theodp writes "The kernel meets The Colonel in a just-published Microsoft patent application for an Advertising Services Architecture, which delivers targeted advertising as 'part of the OS.' Microsoft, who once teamed with law enforcement to protect consumers from unwanted advertising, goes on to boast that the invention can 'take steps to verify ad consumption,' be used to block ads from competitors, and even sneak a peek at 'user document files, user e-mail files, user music files, downloaded podcasts, computer settings, [and] computer status messages' to deliver more tightly targeted ads."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Among the big winners from the explosion in online video are content delivery networks (CDNs), like Akamai. It was a darling during the dot-com boom and Wall Street is in love with it once again. Success, of course, breeds competition. Smaller rival Limelight Networks recently went public with much success, and now Korean Firm CDNetworks says it will soon enter the US market (via Data Center Knowledge). This is great news for content firms, which should benefit from price competition in the space. The question for Akamai is whether its product can be more than a commodity. If any company can do what it can with enough infrastructure investment, then ultimately competition will just come down to price, which is the last thing it wants to see.

couch_warrior writes with a BBC article about Japan's choice to restrain political speech in the 21st century. The nation of Japan bans the use of internet sites to solicit voters in its upper house elections. Based on election laws drawn up in the 50s, candidates are restricted in the ways they can reach their constituents. Candidates are even restrained from distributing leaflets that will reach more than 3% of the voters. What's more, people who are trying to change the laws are failing. Despite heavy internet usage and a strong install base of high-speed connectivity, young people just don't feel involved in politics. "In Japan, 95% of people in their 20s surf the web, but only a third of them bother to vote. Some, though, do not seem keen on politicians using the web to try to win their support. 'I believe that internet resources are not very official,' says Kentaro Shimano, a student at Temple University in Tokyo. 'YouTube is more casual; you watch music videos or funny videos on it, but if the government or any politicians are on the web it doesn't feel right.' Haruka Konishi agrees. 'Japanese politics is something really serious,' she says. 'Young people shouldn't be involved, I guess because they're not serious enough or they don't have the education.' There cannot be many places in the world where students feel their views should not count. Perhaps it is really a reflection of the reality - that they do not."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington state Supreme Court has ruled that a class-action lawsuit against mobile operator Cingular (now called AT&T) can proceed, despite a clause in the contracts it has subscribers sign preventing them from starting such actions. The suit in question alleges that Cingular overcharged some customers in the state for some roaming and long-distance calls, with a lawyer for the customers saying they were overcharged by $1 to $40 per month. Will this help the customers recover the charges and receive compensation in line with the overcharging? That seems unlikely, since all that's really happened is the court's given lawyers a green light to pursue a paycheck.

twofish writes "Yahoo News is reporting that the carcass of a giant squid, nearly 8 meters in length, washed ashore in Australia on Wednesday. The creature's mantle is over two meters in length and almost a full meter across. The creature, stretched out, is in total more than eight meters long. 'Scientists would take samples from the creature, identified by state parks officials as an Architeuthis, which can grow to more than 10 meters (33 feet) in length and weigh more than 275 kilograms (606 pounds). The Tasmanian animal was 250 kg ... Giant squid, once believed to be mythical despite occasional sightings by mariners, feed on fish and other squid. Last year, fishermen off the Falkland Islands caught a complete animal measuring 8.62 meters.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The VC community has expressed concern that changes to the tax code, intended to hit private equity firms, will end up hurting them as well. Given the explosion in alternative investment vehicles and the large sums that these companies have been raking in, politicians have been keen to make sure that they're all paying their "fair share", whatever that means. But perhaps the issue is being overblown on all sides. According to one estimate, the change would only bring the government an additional $2 billion in annual tax revenue. From the perspective of industry and government, that's really a mere pittance. Of course, it should make one wonder why Congress is spending so much time debating this issue. If it's not about raising revenue, and only about going after a successful, high-profile segment of the economy, then the push would mainly seem to be about politics.

David Pescovitz: Nat Torkington says, "In Collapse, Jared Diamond wondered what the person who cut down the last tree on Easter Island was thinking as he did so. On the Solomon Islands, he'll soon have the chance to put that question to that person." Link

David Pescovitz: Last month, artist Damien Hirst unveiled the most expensive contemporary artwork ever made, a skull bedazzled with more than 8,000 fine diamonds. It's expected to sell for as much as $100 million. In response to the skull's exhibition at London's White Cube Gallery in Mason's Yard, an artist named Laura created a replica covered with 6,522 Swarovski crystals and dumped it outside the gallery in the middle of the night on top of a pile of trash.
Link (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

Previously on BB:
• Damien Hirst's diamond skull Link

AlexGr writes "We've heard conflicting tales regarding Linus Torvalds' acceptance of GPLv3. InformationWeek reports on comments by Mr. Torvalds that would seem to decide the issue: 'Torvalds said the authors of a new software license expected to be used by thousands of open source programmers are a bunch of hypocrites ... For Torvalds' part, it appears unlikely he'll ever adopt GPLv3 for the Linux kernel. He accused the Free Software Foundation leadership, which includes eccentric, MIT-trained computing whiz Richard Stallman, of injecting their personal morality into the laws governing open source software with the release of GPLv3. "Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality," Torvalds wrote.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David Pescovitz: Indonesia kopi iuwak is a rare kind of coffee that apparently goes for $30/cup in some fancy Hong Kong hotels. The secret to its reportedly fine flavor is that the beans are collected, swallowed, and crapped back out by wild civets, small, arboreal mammals that are currently endangered. Today's Los Angeles Times tells the story of the $600/pound coffee. The article quotes Canadian food scientist Massimo Marcone, author of a new book that sounds fascinating: In Bad Taste?: The Science and Adventures Behind Food Delicacies. From the Los Angeles Times:

In the animals' stomachs, enzymes in the gastric juices massage the beans, smoothing off the harsh edges that make coffee bitter and produce caffeine jitters. Humans then separate the greenish-brown beans from the rest of the dung, and once a thin outer layer is removed, they are ready for roasting....

Days before the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami struck, Marcone was in Indonesia's Sumatran rain forest, where he collected about 10 pounds of civet droppings laced with coffee beans. He now uses it as "the gold standard" to rate other kopi luwaks in his lab at the University of Guelph in Ontario.

Like a forensic scientist reading a bullet's markings, Marcone stares at kopi luwak under an electron microscope, searching for striations that tell him that a civet excreted it. His studies found that kopi luwak drinkers need to be careful to avoid being duped.

"About 42% of all the kopi luwaks that are presently on sale are either adulterated or complete fakes, unfortunately," he said.

Real kopi luwak has a top note of rich, dark chocolate, with secondary notes that are musty and earthy, the scientist said. An Indonesian coffee lover described the scent as the smell of moist earth after a rainfall, with hints of vanilla, that teases the palate for hours after the cup is empty.

Link to Los Angeles Times, Link to buy In Bad Taste (Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)

Telcos' resistance to municipal WiFi broadband projects is pretty well documented, but it's been interesting to see how their position changes once they realize they can make some money from running the muni networks. Over in France, the country's incumbent operator, France Telecom, has filed a legal challenge to Paris' plan to roll out free hotspots (via MuniWireless), saying they will illegally compete with its network of 2,250 paid hotspots in the city. This argument has been made before in Europe, like in Barcelona, where the city was forced to shut down its hotspots after a similar complaint -- even though they blocked access to everything except 60 sites with city information and services. What makes France Telecom's suit even more ridiculous is that its mobile phone unit, Orange, bid on the tender to provide the service for the city. Now, after it's lost out, the company cries foul.

Unequivocal writes "A new Wired magazine blog entry shows that Microsoft has patented a technique for preventing and reversing music piracy at the hardware level. 'Microsoft and Apple are thinking along the same lines when it comes to enabling users to copy music between their wireless devices. Certain cellphones already allow you to [transfer music] via Bluetooth file transfer, but Microsoft's patented idea would take the concept further, by allowing users to trade MP3s that may have come from file sharing networks to one another, expiring the song on the recipient's device after three plays, unless the user pays Microsoft a fee in order to continue to listen to the track, with a percentage going to the person who provided the song. As the abstract puts it, "even [the] resale of pirated media content [can] benefit... the copyright holder."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lucas123 writes "According to a Computerworld story there will be 8 million cell phones/smart phones lost this year. The site describes how to easily back up data on handhelds. The piece also addresses the future of these technologies: 'In Dulaney's opinion, traditional USB syncing "will die." Gartner is telling its corporate customers they should hasten this process by not permitting their employees to sync to their PCs. He explains this by saying that individual end users can create distributed computing and security problems because they are poor data administrators. Moreover, he adds, PCs are not necessarily more reliable than cell phones. Drake gives a qualified endorsement of wireless e-mail as the master application for backing up and syncing data, saying the technology is fine for dedicated e-mail environments but insufficient for corporate environments that require a vast array of wireless applications.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reader Mark alerts us that once again, Google is getting sued because it allow companies to buy ads that use another company's trademark. In the US, it's pretty much settled law that there's nothing wrong with this. Geico tried suing the company over this, but it had its case slapped down by the courts. This time, it's the Australian government upset that a popular Australian classifieds site is using the name of certain car dealerships in its ads. Of course, the Geico case doesn't set any precedent for Google in Australia, so it's possible that the law won't be as favorable to the company down under. The government is also making the somewhat bizarre claim that Google doesn't do a good job distinguishing its paid results from its organic listings. It's pretty hard to see how anyone but a moron in a hurry would have a hard time seeing the difference, so it would certainly seem that Australia has an uphill battle going forward on this one.

MojoKid writes "Motherboards manufacturers seem to get more exotic in their designs, with each new chipset release. HotHardware has an evaluation posted looking at the Gigabyte GA-N680SLI-DQ6; a product that seemingly out does every other current desktop motherboard in a number of key areas. The board features four Gigabit LAN controllers, 10 SATA ports, a 12-phase power array, 100% solid-state capacitors, and a unique wrap-around, passive, cooling apparatus that cools both the top and underside of the chipset and CPU socket area. And because the board is based on NVIDIA's nForce 680i SLI chipset, it also has three full-length PCI Express x16 slots for multi-GPU support. It's a good overclocker and performed well throughout the benchmarks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xeni Jardin: BB reader Ben Byrne says,

Free Press, the organization behind the pro-Net Neutrality site SavetheInternet.com, has a new project: Free the iPhone.

That's "free" as in speech, not beer. The aim of the campaign, directed at Congress and the FCC, is to make sure that any company looking for a new slice of the public airwaves adheres to "open access," which would put the kibosh on exclusive deals of the Apple-AT&T sort. It may sound petty, but the future of the Internet is in wireless, so allowing such device freedom could become critical.

Here's a snip from the website:

Dear Apple,

for years you have been delighting us with great products, fun to use, tremendous to work with and bringing the joy and beauty back into the Computer world.

Once again you did it with the iPhone.

It is gorgeous, sexy and opens up the mind of millions of consumers... and developers! But... it is enslaved in some awkward cage of technological unfriendliness, begging to be freed.

So please, free the iPhone, open it to the world of opportunities knocking at your door and let the developers unleash its power!

Link

Xeni Jardin:

One of the earliest and most vivid memories I have from childhood is sitting on a plaid couch (maybe two years old?), staring into a television, screaming in full toddler freakout because a robot on Sesame Street was scaring me.

What's funny about this memory is that even though the robot terrified me, I could not look away from the screen.

I was trying to retell this tale to someone over IM today, then googled and found one clip in which the robot appears -- the very first time, in 1972. Turns out S.A.M. ("Super Automated Machine") also made a cameo appearance in a Spider Man comic book.

Funny how memory imprints work -- the Sesame Street Robot still kind of scares me when I watch the clip, all these years later.

Link to video, Link to scans from the comic book.

Reader comment: david z. says,

I had the same experience with this clip from Sesame Street of a stop-motion orange singing "Carmen." As a child, it would send me running from the room when it came on. I finally found it on YouTube and felt the same rush of fear as I did thirty-odd years ago. When the orange hits that high note and her face flies off, I almost had to close the browser. Link.

Xeni Jardin: Over at News.com, Declan McCullagh has been following a recent court case that offers a rare peek into how some fed agents conduct digital investigations when a suspect uses encryption> First, break into the suspect's home or workplace, then implant keystroke-logging software on their computer, then step back and spy. Snip:

An agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration persuaded a federal judge to authorize him to sneak into an Escondido, Calif., office believed to be a front for manufacturing the drug MDMA, or Ecstasy. The DEA received permission to copy the hard drives' contents and inject a keystroke logger into the computers.

That was necessary, according to DEA Agent Greg Coffey, because the susp