed for SpaceFlightNow's coverage of Shuttle Endeavour's landing tonight. You can track the trajectory live, using Google Earth—so cool. Image below, via NASA TV: "This map shows the path space shuttle Endeavour will take to the shuttle landing facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for its landing Wednesday at 2:35 a.m. EDT. " Here's the NASA main shuttle mission web page, with updates; SpaceFlightNow also has good coverage in a liveblog with frequent updates. Here's wishing our astronauts a great landing; welcome home.
|
| Pentagon has list of "cyber-weapons" for use in computer warfare Posted: 31 May 2011 10:16 PM PDT At the Washington Post, Ellen Nakashima has a story this evening about a list of cyber-weapons and tools (for instance, malware with which to attack an enemy state's infrastructure networks) for computer warfare. The list of capabilities is classified, and has been in use for several months. Other US agencies, including the CIA, have approved it, and the list is now of the Pentagon's set of weapons or "fires" approved for use against an adversary. Snip: List of cyber-weapons developed by Pentagon to streamline computer warfare (WaPo)
|
| YouTube unblocks video of 13yo Syrian boy allegedly tortured, killed by government thugs Posted: 31 May 2011 09:52 PM PDT  YouTube has reinstated access to a graphic, horrifying video of Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, a 13-year-old child who is reported to have been tortured, castrated, and killed by Syrian government thugs after being separated from his mother and father at an April protest against the Assad regime. A link to the video is here; it is extremely disturbing and not appropriate for viewing by children. The video was apparently blocked by YouTube due to its shocking content, then unblocked after reporters and human rights advocates petitioned YouTube administrators. The boy's corpse was returned to his family a month after his arrest. As The Nation reports, they "risked their lives to produce the video." The New York Times reports that his father was detained after the video went public, and he has since been missing. The New York Times describes the video: But the remains themselves testify all too clearly to ghastly torture. Video posted online shows his battered, purple face. His skin is scrawled with cuts, gashes, deep burns and bullet wounds that would probably have injured but not killed. His jaw and kneecaps are shattered, according to an unidentified narrator, and his penis chopped off.More from The Nation:
By Tuesday, however, the video that shot from the web to Al Jazeera to the streets of Syria -- where people marched carrying signs emblazoned with the deceased child's portrait -- had been blocked on YouTube, the very site where it first launched. The temporary blockage of the brutal video, which YouTube has since restored, is another reminder that the same social media platforms which help spread protests can also seriously hinder activists.
Further on in that piece, EFF Director for International Freedom of Expression Jillian York says YouTube handled the matter of the video itself pretty well (for what it's worth, I agree):
Predictably, the Syrian state-controlled media went into full denial mode on this story, saying the boy is no 'Child Martyr.' From The Atlantic:
|
| Yelp review for $8 billion Kansas Abortionplex (after the viral Onion article on same) Posted: 31 May 2011 04:41 PM PDT  Remember the (fictitious, funny) Onion article "Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex"? Now the famed Abortionplex is on Yelp. Free nachos and mojitos after your partial birth abortion, with a Yelp discount code! As noted in a previous Boing Boing post, many people believe the Abortionplex (and other Onion coverage) is real. I can't wait for the credulous Fox News coverage to kick in. Everyone loves Abortionplex, but true fans know that the real magic is found in the secret menu. A 2x3 lets you sandwich in movie screenings at the theater before, between and after ridding yourself of potential twins. An 8x8? Spend your day easily breezing from Octomom to Oscars noms. Hold the butter on that popcorn though - you're not eating for 9 anymore!(thanks, Susannah!)
|
| PBS Hack and LulzSec: Xeni on The Madeleine Brand Radio Show Posted: 31 May 2011 04:15 PM PDT 
Audio: MP3 Download. I joined "The Madeleine Brand Show" today for a discussion about the marathon hack of PBS.org by a group calling itself LulzSec, or The Lulz Boat. They've published what they claim was the method used: in short, vulnerabilities in Movable Type, and related weaknesses. As noted here on Boing Boing in previous posts, the hack was said to be in retaliation for the PBS Frontline "Wikisecrets" documentary, which was perceived by Wikileaks advocates (and whoever LulzSec is) to be unfair to the secrets-leaking organization and to accused leaker Bradley Manning. Taking a news organization effectively offline to protest the content of its coverage is not exactly supporting free speech—but this was about lulz, not logic. And as I said on Twitter when news of the attack first broke: PBS doesn't operate like CNN or Fox News, with a centralized news production process. Attacking PBS like this because one episode of one show wasn't A+ is like firebombing an entire grocery store because one apple you bit was bad. Of course, unlike a firebombing, PBS will recover just fine. While the hack was ongoing last night, the organization coped by publishing to Tumblr and interacting more directly on Twitter with viewers. But a bunch of poor IT admins at PBS HQ, and affiliate stations around the country whose logins and passwords were exposed, probably had a really crappy Memorial Day (and will have a lot of cleanup and stress in weeks ahead). None of this helps Wikileaks, Manning, or journalism. From the show overview: Hackers attack PBS website over Wikileaks documentary (The Madeleine Brand Show, SCPR)
|
| This Guy Has My Macbook: to catch a laptop thief, in photos (update: CAUGHT!) Posted: 31 May 2011 10:12 PM PDT  Joshua Kaufman says his laptop was stolen, and that it looks like this guy in the photo above has it. Now, the tumblr equivalent of a slow-speed freeway police chase: thisguyhasmymacbook.tumblr.com. The software helping to surveil and document the apparent thief is called Hidden. On March 21, 2011, my MacBook was stolen from my apartment in Oakland, CA. I reported the crime to the police and even told them where it was, but they can't help me due to lack of resources. I'm currently in the process of contacting the mayor's office. Meanwhile, I'm using the awesome app, Hidden, to capture these photos of this guy who has my MacBook. UPDATE: They caught him, and the stolen Macbook is going back home! May 31, 8:37 PM PST. ARRESTED! An Oakland police officer just called me to let me know that they arrested the guy in my photos! BOOYA! The police used my evidence (email which pointed to a cab service) that he was a driver and tricked him into picking them up. Nice work OPD! Below, a final photo snapped of the apparent thief, sleeping next to the MacBook before he goes to the pokey.
Not at all unlike what happened in the case of Sean Power (Twitter), who used the software Prey to find, photograph, and ultimately catch his laptop's thief—and get his laptop back.
(thanks, tara!) |
| Lodsys files lawsuits against app developers Posted: 31 May 2011 02:35 PM PDT Lodsys has followed through on its threat to file lawsuits against iOS app developers who used certain features of Apple's development platform. Apple claims its own license covers devs; Lodsys disagrees in a new statement of its own. In any case, it had already described a strategy of attacking small businesses that cannot afford legal representation, forcing them into the relatively inexpensive option of paying licensing fees. |
| The World Health Organization, cell phones, and cancer—what's actually going on Posted: 31 May 2011 01:04 PM PDT  Today, I was surprised to see posts popping up on Twitter implying that the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research into Cancer had declared radiation from cell phones to be a cancer risk. As you've read here before, and as sources like the National Cancer Institute have reported, the evidence linking cell phone use and cancer risk is actually pretty slim. So I was waiting to hear about some new study or analysis. Instead, it looks like this is really a story about context. If you don't have the context, it's easy to look at the headlines and assume that the WHO just told you to stop using your cell phone. But, add context, and the news looks very different. In fact, with context in place, it appears the WHO isn't saying cell phones are dangerous, and isn't saying anything you haven't heard before. Science blogger Ed Yong works for Cancer Research UK. He wrote up a very nice explanation of what the WHO announcement really means.
Basically, this is where we start talking about semantics, and the difference between official, bureaucratic categories and how people actually talk about risk in everyday life. When you hear someone say, "Using your cell phone probably won't give you cancer. The evidence supporting that idea is very weak," they are, more or less, saying the same thing that the World Health Organization is saying. Only the WHO has also added the (very reasonable) assertion that more research is needed if we want to say anything definitive about cell phones and cancer. Image: Hello Operator, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from derekolson's photostream |
| Early 20th century solar panel Posted: 31 May 2011 12:36 PM PDT |
| Posted: 31 May 2011 11:50 AM PDT Steven Haddock of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (let's all pause a moment to reflect on kismet of that surname/job combination) made this video about the wide world of creatures that we call "jellyfish." It's a great summary of the extreme diversity encompassed under one, catch-all name, and does a really nice job of explaining relationships between different species and families of jelly-like creatures. And let's not discount the stop-and-gawk value. Check out 1:27 for a Hydromedusae that looks strikingly like Darth Vader's helmet. You'll also meet shell-less snails, jelly worms of the sort you don't find at the candy store, and even colony-dwelling creatures thousands of individuals strong. |
| Video of waterspouts off Australia Posted: 31 May 2011 12:28 PM PDT Seen here is amazing video recorded yesterday of waterspouts off Australia's New South Wales coast. Waterspouts are a columnar vortex, often in the form of a tornado, occurring over a body of water. They're sometimes thought to be responsible for Fortean "falls," such as fish or frogs dropping from the sky onto dry ground. "Dramatic water tornado appears off Australia coast" (The Telegraph) |
| SPECIAL FEATURE: ADAPT: An interview with Tim Harford and an excerpt from his new book Posted: 31 May 2011 12:08 PM PDT Tim Harford is a Financial Times columnist and the presenter of Radio 4's More or Less, which won the Royal Statistical Society's 2010 award for statistical excellence in broadcast journalism. He is also the author of several books, including The Undercover Economist.
Cory Doctorow: First of all, some context -- what's the thesis of Adapt, and how does it refine, extend or improve upon The Undercover Economist? Tim Harford: The Undercover Economist was a book about the economic principles behind everyday life, from the way Starbucks prices drinks to the rise of China. Adapt isn't primarily an economics book at all — it's a book about how complex problems are solved. (If ideas from economics help, great. But sometimes they don't.) That said, the two books start from a very similar place: describing the amazing complexity of the economy that produces the everyday objects which surround us. In Undercover it was a cappuccino, and in Adapt I describe a memorable project in which a student called Thomas Thwaites attempts to build a simple toaster from scratch. But in Adapt this complexity isn't just a cause for a "wow, cool" moment — it's a headache, because it's a measure of the obstacles facing anyone who wants to solve problems in this very intricate, interconnected world. Ultimately Adapt argues that the only way forward is experimentation, which can either be formal or ad hoc. Whether we're talking about poverty in Nigeria or innovation in Boston, solutions tend to evolve rather than be designed in some burst of awesome genius. And then the question is — what do we need to encourage those experiments?
|
| Posted: 31 May 2011 11:14 AM PDT Just because science sounds silly doesn't mean it's worthless. MSNBC's Alan Boyle breaks down recent political attempts to attack the National Science Foundation. TL;DR: Yes, the jello wrestling at an Antarctic research station was a mistake, but funding a towel-folding robot is actually important and not really a major drain on the federal budget. |
| Meanwhile, scientists are still debating arsenic-based life Posted: 31 May 2011 03:04 PM PDT Scientists don't get bored with a question just because the press does. Last December, research claiming to have found evidence of "arsenic-based life" on Earth touched off a firestorm of controversy, as many scientists weighed in, via blogs and magazines, on why they thought the research, and its conclusions, were flawed. Last week, the debate moved into traditional science media, as the journal Science, which published the arsenic life paper, published eight critiques of it, as well as a response to the critiques by the authors of the original paper. One of the critiques was written by Rosie Redfield, a microbiologist who was also one of the first scientists to post a critique of arsenic life in blog form. These critiques don't completely end the debate. The original researchers recently released their ostensibly arsenic-based bacteria to other scientists, who will now try to replicate the results. But the critiques have changed the discussion in some subtle, and important, ways. For instance, New Scientist and The Washington Post pointed out that, in responding to the critiques, the original researchers have changed their conclusions from having found "proof" to having produced a "viable interpretation." In other words, they haven't backed down, but they have copped to being less certain. |
| Viktor Wynd's cabinet of curiosities shop Posted: 31 May 2011 10:55 AM PDT  On a recent trip to London, Strange Attractor's Mark Pilkington introduced me to Viktor Wynd, a curator and proprietor of The Last Tuesday Society/Little Shop of Horrors, a fantastic gallery cum wunderkammer in London's East End. Upstairs is the art gallery, while the dark basement is packed -- and I mean stuffed, to the point of total claustrophobia -- with countless curiosities, from odd stuffed beasts to bizarre books, a box of the Rolling Stones' rubbers to a sealed box allegedly containing some of the darkness that Moses brought upon the Egyptions in Exodus. It's not always clear whether Wynd's place is a museum or a shop. And in many ways, that's the point. Fortean Times' Richard Freeman paid him a visit (photo by Etienne Gilfillan): "I wanted to see how a contemporary wunderkammer might look," he says. Was it meant to be a sort of successor to the late, lamented Potter's Museum of Curiosities?"Viktor Wynd and his Little Shop of Horrors" |
| Posted: 31 May 2011 10:11 AM PDT  The Supreme Court ruled today that former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft cannot be personally sued over his role in the arrest of an innocent American citizen, a Muslim man who was never charged with a crime. From the Associated Press: By a 5-3 vote, the court said Ashcroft did not violate the constitutional rights of Abdullah al-Kidd, who was arrested in 2003 under a federal law intended to make sure witnesses testify in criminal proceedings. Al-Kidd claimed in a federal lawsuit that the arrest and detention violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. The ACLU's response to the ruling is here. Photo: REUTERS. Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft speaks to the National Rifle Association's 'Celebration of American Values Conference' in Washington, September 21, 2007. |
| Pentagon: Hacking can count as an act of war Posted: 31 May 2011 10:12 AM PDT The Wall Street Journal broke the news yesterday that the Pentagon has concluded that hacking and other forms of digital sabotage that originate from other countries can be considered an act of war. This means that for the first time, the U.S. is in the position of possibly responding to an online attack with offline "traditional military force." Guns, troops, drones, bombs. The Pentagon's first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country's military. In part, the Pentagon intends its plan as a warning to potential adversaries of the consequences of attacking the U.S. in this way. "If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks," said a military official. Read the whole article here. If the paywall locks you out, MSNBC has a related piece. |
| An overpass is not a tornado shelter Posted: 31 May 2011 09:38 AM PDT  Sometimes, it's a little scary to find out just how wrong the folk wisdom you've picked up over the years really is. Growing up in Kansas, I remember adults telling me that, if a tornado happened and I was in a car on the highway, I should hide under an overpass. Turns out, that advice is not just incorrect, it's potentially deadly. And it's also a great example of why anecdotes aren't the same thing as data. Why? Because the myth actually stems from one incident in the early 1990s, when people did survive a tornado by seeking shelter under an overpass. But, as the National Atmospheric and Oceanographic Administration explains, those folks were lucky. Very lucky.
Image: Train Overpass, a Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from rfduck's photostream |
| Posted: 31 May 2011 10:16 AM PDT Angry Birds, indeed! Video of a cool weapon automata from the 19th century, in which a little birdie spins on the top of a gun when you fire it. Video is from Christies, the auction house where this oddity is offered. The intricate mechanics are what make this precious device a win; the narrator is what makes the video win. (via Submitterator, thanks amok69, via from Tree Climber, the blog of goldsmith David Neale) |
| Android's YouTube Store lockout is textbook copyright extremism Posted: 31 May 2011 09:38 PM PDT My latest Guardian column, "Google's YouTube policy for Android users is copyright extremism," examines the theory of copyright behind Google's announcement that it would bar people who unlocked their phones from using the new YouTube video store. This is the latest example of a new kind of copyright emerging in the 21st century, "configuration-right," in which someone who makes a creative work gets a veto over how all the devices that can play or display that work must be configured. It's a novel -- and dangerous -- proposition, akin to record companies telling which furniture you were allowed to move into the same room as your stereo, and to require that you close your window when the record was playing, lest your neighbors get some tunes for free. Which brings us back to where we started: unless you're running a very specific version of Google's software on your phone or tablet, you can't "rent" movies on YouTube. Google - the vendor - and the studios - the rights holders - are using copyright to control something much more profound than mere copying. In this version of copyright, making a movie gives you the right to specify what kind of device can play the movie back, and how that device must be configured.Google's YouTube policy for Android users is copyright extremism |
| Posted: 31 May 2011 07:50 AM PDT  Scott Carney's The Red Market is a book-length investigative journalism piece on the complicated and sometimes stomach-churning underground economy in human flesh, ranging from practice of kidnapping children to sell to orphanages who get healthy kids to pass off to wealthy foreigners to the bizarre criminal rings who imprison kidnapped indigents in "blood farms" or lure impoverished women into selling their kidneys. Carney's story starts when he was living and working in India, showing around groups of American students; one of his charges commits suicide and he is plunged into the grisly midst of the bureaucracy of human remains and the disposal thereof. Carney uses this story as a jumping-off point for a series of investigative chapters, each of which is a relatively self-contained look at a different part of the "red market" -- the black market for human bodies and their parts. Many of these chapters focus on India, which seems to be at the middle of much of the red market trade, having the unique and unfortunate combination of huge population, massive poverty, widespread corruption, ineffectual bureaucracies, enormous wealth discrepancy, and a post-colonial relationship with the west whose legacy is a set of trade routes and relationships for everything from articulated skeletons (dug up by grave-robbers who terrorize whole villages) to human hair (the sole example of a purely altruistic supply-side in the book -- it's donated by religious pilgrims to help fund a temple) to "orphans" who are actually poor children, kidnapped by unscrupulous brokers who know that Westerners would rather adopt a healthy, well-looked-after kid than a genuine orphan who's endured privation in an underfunded orphanage. But Carney also looks at other red markets, grilling cowboy and quack doctors in Cyprus who trade in extreme fertility therapy, preying on vulnerable eastern European women who are coerced into giving up their eggs; recounting his own experiences as a human guinea-pig in pharmaceutical trials in the American midwest; and investigating Falun Gong claims about mass-arrests and organ harvesting from political dissidents in China. On the way, Carney looks at the wider context of the red markets, the history of graverobbing and medical education, the toothless efforts to contain the trade, and especially the ethical and regulatory frameworks for human tissue and human beings that have been employed and discarded in the past. Carney lays a lot of the blame for the red market in the principle that tissue donors (and birth-parents of adoptive children) should be anonymous. He stipulates that this principle was taken up with the best of intentions, but that the net effect has been to rob the system of transparency, so that middlemen and "buyers" can disclaim any connection to unethical conduct at the supply side. Carney also asks some pointed questions about whether market logic can be applied to human tissue, and what it says about the equal sanctity of human life when unequal human wealth puts some of us in a position of selling (or being robbed of) our organs, blood, skin, remains and children so that the rest of us can enjoy a few more years of life, or fertility, or a family. All of this is raised in order to ask how the real benefits of adoption, blood transfusion, organ transplantation, fertility therapy and so on can go on to be enjoyed without being a less-than-zero-sum game that visits enormous tragedy on the many to improve the lives of the few. Carney examines the claims that synthetic human tissues will come along soon to alleviate the pressure that creates the red markets, and finds it wanting. He notes that each expansion in the supply of human tissues has been attended by an equal growth in demand, created by entrepreneurial surgeons who expand the definition of who might benefit from the use of the tissue. Carney writes with a novelist's eye for character and detail and a muckraking reporter's gift for asking uncomfortable questions about stuff that most of us shy away from learning too much about. The Red Market is a gripping account of an invisible crime wave that lurks in the wings of every story about miracle medical breakthroughs and dazzling recoveries from the brink of death. |
| Posted: 31 May 2011 06:42 AM PDT Epic Asus CEO Johnny Shih (previously) introduces its latest product, the Padfone. [Network World via Daring Fireball] |
| Electric bear, riding an electric shark, riding a lighting bolt Posted: 31 May 2011 06:16 AM PDT  A redditor named Sparkychacha088 posted this request: "Dear Reddit, my 8yo son drew this on a napkin. It's an electric bear, riding an electric shark, riding a lighting bolt. He says it's our family crest. Can someone with graphic design skills make this a legit crest?" and Misternarwhale obliged with the fab illustration above. Huzzah! |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Boing Boing To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment