Back in April, we wrote about services that offered to rent good credit ratings to people with poor ones, so they could get a mortgage or other loans. We were pretty skeptical that many people would be interested in actually renting or selling their credit scores to other people, but a new story in the New York Times claims that the services are partly to blame for the problems in the subprime mortgage market -- problems which are weighing on the overall financial markets. In a reaction to an increasing number of mortgage defaults, lenders are tightening their policies and requiring more documentation from potential borrowers, in an effort to more thoroughly vet them and weed out people who won't have the ability to pay back their loans. The NYT claims, however, that instead of cutting down on the amount of fraudulent applications, the higher standards actually appear to be leading even more applicants to these service. This issue -- whereby a person can "piggyback" on another's credit report and gain benefit from it -- is just one that's fueling financial institutions' unhappiness with FICO scores, and the company behind the system, Fair Isaac, says it's making changes to eliminate the positive influence of piggybacking. Even with those changes, though, it's likely that lenders will continue to seek out additional services to judge the creditworthiness of borrowers.

Cory Doctorow:
Check out the EULA that accompanied this pre-1909, 78RPM Victor Talking Machine recording of Ave Maria. Link (Thanks, Rich!)

Cory Doctorow: Ian Randal Strock, former editor of the print-zine Science Fiction Chronicle, has started a new science fiction newswire source called SFScope. It's very comprehensive, if a little terse. Link (Thanks, Ian!)

Cory Doctorow: Julian Dibbell, author of the stellar Play Money (a book about making real money in virtual worlds), has a great NYT feature up about the life of Chinese gold farmers (a subject I tackle in my story Anda's Game). This story keeps on getting weirder and more interesting.

At the end of each shift, Li reports the night’s haul to his supervisor, and at the end of the week, he, like his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less. The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20. The small commercial space Li and his colleagues work in — two rooms, one for the workers and another for the supervisor — along with a rudimentary workers’ dorm, a half-hour’s bus ride away, are the entire physical plant of this modest $80,000-a-year business. It is estimated that there are thousands of businesses like it all over China, neither owned nor operated by the game companies from which they make their money. Collectively they employ an estimated 100,000 workers, who produce the bulk of all the goods in what has become a $1.8 billion worldwide trade in virtual items. The polite name for these operations is youxi gongzuoshi, or gaming workshops, but to gamers throughout the world, they are better known as gold farms. While the Internet has produced some strange new job descriptions over the years, it is hard to think of any more surreal than that of the Chinese gold farmer.

Link

See also: Avatars, and the carbon-based meatbags behind them (that's us)

Cory Doctorow: Google's public policy team (led by the wonderful Andrew McLaughlin) has opened up its internal blog, and it's great reading.

I worry a lot about Google being evil -- and about whether Google is evil today. But people like Andrew and his team go a long way to setting my mind at ease. This is going straight into my daily reads. Link (via Michael Geist)

Cory Doctorow: Got a baby? Got knitting needles? You can use the latter to improve the former (and perforation of the child is not involved, you sicko) -- by making a baby viking helmet! Link (via Craft)

Cory Doctorow: When AT&T bought out BellSouth, it had to promise the FCC that it would provide a basic, $10/month DSL service. However, AT&T has done everything it can to suppress information about the service. The Consumerist has found the plan.

But even at $10/month, AT&T DSL should be avoided like the plague. These are the scumbags who illegally wiretapped the entire Internet for the NSA, who broke net-neutrality to find "copyright infringements, and who inspired NBC to call for a law requiring all ISPs to do the same (imagine -- a law forbidding network neutrality!). Seriously: the only day I wouldn't piss on AT&T is if they were on fire. Link

A number of readers sent us word about a malware attack that has been underway since Saturday that began with the compromise of more than 1,100 mostly Italian Web sites. Websense claims that more than 10,000 sites have been infected by now, 80% of them in Italy. There are indications that most of the Italian sites are resident at the same large Italian hosting provider. Trend Micro reports on the attack, which is launched from a malicious Iframe tag inserted into pages on compromised sites. For visitors to these sites, this begins a cascade of "drive-by" malware downloads if one of several targeted vulnerabilities is available and unpatched. The first page to which visitors are redirected by the Iframe hosts a recent version of Mpack attack software. Panda has a month-old report on Mpack (PDF) that provides copious detail about its nefarious ways.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It seems to be the nature of highly random, hit-driven industries that they become overly infatuated with sequels. The film industry is the most obvious example of this, as every successful film is seen as a possible franchise to be exploited through endless iterations of the initial version. The other big industry that operates on this model is the pharmaceutical industry, which is analogous to Hollywood in several ways. In the 90s, the big pharmaceutical players soared on the backs of so-called lifestyle drugs (Viagra being the most well-known), and since then, these firms have tried to extend that success by doubling down on similar products. But the industry is facing a problem, as many of its most promising drugs have come under increasing FDA scrutiny due to complications and side effects. While the side effects in many of these cases seem rare, the FDA is taking a strict stance, because the underlying condition that's being treated is not seen as particularly serious. A drug that targets cancer or AIDS is given leeway in terms of negative side-effects that is not afforded to a drug targeting weight loss. But because these companies need blockbusters to keep justify their market caps, and because lifestyle drugs are seen as the most likely candidates to become blockbusters, the industry has cornered itself by investing in pills that have a very difficult time clearing regulatory hurdles. As in other industries, the more promising areas of the pharmaceutical space are in the "long tail", which is currently occupied by a multitude of niche biotechs. However, since these large firms feel that they can't maintain their size by selling drugs to narrow segments of the population, they're not at all position to take advantage of these opportunities.

Spamicles alerts us to a report just issued (PDF) by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. At least 88 White House officials used Republican National Committee email accounts for government business. The RNC has destroyed at least some of the emails from 51 of those officials. Law requires emails sent by officials to be stored or recorded. There is evidence that White House lawyers and the (current) Attorney General knew of this but did not act to stop it. From the article: "These e-mail accounts were used by White House officials for official purposes, such as communicating with federal agencies about federal appointments and policies... Given the heavy reliance by White House officials on RNC e-mail accounts, the high rank of the White House officials involved, and the large quantity of missing e-mails, the potential violation of the Presidential Records Act may be extensive."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few months ago, we had the story of a guy in Canada who was suing a whole bunch of sites because commenters on those sites said things he believed were defamatory. He supposedly even went after a few sites that simply linked to the defamatory material (and then there were claims that he went after sites that simply linked to sites that linked to the supposedly defamatory content). That seems a bit absurd, for obvious reasons. However, an article in Toronto's Globe & Mail notes that it may actually have been effective. Various bloggers have stopped writing about the guy out of a fear of getting sued as well. That, of course, is exactly what the suits were intended to do: to create some "chilling effects" against free speech. While the US laws clearly protect publishers and online services from content they didn't write, Canada doesn't have such protections -- and the chilling effects from that gap in the law are quite clear in this case. There's nothing wrong with using the law against those who actually are making defamatory remarks. However, suing sites that host those remarks or those who simply write about the story itself isn't protecting against defamation. It's going beyond that to intimidate anyone who might normally write about a perfectly legitimate legal issue.

jcatcw writes "Computerworld's annual summary of the best places to work in IT lists companies that excel in five areas of employment: career development, retention, benefits, diversity, and training. According to the scorecard, the top five retention methods are: competitive benefits; competitive salaries; work/life balance; flexible work hours; and tuition reimbursement. Of the top 100 companies, 64 expect the number of U.S.-based IT staffers to increase in 2007, on average by 7%. Here is the whole list. The top three are Quicken Loans, University of Miami, and Sharp HealthCare."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Frauenfelder:
Coverbrowser has hundreds of old comic book covers for your browsing pleasure. I'm really fond of the excellent painted covers for Turok, Son of Stone. Link.

Mark Frauenfelder: Charlie says:

James Leatham, one of the a regular commenter on my blog just posted links to this amazing movie he made on his Apple IIe in 1985. The graphics are way beyond the capability of the computer to render in real time, so he used stop-motion. To film it he actually had the computer control a film camera and a wheel of colored filters. The computer would render a frame, spin the color wheel (made from an old record with holes cut in it) then open the shutter, repeating for each color and frame. It took about 2 minutes per frame but the results are awesome.

Link to an article he wrote in Cinemagic magazine describing how he did it.

Link to his original comment.

Link to YouTube video

Mark Frauenfelder: Here's adorable photographic proof that man and dinosaurs walked the Earth together. Link (Thanks, Charlie!)

Mark Frauenfelder:
Paul says:

In the last couple days you've had some articles that have featured weird Archies and a cover from a Spire magazine.

Spires have been a fascinating subject for a myself and a friend who had a collection of these as kids growing up in conservative fundamentalist Christian homes. A couple of years ago he and I (now both best described as recovering Fundamentalists/Skeptics) started to collect them again and we made the site listed above to share them with each other as we lived at opposite ends of the country. Unfortunately, part way through our project to scan all of our Spires homeownership and children took away much of the time we both have for doing the truly important things in life--sitting at a computer and scanning old comic books. We hope to have them all scanned soon but it may take many many years at the rate we're going right now (i.e. we haven't put a new Spire up on the site in over a year).

Over the years the site has been "found" by the world and I get thousands of hits every month.

But, since I'm a regular Boing Boing reader I noticed two references to Spire this week so I thought I'd share the collection with you. Also, [here] are two really excellent links for more info on the topic: Vanity Fair article about Christian Archie | History of Christian Archie

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Creationist Archie comic
• Little Archie anthology
• Mark interviews Love and Rockets' co-creator Jaime Hernandez (a big fan of Little Archie)

Mark Frauenfelder:
John says: "My wife found this odd snapping turtle beach toy at the local 99 cent store." Sand toy label reads: “Expediently Schelp” and “Be beneficial to brains” Link

prostoalex writes "As part of the deal with the FCC to approve the AT&T/BellSouth merger, AT&T started selling, but not advertising, a $10-per-month DSL service in 22 states, AP has learned. 'The service provides download speeds of up to 768 kilobits per second and upload speeds of up to 128 kbps, matching the speeds of the cheapest advertised AT&T plan, which costs $19.95 per month in the nine-state former BellSouth area and $14.99 in the 13 states covered by AT&T before the acquisition.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.