Tuesday, March 9, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

When RealNetworks Settled on DVD Copying, We All Lost

Posted: 09 Mar 2010 04:32 AM PST

DVDfeature.jpg RealNetworks just screwed us all by settling lawsuits in which it might have lost--but which might also have given some new life to fair use for digital media. The post-RealDVD world means that unless there's a major change to the law surrounding copy protection, there will never be a legal way to perform legal acts of copying or shifting protected movies, music, and games. Take it from a guy who has a special E Ticket. The major movie studios can never sue me nor four other individuals ever for a variety of media-moving activities that you and 300 million other Americans could be subject to. It's like a superpower. More on how we got this pass later. The suits in question revolve around RealDVD, software Real introduced in September 2008 that would copy the full contents of a video DVD to a file that could be played back on a Windows system. RealDVD is not a DVD ripper: those programs use one of many methods to strip the Content Scramble System (CSS), the DRM that wraps up DVD content, and other defensive techniques.

CSS and its ilk aren't precisely defended by technology--the standards are too weak or poorly executed--but by law. The much-excoriated Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibits "circumvention" of software that's designed to prevent copying. Breaking DRM encryption breaks the law.

But Real went through the steps to obtain a license from the DVD Copy Control Association (DCCA), which controls CSS on behalf of the movie industry. RealDVD decrypted the DVD, copied it, and then locked it tight. Up to five PCs licensed by the same person could play back the discs. (Real also broke through a couple of unrelated protection efforts.)

RealNetworks must have calculated that as a company with a large war chest, it could succeed where others didn't dare to tread. As soon as it released RealDVD, it preemptively sued the DCCA and several studios to establish that it had the right to use CSS in the way RealDVD did. The studios and DCCA sued in return, and got software sales halted. The studios won in August 2009; Real appealed.

The settlement on Monday clears all the suits by RealNetworks agreeing to never sell the software again, refund the money to about 2,700 RealDVD purchasers, disable an associated metadata service, and pay $4.5 million to several movie studios, its Rhapsody partner Viacom, and the DCCA to cover legal and other expenses.

Some people may truly hate RealNetworks for its mediocre RealPlayer software (once a technical miracle) that was bundled with poorly disclosed third-party adware programs. But RealDVD was a thin blade trying to shimmy open the door of fair use.

Fair use is a maddeningly ambiguous set of rules enshrined in copyright law that mention nothing whatsoever about personal use and copying. Court decisions have shaped fair-use exemptions to copyright laws. Congress has passed extremely narrow copyright exclusions for personal use as well.

Without testing specific ideas about fair use or copyright scope in court, there's no sure way to know whether your particular software program, Web site, tweet, or steampunk-based laser decrypter isn't in violation. When the MPAA or a studio sues you, you could potentially plow through millions of dollars with no idea of the outcome.

You can always be sued, but you want to make sure that you have some basis on which to defend yourself, especially if the law and court decisions firmly back you up.

As BoingBoing recently reported about its battle with MagicJack, a group without crazily deep pockets can win and recover costs when it has a strong idea it is in the right. (BoingBoing benefitted from the California strategic lawsuit against public participation or SLAPP, which wouldn't apply to software and hardware.)

That what was made the RealDVD suits so exciting, because Real has hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank, and had a pugnacious CEO, Rob Glaser. Glaser faced down Microsoft over unfair competition and got nearly $800 million from the Windows maker. (Glaser was forced out as head of Real a few weeks ago, although he intended to move on after an executive search; he remains chairman of the board and owns nearly 40 percent of the firm.)

Even better, Real wasn't promoting piracy, or the broad right to rip DVDs into an unprotected format and then move them onto all kinds of devices for playback. RealDVD was very very narrow in purpose: can individuals buy software that converts one kind of protected content on a specific physical medium into another, with even stronger encryption?

Back in 2002, I joined a model lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, what became known as Newmark v Turner (after Craig Newmark of craigslist, one of four other co-plaintiffs). The EFF wanted Newmark v to be joined to a lawsuit originated in 2001 by 28 movie studios, TV production firms, and cable operators against SonicBlue, which made ReplayTV, a digital video recorder that was at one point mildly superior to TiVo.

You may recall the ReplayTV suit, which begat the statement in a magazine interview from then chief executive of Turner Broadcasting that skipping ads was "theft," and that not watching ads was breaking a contract. He said, "There's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom." The industry later tried to backpedal from these statements.

Our suit was a way to try to establish that consumers had rights in this fight among firms: that time-shifting (recording for later consumption) and space-shifting (moving among devices under our control for personal use) were perfectly acceptable, and that we were in danger of losing such rights. Ad skipping was also part of the suit.

Remarkably, a judge agreed to join us in the fight, to the surprise, we think, of the 28 media firms. That would have been ugly had we gone to trial. We faced some potential (though unlikely) penalties were it to be proved that we had violated copyright in our efforts to establish we had used media fairly.

The media firms had a big problem, though, in that it would have been an ugly public-relations battle to try to paint Craig Newmark, your humble reporter, and three other mild-mannered individuals as horrible scofflaws.

Had we won, we would have enshrined a judicial opinion that would have perhaps emboldened consumer-electronics firms and software makers to create products that put much more control over recorded programs in the hands of consumers.

Instead, SonicBlue went bankrupt and sold its assets to another firm that removed the features in question in 2003. The media firms then dismissed its lawsuit against the companies involved.

Here's where it gets interesting. I had completely forgotten until researching the case to write this editorial that the 28 firms gave Craig, me, and our three fellow plaintiffs a "covenant not to sue" for the acts in question. That essentially nullified the suit because we had no more fear of litigation. (The EFF tried to get the same rights for all ReplayTV owners, just 5,000 people, but failed when the judge wouldn't move the case into class-action status.)

So we are copyright superheroes, with the ability to advance ads in a single click, shift content among hardware, and watch at our leisure! Behold us, and despair, for you will not see our like again.

RealNetworks needs to work with studios, so it settled and paid less than 1 percent of its still-giant cash horde--last year, the company's cash was of greater value than its market capitalization for several months--to be able to move forward on content licensing.

I can understand why they did it, but it resembles the Google Book Settlement, a massive effort by Google to get a special judicial and settlement right to not be sued for selling works to which the owner cannot be found and to which it does not have assigned rights (so-called orphan works).

If Google succeeds, then no other firm will go through the expensive litigation that allowed Google to reach the point where it can settle and win in cooperation with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. Google will have a de facto monopoly.

It's unlikely that any other firm with the resources to challenge the media industry will release software or hardware that would allow DVD conversion in a manner that a court could find legal. Real was the last, great hope, because any other similar firm already has multi-million to multi-billion-dollar deals in play. Apple, Microsoft, and others aren't going to release anything that jeopardized how they work with giant copyright holders.

That leads to the conclusion that in order to make legal copies, you are obliged to be a pirate. Media companies failure to accommodate the notion that people may have legitimate purposes for making digital copies for their own use dooms them to eternal piracy.

We're all screwed. Well, I'm not, probably. But you are.

(Disclosure: About a decade ago, a company I helped incubate was bought by RealNetworks, and I received a modest amount of stock, long sold.)

Beyond breaking firewalls: how to fight net-censorship

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 10:34 PM PST

Ethan Zuckerman's new piece on Worldchanging, "Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention," looks at the technical and social limitations of circumvention of censoring firewalls that we love so much as a tool for helping people in repressive regimes liberate themselves. It's an excellent and thought-provoking piece that raises more questions than it answers, but it points to some very meaty research problems that people who care about technology and freedom need to attend to.

- We need to shift our thinking from helping users in closed societies access blocked content to helping publishers reach all audiences. In doing so, we may gain those publishers as a valuable new set of allies as well as opening a new class of technical solutions.

- If our goal is to allow people in closed societies to access an online public sphere, or to use online tools to organize protests, we need to bring the administrators of these tools into the dialog. Secretary Clinton suggests that we make free speech part of the American brand identity - let's find ways to challenge companies to build blocking resistance into their platforms and to consider internet freedom to be a central part of their business mission. We need to address the fact that making their platforms unblockable has a cost for content hosts and that their business models currently don't reward them for providing service to these users.

- The US government should treat internet filtering - and more aggressive hacking and DDoS attacks - as a barrier to trade. The US should strongly pressure governments in open societies like Australia and France to resist the temptation to restrict internet access, as their behavior helps China and Iran make the case that their censorship is in line with international norms. And we need to fix US treasury regulations make it difficult and legally ambiguous for companies like Microsoft and projects like SourceForge to operate in closed societies. If we believe in Internet Freedom, a first step needs to be rethinking these policies so they don't hurt ordinary internet users.

Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention

(Image: Great Firewall of China, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike image from chidorian's photostream)

Previously:


Smart auto-sorting bolt/screw/nut box

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 10:20 PM PST


Wulf from Craftster built this uber-clever workshop-bits sorting box after getting sick of manually sorting out the buckets of loose bits of metal that built up around his shop: "At the shop where I work we just toss loose screws, bolts, nails and other bits and pieces of hardware from the workbenches and the floor into a bucket and, every couple of years when the bucket gets too full, somebody has to dump the whole mess out and sort everything back to where it belongs. When that job fell to me this Spring, I decided there had to be a better solution. So I designed a bin that would help to at least divide things by type to make the final sorting easier. Though built for an industrial situation, it would work equally well in the home craft room for jewellery findings, sewing notions, etc."

Self-sorting (sorta) bin (via Dinosaurs and Robots)

Previously:


iPhone developer EULA turns programmers into serfs

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 11:09 PM PST

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published the Apple iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, a secretive document that requires its signatories to agree to a gag order on the terms of the deal. EFF got the agreement by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request to NASA, who had signed onto it in order to release its app. EFF Senior IP Attorney Fred von Lohmann has some pithy analysis of just how awful this agreement is for the programmers who gets sucked into it:

Overall, the Agreement is a very one-sided contract, favoring Apple at every turn. That's not unusual where end-user license agreements are concerned (and not all the terms may ultimately be enforceable), but it's a bit of a surprise as applied to the more than 100,000 developers for the iPhone, including many large public companies. How can Apple get away with it? Because it is the sole gateway to the more than 40 million iPhones that have been sold. In other words, it's only because Apple still "owns" the customer, long after each iPhone (and soon, iPad) is sold, that it is able to push these contractual terms on the entire universe of software developers for the platform.

In short, no competition among app stores means no competition for the license terms that apply to iPhone developers.

If Apple's mobile devices are the future of computing, you can expect that future to be one with more limits on innovation and competition (or "generativity," in the words of Prof. Jonathan Zittrain) than the PC era that came before. It's frustrating to see Apple, the original pioneer in generative computing, putting shackles on the market it (for now) leads. If Apple wants to be a real leader, it should be fostering innovation and competition, rather than acting as a jealous and arbitrary feudal lord. Developers should demand better terms and customers who love their iPhones should back them.

It's amazing all the ways that the iPhone manages to screw the people that love it: saddling iPhone owners with crappy contracts with abusive mobile companies, limiting their access to programs and forcing them into one-sided EULAs, then screwing the developers with equally abusive agreements. I guess that's one way to think different.

All Your Apps Are Belong to Apple: The iPhone Developer Program License Agreement

Previously:


Clock made from a whirling, strobing hard-drive

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 10:02 PM PST

This Strobeshnik clock is made from an old hard drive: "The digits are etched in the original platter and they're strobed from behind with leds. The HDD motor is driven by a custom circuit without feedback, hence poor startup performance and awful noise. Rotational feedback is provided by an IR LED/phototransistor pair near the place where the head arm formerly was."

The result is a whirling, grinding, eye-catching, unreadable kinetic sculpture. Now that's a timepiece!

Strobeshnik (final) (via JWZ!)

Previously:


Stomach-churning details of CIA waterboarding crimes

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 09:58 PM PST

Salon's Mark Benjamin went spelunking in the recently released CIA torture memos and comes back with a stomach-churning account of the waterboarding practiced at Gitmo. This fine-tuned torture process repeatedly took its victims to the brink of death (one victim was waterboarded 180+ times) until many of them simply gave up on breathing and tried to allow themselves to drown, only to be revived by unethical medical personnel who collaborated with the war criminals conducting the torture.
The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second "applications" of liquid in each two-hour session - and could dump water over a detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session - a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding - the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

"This is revolting and it is deeply disturbing," said Dr. Scott Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University who has reviewed all of the documents for Physicians for Human Rights. "The so-called science here is a total departure from any ethics or any legitimate purpose. They are saying, 'This is how risky and harmful the procedure is, but we are still going to do it.' It just sounds like lunacy," he said. "This fine-tuning of torture is unethical, incompetent and a disgrace to medicine."

Waterboarding for dummies

Fafblog on the Iraq elections

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 09:51 PM PST

Fafblog, one of my favorite satirical sites, has a scorching and unfortunately accurate take on the Iraq election:
VICTOREEEEEEEEE! After nineteen years of bombs and wars and torture and bombs and torture and ethnic cleansing and torture, America's mission in Iraq has finally been re-reaccomplished through the miracle of symbolic purple-fingered brown people! Oh sure, all the cynics and the critics and the nattering nabobs of payingattentionism will say "Oh but Giblets haven't we had five or six of these already, what makes these purple fingers different from previous purple fingers" and the answer to that is shut up. These purple fingers are the most purplest-fingeriest purple fingers to ever have been symbolically purpled! They stand as unique and compelling evidence of our nation's sincere generational commitment to transform a brutal impoverished dictatorship into a brutal, more impoverished dictatorship by freeing Iraq from the deadly menace of Iraqis.
Freedom On The Lurch
Previously:


Rhizome's 7 on 7: 7 geeks, 7 artists co-create in NYC

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 09:47 PM PST

Fred sez,
If you're in NYC on April 17th, definitely consider attending Rhizome.org's new conference, Seven on Seven.

The idea behind Seven on Seven is to pair seven leading artists with seven technologists to see what they can produce. There's already a lot of buzz about the event, and for good reason, our lineup is stellar:

Artists: Cao Fei, Evan Roth, Aaron Koblin, Monica Narula, Ryan Trecartin, Tauba Auerbach, and Marc Andre Robinson

Technologists: Jeff Hammerbacher, Joshua Schachter, Matt Mullenweg, Andrew Kortina, Hilary Mason, Ayah Bdeir, and David Karp

Check the link for full details, artist and technologist pairings, and ticket prices.

Seven on Seven - Rhizome (Thanks, Fred!)

Don't forget to schedule your mammogram

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 04:32 PM PST


Don't forget to schedule your mammogram.

Gabourey Sidibe's mom, Alice Tan Ridley, is a NYC subway busker

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 04:19 PM PST

sidibe.jpg Alice Tan Ridley, mother of Academy Award-nominated Precious star Gabourey Sidibe, performs music — beautifully — in subway stations. Above, her rendition of "I Will Survive." Many more videos of her amazing street performances here, a pity the sound quality's so bad on all of them: The Subway Song Stylings Of Alice Tan Ridley! (stationstops.com), and a US Magazine story about the R&B singer here. (via Farai Chideya)

Related: Here's the raw audition tape that won Gabourey Sidibe her Precious role.

Hundreds dead in Nigerian violence

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 03:48 PM PST

"The killers showed no mercy: They didn't spare women and children, or even a 4-day-old baby, from their machetes." At least 200 people were killed in Nigeria on Sunday, mostly Christians, amid ethnic clashes over land.

Where does your dairy come from? Look it up on this website

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 04:02 PM PST

At whereismymilkfrom.com, you can enter the code from a carton of (cow's) milk and find out where that dairy product came from. I know, I know, "Duh, a cow!" — but like, what farm. I only drink veggie milks myself now (almond, soy, coconut, rice) but this seems like a helpful tool for others. When I read the copy on the website like "Just go get the milk out of your fridge!" I hear Dr. Steve Brule's voice, and the word "dummy!" at the end. (via Consumerist)

Tribe in India, exploited like Na'vi for mining, appeal to James Cameron

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 03:44 PM PST

In an ad placed in Variety, an indigenous tribe from India known as the Dongria Kondh said: "Appeal to James Cameron. Avatar is fantasy... and real. The Dongria Kondh tribe in India are struggling to defend their land against a mining company hell-bent on destroying their sacred mountain. Please help the Dongria." No word from Cameron yet, but Amesty International has more on the story here, and a video here.

Xeni in Amoeba Records "What's In My Bag?" video feature

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 04:51 PM PST

amoeba.jpg Amoeba Records is one of the world's greatest independent record stores, with many thousands of square feet of new and used vinyl, CDs, DVDs, and assorted rarities in film and music. They're in SF, Berkeley, and Hollywood. The kinds folks who run the joint invited me in to pick a handful of items I'm excited about, and the video that resulted is embedded above. I chose:

• The incredible Alan Lomax in Haiti box-set (we'll be blogging more about this one on BB soon!)
• Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias From Peru (a tip of the chapeau to Susannah Breslin, and to my brother DJ Carlito for turning me on to this one)
• N.A.S.A. "Spirit of Apollo" (we've premiered a number of the music videos from this project on Boing Boing Video)
• Q-Burns Abstract Message and Eighth Dimension Records (we've used snips from his work as theme music for Boing Boing's audio podcast, and for our video project—I'm a longtime fan!)
• Wilco, "Wilco (The Album)" (I loved their latest record, and I believe they're one of the greatest live acts on the planet.)
• Pronto, "All is Golden" (Wilco keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen's side project. "The Cheetah," a digital-only download release, was glitchy electronic minimalism, but the release I grabbed from the bins in this video is "All is Golden," a paean to '70s rock. I also mispronounce Mikael's name horribly in this video... sorry Mikael!)
• Die Antwoord!

Amoeba Records: What's in My Bag? / Xeni Jardin

The complete "What's in My Bag" archives are here, with many interesting past guests.

(thanks, Rachael McGovern. Disclosure: I wasn't paid to appear in this video, but the nice folks at Amoeba gave me a $75 store credit which I plan to use on Radiohead vinyl and old Almodóvar movies!)

Mark on This Week in Media, 12:30pm PT Monday (today)

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 12:36 PM PST

I'll be one of the guests on This Week in Media, a live streaming video program from Twit.tv.

Mark on This Week in Media at 12:30pm Monday

HUMONGOUS Soviet ground-effect tank-plane

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 12:15 PM PST


I know nothing about this titanic Lun Soviet ground-effect war-tank-plane-thing. The description (in Russian) contains a large number of specialized ground-effect tank-plane enthusiast vocabulary words that stymie Google Translate. It appears that it could traverse broken apocalyptic roads, frozen tundra, and water with equal ease, skimming below radar, too. But I can't say anything else for sure.

So I will say this: if you fed a hyperactive 12 year old lad a diet of old Astounding Stories covers and put him in the most boring math class of all time for 28 straight hours with a collection of fine pens and a binder full of doodling paper, he just might produce one of these.

Экраноплан "Лунь" проект 903 (Thanks, Elapsv!)

Previously:


Balkan Beat Box: "War Again"

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 12:11 PM PST

waragain.jpgBalkan Beat Box have a new album coming out on April 27, Blue Eyed Black Boy, recorded in Tel Aviv and Belgrade during anti-Kosovo riots. The first video's out: "War Again," and was directed by award-winning animator Paul Griswold, who worked with Syd Garon on one of the N.A.S.A. Project videos featured previously on Boing Boing Video. Read more about the record at National Geographic (they're the record label!), and here's a YouTube link, and a Vimeo link. Amazon link for the band's previous releases here.

Previously:


Female Illustrators of the Mid-20th Century

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 11:38 AM PST

Marion-Larson

"Female Illustrators of the Mid-20th Century" is a blog about famous Chess endgames. (Not really. It's a blog about female illustrators of the mid-20th century.) Above, an advertisement by Marion Larson.

Beautiful collision of two colored smoke rings

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 07:52 PM PST

A red smoke ring and a blue smoke ring collide, with spectacular results. (Via Forgetomori)

OK Go Rube Goldberg video: meet the makers!

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 09:55 AM PST

201003080948

Becky Stern of Make: Online interviewed the crew of the latest OK Go video, which was a single-take Rube Goldberg machine.

Becky: How many takes did it require to get the final?

DB: I lost count. I think we did that first sequence about 70 times. When we got past the tire, we knew we had a chance. When the piano dropped without triggering the flags or chairs, we started getting excited. If the sledgehammer blew up the TV we were in the home stretch. It was a tense video to film!

...

PyroPenguin: Did you need to employ failsafes? If a component didn't activate because the component intended to trigger it was off by just a hair, did you have a system to activate it manually?

BD: Not re ally. I think if we were more film oriented rather than machine oriented we would have built in more manual "cheats". As it is, I think we did some things (or at least I did) that didn't play as well to camera as it could have just because I was preoccupied by the mechanism. But we were pretty determined that the thing work. In some cases, we spent a lot of time working out a mechanism that doesn't even show up on camera- like the pneumatic paper airplanes. it's a really reliable mechanism that is triggered by the machine, and yet that's happening amid such chaos that in afterthought I guess we could have just had a guy pushing a button. But I don't think anyone even considered that. There was a little assist in the curtain pull, because the curtains had a tendency to stick together, so if that was having trouble there was someone available to pull a little string to help things out. But I think that's it.

OK Go Rube Goldberg video: meet the makers!

Previously:


Ida Maria, "Oh My God" (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 08:49 AM PST

Regular visitors to my blog are likely sick of my outsize enthusiasm for the songwriter, singer, and guitarist Ida Maria; now it's time for you to suffer. I've written about the excitement of discovering her debut album, trying to get my then-12-year-old daughter into a 21+ club to see her (I received some hilarious help from the Internets on this front), succeeding at getting said daughter into a show, and my sadness at Maria's apparent genuine breakdown onstage one night. If you haven't heard Ida Maria, start here. "Oh My God" is ferocious in every way a great rock'n'roll song can be ferocious, climaxing with a scream as frightening as Johnny Rotten's and as powerful as Roger Daltrey's. There are few better ways to start the week.

Praying mantis vs. hummingbird

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 09:03 AM PST

A rivalry I never knew about, captured in glorious slow motion. Science blogger GrrlScientist says the hummingbird involved lived to fight another day.

EDIT: Sadly, that is not true of all hummingbirds that choose to take on the (apparently rather badass) praying mantis. Mrs.Bug offers pictures of what happens when the bird loses. They are not for the faint of heart.

Previously:


Body Worlds creator takes on giant squid

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 08:22 AM PST

squidwardsrevenge.jpg

In an impressive display of plastic prowess, Gunther von Hagens—the anatomist who invented the cadaver plastination process and created the Body Worlds exhibit—has successfully plastinated a giant squid.

This is no simple feat. Plastination replaces water in the body with silicone. Unlike the other vertebrate animals, including humans, that von Hagens has worked on in the past, the squid is far more liquid and has no built-in structural support system. Sadly, there's not much information in the article about how von Hagens managed to pull this off, but we are told that plastinating a squid is a much slower process.

New Scientist: Giant squid get radical plastic surgery

Image courtesy Flickr user Ryan Somma, via CC

Fur Fun: The inner lives of furries

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 09:02 AM PST

furfunpost.jpg Of all the folks in the geek hierarchy, furries can say a thing or two about getting negative attention from the mainstream. One aficionado of anthropormophic art, fiction and culture, however, would rather to talk about what makes the fandom so fulfilling. "Fur Fun," a Boing Boing special feature

Flurb 9: more Rudy Rucker fiction picks

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 08:12 AM PST

Hurrah! It's time for another issue of Rudy Rucker's absolutely ass-kicking free sf zine, Flurb. The new ish has stories by Paul Di Filippo, Rudy Rucker, Richard A. Lupoff, Danny Rubin, and Kathe Koja and Carter Scholz (incidentally, I've been reading Koja's new book in manuscript form and I am agog at its brilliance -- watch this space in the months to come for a review of Under the Poppy).

I love reading Rucker's fiction (and essays), but I have even more fun reading these zines he curates -- a kind of "Rudy Rucker presents..." that manages to convey the influences and esthetic that shoots through all of Rucker's work.


I'm especially proud to be presenting the first-ever publication of "Palmetto Man," by Danny Rubin. Rubin is the writer responsible for Groundhog Day, a movie which many people (including me) quite seriously view as one of the very greatest SF films ever made. I happened to email Danny about his work last month, and he came up with this wonderful and previously unknown tale.

The gnarly and subcultural Kek is back for another visit to Flurb. His "Search" takes us on a dreamy, postcyberpunk waltz with the grateful undead. What does it mean to lose a loved one?

Adam Callaway's "The Goddess of Discord" is a kick-ass example of the Seussian street-surrealism that infuses the finest SF. For his hero against the forces of chaos Callaway enlists...an accountant!

Flurb: A Webzine of Astonishing Tales/Issue #9, Spring-Summer, 2010
Previously:


How the venus flytrap eats a frog

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 08:06 AM PST

It's electrical signals that allow the lobes of a venus flytrap to snap shut faster than a frog can flee. In animals, those sort of signals travel via the nervous system, which plants like the flytrap conspicuously lack. In a way, it's like the plants can send email without the Internet. How's it work? Science writer Ferris Jabr explains.

Also, there's this paragraph, which makes you feel very sorry for that frog:

Having secured its meal, the trap begins to eat by releasing an array of digestive enzymes--special proteins that help control the rate of chemical reactions. This acidic concoction dissolves the victim, allowing the Venus flytrap to absorb the nitrogen it can't get from the nutrient-poor soil in which it grows. Around ten days later, the trap reopens, revealing a crumbling exoskeleton.

Lawrence Lessig scares a room of liberals

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 06:17 AM PST

I should say upfront that I'm a big fan of Lawrence Lessig's causes and his presentation techniques. My favorite might be his 2007 tour de force at TED about John Philips Sousa, Jesus singing "I Will Survive," and the joys and dangers of remix culture. A few days back he spoke at TEDxNYED about what conservatives can teach the free culture movement. I may be getting into trouble recommend a talk about conservatives here -- some of the email I received last week suggests that a good percentage of the readers here might find a Kucinich-Sanders ticket to be hopelessly middle of the road -- but this talk is classic Lessig, from its "I Was a Teenage Republican" opening to his real-time Wikipedia fix, to a reminder that Republican Walt Disney (the guy, not the company) was something of a remixer. There's plenty to argue about here and he presents in black and white some issues that are full of grays, but chances are you won't spend 20 minutes today with a smarter person. It's worth watching and thinking about even if, like me, you agree with only part of it.

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