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ProjectCensored.org: Stories all but ignored by the mainstream media.
Space Is Playing Field For Newest War Game: "Last week's space war game was set in 2017, with country 'Red' massing its forces for a possible attack on its small neighbor, 'Brown,' which then asked 'Blue' for help. Officials described 'Red' only as a 'near-peer competitor,' but participants said Red was China and Blue was the United States. When asked directly about this, Lt. Col. Donald Miles, an Air Force spokesman, said, 'We don't talk about countries.'" Why does this remind me of Reservoir Dogs?
Senator introduces strong e-privacy bill: What are the odds that this bill will emerge from the legislative process intact?
Gene-altered smart mice may be more sensitive to chronic pain: In the lab, no one can hear you scream.
Big Cheeses Fear Net's Power: "The Internet is a kind of power shift," said Nobuyuki Idei, chief executive of Sony, which has extensive music copyright holdings. "Now the consumer has more power than the company." Ah, the good old days, when E.F. Hutton talked and people listened.
Kurzweil vs. Dertouzos: Astute musings about the future.
The Army Is Watching Your Kid: Reason 3134234 why we need real privacy legislation.
The Pessimist's Mug: I may have to get one of these.
Time for real intelligence?: Teach your robots well.
Bear Fight Ad: Shades of Monty Python, from AdCritic.Com
Laser Sends Powerful Message: "Authorities in Switzerland have erected a ring of steel around this week's World Economic Forum in Davos, but anti-globalization protestors may still get their message across using a powerful laser and the Internet." Let there be light.
DeCSS Allies Ganging Up: The saga continues.
Google Link Is Bush League: Wired News reports that "When you type 'dumb motherfucker' into Google, the search engine's top result is a site about President Bush."
Christiane Amanpour: Why Do I Do It?: "I want to tell my infant son why my colleagues and I risk our lives: to try to do good. But is the risk worth it now that the journalism I know and love is dying?"
Web war rages over DVD-cracking site: Verio proves it has a spine. If you're looking for a good hosting service, I recommend it.
I received the following email exchange between Jonah H. Peretti and Nike from a mailing list that I subscribe to. To make sure it was not a hoax, I emailed Mr. Peretti to ask him if the exchange below really took place. He said it had, and granted me permission to post the conversation here. He also noted that another blogger at the shey network had posted it. Some background: Nike offers a service whereby you can personalize your shoes with your "Nike iD."
That is, unless you choose a word like "sweatshop"...
From: "Personalize, NIKE iD"
To: "'Jonah H. Peretti'"
Subject: RE: Your NIKE iD order o16468000
Your NIKE iD order was cancelled for one or more of the following reasons.
1) Your Personal iD contains another party's trademark or other intellectual property.
2) Your Personal iD contains the name of an athlete or team we do not have the legal right to use.
3) Your Personal iD was left blank. Did you not want any personalization?
4) Your Personal iD contains profanity or inappropriate slang.
If you wish to reorder your NIKE iD product with a new personalization please visit us again at www.nike.com
Thank you,
NIKE iD
-
Indie Films You Can Buy Into: Wired News reports on Civilian Pictures, a site where you can "invest" in future indie pictures. Like the Hollywood Stock Exchange, only for real. Given that something like 70 to 80 percent of films lose money, you'd do better to bet on black and spin the roulette wheel.
DirectTV Can Shut You Down: "If you buy a new DirecTV HDTV set-top box, you may surprised to learn that it includes a previously undisclosed feature: the ability for the company to unexpectedly, and at any time, shut down its HDTV capabilities." In other words, the customer isn't always right.
DeSDMI: French hackers break SDMI...and live to tell about it.
SamSpade.org: Anti-spam tools.
What's Wrong With Content Protection: An excellent essay about the problems with copy protection by John Gilmore of the EFF.
Letter 'W' missing from White House keyboards: Apparently, Clinton administration officials removed the letter 'W' from dozens of keyboards in the Old Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House. No word on whether Dubya noticed.
Mechanical taster passes cheese test: A machine matches the performance of "an expert team of human cheese-tasters." I'm looking forward to having a surly garbage disposal that rejects foul-tasting leftovers.
Privacy Battle Brews in England: Rather distressing.
Are movies about to meet their Napster?: I doubt it. How many people really want to watch movies alone on a desktop machine?
Excalibur: A site devoted to one my my favorite films, John Boorman's Excalibur. I was surprised to find a translation for Merlin's Charm of Making, which is spoken in the film and is something I've always been curious about (like the alien command spoken in The Day the Earth Stood Still. The quasi-Gaelic Anail Nathrach. . . Uatha Bha'is Bith. . .Thonn Du'iseacnt. . . Le De'anamh E! translates to
Dragon's breath. . . Death's Cave . . . Waves of Being. . . Awaken with making ! Try saying it when stuck in traffic.
I'm a cyborg and I love it: Life with a portable insulin pump.
Big Blue touts new Napster-proof music locks: "The music and publishing companies also have to persuade consumers that buying songs or books with built-in limitations on sharing and copying even for personal use is a good idea." Cool. So I can pay for a song, put it on my laptop, and buy it again when I sell my laptop a few years later.
Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over': From The Onion. Spotted while perusing Looka.
Free-Speech Advocates Fight Filtering Software in Public Schools: More filtering silliness.
Double-Hand Transplant Patient Applauds Operation: Ten points for the headline.
Ghetto Scooter: Could this be 'Ginger'?
EPIC Bill Track - 107th Congress Privacy and Cyber-Liberties Legislation: Possible laws of the future.
Scientists Bring Light to Full Stop, Hold It, Then Send It on Its Way...after giving it a speeding ticket.
ORSC Registries, Registrars and TLDs: Top-level domains outside ICANN's control...
Plastic: Look out Honey: Newly allied with Feed, Plastic is using Slashcode, the open source software behind Slashdot, to create a community published site that extends beyond geek chic. Is this the future of Internet publishing? Don't ask me.
Toy Santa Wins Stock-Picking Contest: Reminds me of Jolene, the stock picking orangutan that bested several human stock pickers in years past.
Bank Robber Nabbed by Eye in the Sky: Would-be criminals should consider moving to less sophisticated countries.
Fight Rages Over Digital Rights: Perhaps even more disturbing, Wired News is reporting that copyright holders want to limit or eliminate the resale of content such as books and music.
'Ginger': Kamen's Stirling Idea: Too bad, I rather liked the idea of a personal hovercraft.
Powered Exoskeletons: "The US military is planning to turn soldiers into supermen by fitting them with powered exoskeletons." Sounds like a fine idea until you consider the cost and the potential vulnerability to HERF weapons (that disrupt electrical systems). I suppose it's an interim step to a fully robotic system.
The Feds'll Come A-Snoopin': Guidelines for seizing computers.
The Lord of the Rings: The revised official site has gone live.
Not the End of Freedom: A correction to the Register's story, cited on January, 2nd, 2001, about the addition of hardware copy protection to hard drives. According to Patrick Gelsinger at Intel, the article about a 'Stealth plan puts copy protection into every hard drive' contains false information that the 4C's (Intel, IBM, MEI, Toshiba) Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM) is to be applied to all PC hard drives." Still, it's bad enough that Compact Flash and similar storage media will end up crippled.
Mystery 'Ginger' May Be Motorized Scooter: Reuters weighs in.
Ginger: The Wheel Thing?: The Washington Post's take on "Ginger." The paper cites sources saying it's a unicycle with gyros (so you can't fall over).
Inventive Genius Dean Kamen Profiled: A Wired profile and a Slashdot thread.
Dean Kamen speaks...: Inside reports today (and I doubt this link will work after today since the URL isn't pegged to a date) that Kamen has responded to the media furor as follows: "We are proud of our record of introducing many breakthrough products and we continue to work on numerous projects at any given time," the New Hampshire-based engineer says in the statement. "Please understand that while our projects are in the development phase and have client confidentiality requirements, it is impossible for us to comment further."
Mystery Invention 'Ginger' Has Tech World Buzzing: More on "Ginger." Someone on a mailing list I'm on suggested it might be a wheelchair that stands up and walks. (The inventor in question, Dean Kamen, created a wheelchair called the iBot that climbs stairs.) While this would be wonderful for those who can't walk, I'm still hoping it's something like a jetpack.
Bird-plane collisions on the rise: Shades of Bird Strike, mentioned in a post from September 25th of last year. A possible solution: bigger propellors with sharper edges.
Mysterious 'IT' will be subject of new book: More about the secret project known as "Ginger."
The Insurance Industry/FBI Connection: Fee-for-service law enforcement.
Call for Safeguards After Chance Killer Virus Find: "Australian scientists who inadvertently created a killer mouse virus said Thursday that the global Biological Weapons Convention must be given teeth to prevent such discoveries falling into the wrong hands." With advances in genetic engineering, even treaties can now have teeth. And with another accident like this, overpopulation could cease to be an issue.
Microsoft to provide wireless Internet access in Starbucks: Rumor has it that as part of the deal, Starbucks will sell Java beans under a different name.
Forbes.com: Disaster Of The Day: Lost Nuclear Waste: "Two fuel rods containing uranium dioxide, a byproduct of nuclear power, have been missing at the Waterford, Conn., nuclear reactor for twenty years. What's worse, plant officials didn't actually notice that the waste was unaccounted for until November 2000."
Proposal to limit copyright on hard drives draws fire: More on Hollywood's plan to strip you of your rights.
What Is 'IT'? Book Proposal Heightens Intrigue About Secret Invention Touted as Bigger Than the Internet or PC: Either this is a brilliant hoax or something truly revolutionary. My guess: It's either a personal air transport device or a personal (fuel cell?) generator that doesn't pollute.
'Dracula Ants' May Be Key Evolutionary Link: Very creepy.
Apple Sets March Release for New Operating System: Apple's new iDVD app is quite cool.
Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue About the Future With Nongovernment Experts: The CIA's view of the future, to contrast with Salon's. Seen on Bruce Sterling's Viridian mailing list.
Our crystal ball: Salon's tongue-in-cheek predictions for the coming year.
Drug Use in Animals Seen Higher Than Thought: Squirrels on crack? No, rather we're overdosing farm animals with antibiotics -- part of the mutant superbug breeding program.
U.S. Firms Abstain From EU Privacy Pact: Of course, there are instances where the international pressures on the Net can be beneficial, particularly with regard to privacy. Pray Europe's data-protection laws force better corporate behavior here in the US.
Experts See Online Speech Case as Bellwether: Legal experts see Yahoo's decision to ban the sale of Nazi memorabilia, the result of a French lawsuit, as a sign that free speech on the Net will be reduced to the International lowest common denominator. It's a difficult issue given that selling things isn't exactly speech. At the same time, the imposition of laws from other countries on US sites doesn't bode well for freedom on the Net.
Patent Office to Issue New Gene Guidelines: Supposedly these new rules will make it harder to patent genes. Likely, it won't be hard enough.
Major Linux Upgrade Issued with Little Hoopla: So version 2.4 of the Linux kernel is out. "'2.4.0 brings to the table many improvements, none of which come to mind to the exhausted release manager right now,' wrote Torvalds, who is known for an impish sense of humor." There's something reassuring about anti-hype.
All Digital TVs To Include Copy Restrictions: An interesting thread on Slashdot.
U.S. Agency Seeks Approval to Recycle Radioactive Metals: "The manufacture of consumer products out of radioactively contaminated materials discarded from commercial nuclear power plants and government bomb factories could become a fact of American life." The warning labels on such products should prove to be interesting reading.
Blind man passes test to carry concealed weapon: Must've been some test.
On The Internet, Patents Have The Weight Of Gold: A cogent summary of the problem with Internet patents.
Attention, Masters of the Media Universe: You Need to Create New Monopolies by Thinking About Your Businesses and Customers in a New Way: Advice to would-be content producers from Seth Godin. Some good points, though given the hyper-competition the author posits, perhaps aspiring monopolists should, like Godin, produce advice/self-help tracts. After all, person experience is one barrier to entry that's not easily torn down on the Net.
The Nanomicrophone: Though many years off, the nanomic promises to be the ultimate listening device, useful for medical applications such as listening for cancer cells and for surveillance.
Anonymous monolith brings a landmark movie to mind: Someone placed a black steel monolith reminiscent of the ones depicted in 2001: A Space Odessey on a hill in a Seattle park. Congratulations are due to whoever did the deed.
The End of Freedom: "Hastening a rapid demise for the free copying of digital media, the next generation of hard disks is likely to come with copyright protection countermeasures built in." You may have thought you had rights. In fact, you just have old hardware. [See correction posted on 01/12/20/01; see also related 12/28/00 post.]
Pamela Samuelson: Cyber-rights guardian: One of the "good guys."
Clothes that do the thinking: I'm looking forward to the day when my clothes say, "Wash me." Trying to keep that sort of information in one's head can be so taxing.
Sacrificial sheep shoves Egyptian to his death: "An Egyptian sheep destined for sacrificial slaughter forestalled its owner's plans by pushing him to his death from a three-storey building in Alexandria, police said on Tuesday." Forestalled? It seems to me that the sheep pretty much ended its owner's plans.