The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- WIPO's Broadcast Treaty is back: copyright nuts want to steal the public domain, kill Creative Commons, and give copyright over your videos to YouTube and other streamers
- Fully functional Quisp Helmet!
- Jay Kinney on "The Rise and Fall of the Underground Comix Movement"
- Cory Maye Freed After 10 Years In Prison: The Back Story
- HOWTO clean LPs, DVDs, and CDs
- Boring Magazine design contest winner!
- Delightful creatures of Costa Rica
- Walking Dead cake
- Can you ID these telcom lobbyists?
- Rotting, abandoned New Orleans theme-park
- Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab: nuclear playset for kids
- Facebook "Awesome" announcement imminent [UPDATE: Yup, it's Skype]
- Women talk about hackerspaces
- Meat Mix
- Memory Palace podcast: renegade architect Bradford Gilbert
- Heavy metal quilts by Ben Venom
- Secrets of Disneyland
- Jewelry made from distressed comics
- Following the money: how spammers do their banking
- Life in an Indian call center
- Tiny camera fits on the head of a pin
- Bird ruins catnap
- Vintage photo filter actions for Photoshop
- TOM THE DANCING BUG: Super-Fun-Pak Comix, featuring Uncle Cap'n, Dinkle and More!
- SPECIAL FEATURE: Painted People: pics from the World Bodypainting Festival (nudity)
- Stross's Rule 34: pervy technothriller about the future of policing
- There's more to female biology than what they teach you in school
- Funding to research antibiotic resistant bacteria not a priority
- Enthusiasm
| Posted: 06 Jul 2011 10:25 PM PDT One of the major projects I worked on at the Electronic Frontier Foundation was working to kill the World Intellectual Property Organization's "Broadcast Treaty," a treaty that would have given a new form of copyright to broadcasters. Under this proposal, the mere act of broadcasting audio or video would trigger a new right for the broadcaster to control all copies made from that broadcast. This right wouldn't be subject to the same fair use or fair dealing rules, and would cover works that were in the public domain. It would also give broadcasters the right to control copies of works where the actual creator has explicitly allowed copies to be made, such as Creative Commons works. The treaty died just around the time I left EFF, and I like to think I had a small part in killing this treaty. As did you, if you were one of the thousands and thousands of Boing Boing and Slashdot readers who contacted your government, or wrote to WIPO in protest. There was plenty to speak out about, such as the handouts opposing the treaty being spirited away and hidden in the toilets, or the WIPO administration trying to lock public interest groups out of important related meetings. But now, the Broadcast Treaty is back, and with a vengeance. The new WIPO Broadcast Treaty incorporates the two most controversial proposals from the original one. First, "technology neutrality," which is WIPO-speak for "this applies to the Internet," which is to say, YouTube and Vimeo would get to control copies of all the works that they stream (as would Hulu and other streaming services), even CC-licensed works, even public domain works, even uses that would be fair use or fair dealing under copyright. Second, "technical measures," which is WIPO-speak for DRM. This means that laws that make it illegal to break DRM that's used to restrict access to copyrighted works would be extended to DRM that's used to restrict the use of uncopyrighted, uncopyrightable, public domain works, as well as Creative Commons-licensed works (even though the CC licenses actually prohibit the use of DRM in connection with them). EFF is on the scene, and Gwen Hinze and Richard Esguerra have written a great primer on the issues at hand. Be prepared for another long and vicious fight, gang -- and watch out, the broadcasters want to steal the public domain from you. |
| Fully functional Quisp Helmet! Posted: 06 Jul 2011 05:49 PM PDT  Shamptonian says: I'm not sure if you saw in the comments on your Quisp Ring post awhile back, but I had this helmet in storage, so after finally moving down here from SF in May and after getting settled, I was able to dig it out. |
| Jay Kinney on "The Rise and Fall of the Underground Comix Movement" Posted: 06 Jul 2011 05:09 PM PDT  Here's cartoonist and all-around genius Jay Kinney reading an excerpt from his essay "The Rise and Fall of the Underground Comix Movement in San Francisco and Beyond" from the book Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78, edited by Chris Carlsson and published by City Lights Foundation. |
| Cory Maye Freed After 10 Years In Prison: The Back Story Posted: 06 Jul 2011 03:51 PM PDT  Radley Balko says: "I have a longish piece up at Huffington Post today telling the story behind last week's plea bargain in the Cory Maye case. Maye was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 2004 for killing a police officer during a botched drug raid on his home. "It's a story I've been reporting on for about five years. After doing time on death row, then in a notoriously violent wing of Parchman Penitentiary, Maye will soon be going home to his family." Cory Maye, now 30, was convicted in 2004 of shooting and killing Prentiss, Mississippi, police officer Ron Jones, Jr. during a botched drug raid on Maye's home on the day after Christmas in 2001. Maye says he was asleep as the raid began at 12:30 a.m. and had no idea the men breaking into his home were police. The police say they announced themselves. Maye had no prior criminal record, and police found all of a marijuana roach in his apartment, which under other circumstances would garner a $100 fine.The story behind Cory Maye's release   |
| HOWTO clean LPs, DVDs, and CDs Posted: 06 Jul 2011 04:14 PM PDT  electron micrograph of vinyl groove by Chris Supranowitz I've recently picked up several old vinyl LPs at thrift stores and garage sales. My musical taste is very eclectic, but these discs have one big thing in common: they're all filthy. Similarly, we have dozens of kids DVDs and CDs in our house coated in toddler goo that would almost certainly beat the adhesive that holds the tiles on the space shuttle. This weekend, I plan to brew up a cauldron of the cleaning solution used by the master preservationists at the Library of Congress. Or maybe I'll just go with Ivory dish soap, warm water, and an old t-shirt. Anyway, here's the LoC's recipe: Preparation and Directions for Use"Cylinder, Disc and Tape Care in a Nutshell"   |
| Boring Magazine design contest winner! Posted: 06 Jul 2011 01:20 PM PDT  We asked you to design the cover to a supremely boring periodical. The response was overwhelming, with more than 100 thoroughly mind-numbing entries resting on the magazine rack in Hell. Pictured here is winner Tired Magazine, a mirror-world version of Wired where hold music, baby photos and warm salads dominate the headlines. Designer Jack Daniel gets a heavy-duty $350 messenger bag from Saddleback Leather. Three more of the best are after the jump.Highway40's Notational Review applies a minimalist perspective on the reader's level of interest. Absenthero's Magazine Aficionado's recursive irony breaths new life into the verb "interminable." Zigzagatha's Fiber Quarterly will keep you regular--and regularly bored.   |
| Delightful creatures of Costa Rica Posted: 06 Jul 2011 01:09 PM PDT I had fun making a trailer for the animal videos I took in Costa Rica, mainly in and around beautiful Manuel Antonio. I also took a lot of photos, which you can see after the jump. One of the animals isn't real. Can you tell which one? (Click images to embiggen)
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| Posted: 05 Jul 2011 11:36 PM PDT  Atlanta cake artist "Sweets to the Sweet" made this brilliant Walking Dead-themed zombie cake, created for a cast-member on the TV adaptation. Scary and delicious! Walking Dead: First the Comic, Then the TV Show, Now the Cake (Thanks, John!) |
| Can you ID these telcom lobbyists? Posted: 06 Jul 2011 12:03 PM PDT  Nicko from the Sunlight Foundation sez, Today, the non-partisan Sunlight Foundation is experimenting with a new way to create lobbying transparency. We're crowdsourcing analysis of lobbyists at markups and hearings. Our hope is that you can help us identify D.C.'s power brokers and assorted lobbyists who have an interest in influencing the Senate's view on the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger.Help us identify the lobbyists (Thanks, Nicko!)   |
| Rotting, abandoned New Orleans theme-park Posted: 06 Jul 2011 11:15 AM PDT  LostLosAngeles's "Lost Big Easy" Flickr set documents an urban exploration expedition through an abandoned Six Flags park near New Orleans -- it's theme park Southern Gothic, with a side of HDR for spice. lost Big Easy (via JWZ) |
| Posted: 06 Jul 2011 11:02 AM PDT This week's installment of the excellent SF in SF free science fiction reading series features cyberpunk original John Shirley and urban fantasist Mira Grant (AKA Seanan McGuire). July 9, 6PM, San Francisco, free.   |
| Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab: nuclear playset for kids Posted: 06 Jul 2011 12:06 PM PDT  This Gilbert No. U-238 Atomic Energy Lab on eBay is a pretty fabulous bit of science education history: a children's science kit that included a Geiger counter, electroscope, cloud chamber, spinthariscope, and, of course, radioisotopes. Gilbert was a man of true inspiration, often compared to Walt Disney for his creative genius. Gilbert had high expectations of America's youngsters, and with such he tried to help the future engineers, doctors and leaders by providing toys worthy of their imaginations. As the inventor of the Erector Set, and seeing its commercial appeal, the he and his company set a higher goal. They became the leading manufacturer of scientific toys (chemistry sets) and construction sets (Erector), all of which gained wide acclaim at the retail level. Interested in the joy of science more than remuneration, however, Gilbert created the Atomic Energy Lab U-238 - with the help of MIT's able faculty. The toy was made to de-mystify the perils of nuclear energy and to encourage the understanding of chemistry, physics and nuclear science - ultimately helping kids (and adults) become more open to the possibilities these disciplines offer. This educational composite, which was marketed during 1950-51, sold for $49.50 - a very high price for a toy set, even by today's standard.Gilbert No. U-238 Atomic Energy Lab (Thanks, Cinemajay!)   |
| Facebook "Awesome" announcement imminent [UPDATE: Yup, it's Skype] Posted: 06 Jul 2011 10:20 AM PDT A week after the launch of Google+, Facebook promises to announce something "awesome" today. Livestream here, some 27K viewers, problems with the feed—hope they sort that out soon. The Telegraph has a good liveblog going. CNET's on it, too. Buzz around this focuses on four possibilities: HTML5 for tablets and mobile; an iPad app; mobile photo-sharing; and the big money's on some sort of video chat integration with Skype. We'll know soon. UPDATE: Skype is it.   |
| Posted: 05 Jul 2011 10:50 PM PDT John Baichtal interviewed women at several hackerspaces and asked them what it was like to be a woman in a hackspace. The answers are varied, thoughtful and fascinating. What Does it Mean to be a Woman Hackerspace Member?   |
| Posted: 06 Jul 2011 10:18 AM PDT Between the vintage meat industry infomercial doing the rounds again, @GlennF pointing out that there may be bits of hundreds of cows in a single pack of hamburger, and my longstanding love of this YouTube, I thought a quick tribute to all three was in order. [Video Link] The music is titled "Some sort of machine pooping out big blobs of meat."   |
| Memory Palace podcast: renegade architect Bradford Gilbert Posted: 06 Jul 2011 09:48 AM PDT  Nate Dimeo's latest episode of the excellent Memory Palace podcast is about renegade architect Bradford Gilbert, designer of what's considered to be New York City's first skyscraper, the Tower Building. When it was completed in 1889, the Tower Building was the first steel-framed curtain wall skyscraper and, as such, raised concerns that it would topple over in the wind. The controversy led to Gilbert climbing the building during a hurricane to prove everyone wrong... "Memory Palace Episode 38: A Stretch"
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| Heavy metal quilts by Ben Venom Posted: 06 Jul 2011 09:49 AM PDT  Ben Venom makes large, luxurious quilts out of heavy metal t-shirts. Seen above is "Don't Wake Me Lucifer" (83" x 95", 2010). His latest piece will be hanging at the BAN6 exhibition at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts opening this Friday, July 8. For more of Venom's devilishly cool textiles, check out Stacey Ransom's Ransom Notes post about his work. "Mr. Ben Venom at Ban6" (Ransom Notes)
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| Posted: 06 Jul 2011 09:19 AM PDT Is Disneyland overtaken with feral cats at night? Yes. Are there dead bodies in Disneyland's Haunted Mansion? Well, ashes anyway. Over at CNN, Mental Floss lists "8 Secrets about Disneyland." I was familiar with most of them, but it's still a nice, well-rounded collection of Disneyland fun facts. From Mental Floss: "8 Secrets about Disneyland"   |
| Jewelry made from distressed comics Posted: 06 Jul 2011 08:55 AM PDT  Sue Smith, known on Etsy as ComicSalvage, makes cool stuff out of wrecked comics (hence the store's name). As she explains in this GeekMom interview, she was inspired by the idea of making something useful out of all the wrecked comics that crossed her family's path (her husband is an illustrator), and wanted to make something useful and lovely out of them. My husband is an illustrator and has been collecting comic books since he was a kid, so I'm surrounded by them. We love collecting anything vintage, especially toys and books from our childhood. We are often scouting out garage sales and flea markets for some good finds. I've always noticed the excessive amounts of distressed comic books that were out there. A lot of them are missing covers or ripped and not worth much. I loved the idea of recycling them into little pieces of history that you can wear!ComicSalvage (via Geekdad)   |
| Following the money: how spammers do their banking Posted: 05 Jul 2011 10:46 PM PDT  Brian Krebs is continuing to report on the latest research on spammers and scammers, today naming and shaming the banks that process payments for fake anti-virus and rogue pharmacy affiliate networks, and on the system used by scammers to prevent being cut off by Visa and Mastercard. Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara spent several months infiltrating three of the most popular fake antivirus (fake AV) "affiliate" networks, organized criminal operations that pay hackers to deploy the bunk software. The researchers uncovered a peculiar credit card processing pattern that was common to these scams; a pattern that Visa and MasterCard could use to detect and blacklist fake AV processors.Makes me proud of my Azerbaijani background, it does (my dad was born in a refugee camp near Baku). |
| Posted: 05 Jul 2011 10:41 PM PDT Mmechanic sez, "Andrew Marantz wondered how BPOs [ed: Business Process Outsourcing, AKA call centers] train Indians who have never even known a Westerner to sound and act like one. Since the call centers wouldn't let a journalist in to their culture-training sessions, Marantz decided to become a trainee himself. The resulting article from Mother Jones magazine is alternatively funny, sad, and thought-provoking." My Summer at an Indian Call Center (Thanks, Mmechanic!)   |
| Tiny camera fits on the head of a pin Posted: 06 Jul 2011 08:08 AM PDT
A team working at Cornell university has built a microscopic camera with no lenses or moving parts. Costing "a few cents" to manufacture, the inventors claim it could revolutionize surgery and robotics. Created from pieces of silicon doped to make them sensitive to light at different angles, the device has been dubbed the Planar Fourier Capture Array and applies the principles of the Fourier transform to compute images from the captured data. Led by postdoctoral associate Patrick Gill, the group is working to improve the sensor, which generates images just a few pixels wide. Pictured above is a photograph of the Mona Lisa taken with the device. "It's not going to be a camera with which people take family portraits, but there are a lot of applications out there that require just a little bit of dim vision," Gill said in a press release. The work is funded by DARPA and the National Institutes of Health. |
| Posted: 06 Jul 2011 07:26 AM PDT |
| Vintage photo filter actions for Photoshop Posted: 06 Jul 2011 07:28 AM PDT Here are some fantastic vintage-photo Photoshop actions by Daniel Box, for people who can't afford Instragram. [via Gizmodo]   |
| TOM THE DANCING BUG: Super-Fun-Pak Comix, featuring Uncle Cap'n, Dinkle and More! Posted: 06 Jul 2011 06:31 AM PDT   |
| SPECIAL FEATURE: Painted People: pics from the World Bodypainting Festival (nudity) Posted: 06 Jul 2011 06:55 AM PDT The annual World Bodypainting Festival was held in Poertschach last weekend, on lake Woerthersee in Austria's southern Carinthia province. Photographer Heinz-Peter Bader was present to shoot the spectacular (and partially naked) wildlife in attendance.
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| Stross's Rule 34: pervy technothriller about the future of policing Posted: 19 Jun 2011 05:16 PM PDT  Charlie Stross's latest technothriller, Rule 34, is a savvy, funny, viciously inventive science fiction novel that combines police procedure with the dark side of nerd culture to produce a grotesque and gripping page-turner. Liz is an Edinburgh police detective on the "Rule 34" squad; she works with a loose network of European cops to track down weird Internet memes before people start trying to imitate them in real life. It's a quirky, dead-end kind of job -- but then, Liz's policing career is both quirky and headed for a dead-end. Until, that is, someone starts murdering spammers. All around the world, spammers begin to drop in the most disgusting, rococo ways; one died after having a murderous cocktail of badly-interacting drugs (including Viagra) slipped into his recreational enema machine, itself a Soviet relic once owned by Nicolae Ceausescu. The rest go in even less pleasant ways. And suddenly, the Rule 34 squad is at the center of one of the weirdest murder sprees the world's ever seen. Stross's best trick is moving past a kind of funny high-concept premise to something much more substantive and weirdly plausible. What starts off as a novel about dirty murders quickly turns into a spectacular rumination on the future of economic regulation and corporate ethics, the nature of AI research, and the special problems of desktop 3D fabrication (as applied to religious faith, domestic chores, and forbidden sexual practices -- sometimes all at once). As with Charlie's previous novel in this milieu, Halting State, Rule 34 shines as a super-smart futuristic exercise in public policing. Stross's future cops are both victims and employers of a surveillance panopticon, one tempered by thick eurocrat regulation and adaptive criminals. These cops aren't just legal enforcers, they're part of a high-tech, evidence-led, scientifically grounded security strategy that has been refactored to render policing as bloodless and procedural as possible, to deploy genuine science against the cop's vaunted street instincts, and to nudge bad guys into going good before they do something arrest-worthy. This is my favorite kind of science fiction: rigorous, playful, and challenging. |
| There's more to female biology than what they teach you in school Posted: 06 Jul 2011 06:03 AM PDT  Hey ladies, your lady parts are probably normal, even if they don't follow the rules for "normal" that you were taught in school, writes anthropologist Kate Clancy. For instance, back in junior high, most of us learned that a woman's menstrual cycle lasts for 28 days. So what does that mean for those of us whose menstrual cycles are longer or shorter? Basically, I'm OK and you're OK. Clancy explains that both genetics, and lifestyle and environmental factors, can alter the length of your cycle. In fact, the lifestyle and environmental factors might matter more. Image: Human Ovary with Fully Developed Corpus Luteum, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from euthman's photostream   |
| Funding to research antibiotic resistant bacteria not a priority Posted: 06 Jul 2011 05:46 AM PDT MRSA—aka, antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus—kills more Americans every year than HIV. But, writes Maryn McKenna, "For every death from AIDS, the US federal research establishment awards approximately $69,000 in grant funds. And for every death from MRSA, it awards $570."   |
| Posted: 06 Jul 2011 05:37 AM PDT  Thank you, I Can Has Cheezburger user b_dizzle, for making this glorious caption. And thank you, Antinous, for sending it to me.   |
JB: What can hackerspaces do to get more women to participate? 
Each night at Disneyland, after the sunburned families and exhausted cast members have made their way home, the park fills up again -- this time, with hundreds of feral cats. Park officials love the felines because they help control the mouse population. (After all, a park full of cartoon mice is more enticing than a park full of real ones.)
During our second day of culture training, Lekha dissected the Australian psyche. It took about 20 minutes. 
Photo: Alyosha Molnar Lab/Cornell University 
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