Association of Downloadable Media.

mistermark writes "Two years ago this community discussed my encrypted file server. That machine has kept running and running up until a failing drive and a power outage this last week. So, it's time to revise everything and add RAID to it as well. Now you can have an on-the-fly encrypting/decrypting NAS with the data security of RAID, all in one. Here is the how-to."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Duncan Riley starts a thread on the origins of blogging, sparked by a Wall Street Journal piece.

I got involved in the discussion, and along the way dug up an archive.org version of BlogTree.com, specifically the page for Scripting News.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a North Carolina case, Capitol v. Frye, the RIAA has accepted a $300 offer of judgment made by the defendant. This is the first known use, in the RIAA v. Consumer cases, of the formal offer of judgment procedure which provides that if the plaintiff doesn't accept the offer, and doesn't later get a judgment for a larger amount, the plaintiff is responsible for all of the court costs from that point on in the case. The accepted judgment in the Frye case (PDF) also contains an injunction — much more limited than the RIAA's typical 'settlement' injunction (PDF) — under which defendant agreed not to infringe plaintiffs' copyrights."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SkiifGeek writes "Many anti-malware applications use a sandbox as a tool to help identify potentially malicious software. Now knowledge is spreading about techniques and methods that can allow sandboxed software to target the sandbox itself (and by extension the application that applied it). While attacks that specifically target sandboxing applications are probably a little way off, this technology can be considered the logical extension of techniques and procedures to identify the presence of hosted systems (VMWare, Virtual PC, etc.)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cory Doctorow:
Here's a clever hack from Instructables for making a $5 pen that feels and writes like a super-pricey Mont Blanc "writing instrument." Just buy a refill cartridge for a Mont Blanc, trim it to fit in the barrel of a cheap plastic ergonomic pen, and hey presto, instant writing instrument! Link (via Salad With Steve)

Cory Doctorow: A Differential Analyser -- a specialised computer -- made from Meccano is on display as part of a show on "Machines that Count" at the Museum of Transport and Technology in Wellington, NZ:

That machine was bought for £100 and came to New Zealand around 1950. Ironically, it was used to build the Benmore Hydro Dam and by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, to calculate rabbit populations. It then languished for years at Wellington Polytechnic before finding its way to the Museum of Transport and Technology in the 1970s, where it has been restored and is on display as a lead exhibit in the museum’s “Machines that Count” exhibition.

MOTAT’s Differential Analyser was built by J B Bratt at Cambridge University in 1935, largely from Meccano components. It is known as Meccano Differential Analyser No. 2.

“When New Zealand had two computers, that was one of them,” Pratt says of the System 360 on display. The machine is one of Pratt’s favourites, along with the Macintosh IIfx, which he describes as “blisteringly fast”.

Link to Computerworld article, Link to The Differential Analyser Explained (Thanks, Rob!)

See also:
HOWTO protect your Meccano in a divorce
3D printer made from Meccano and hot-glue

Cory Doctorow:
Next time you find yourself bound by a pair of plastic handcuffs, slip them by inserting a short straight-pin between the roller-lock and the cuffs' teeth. Link (via Neatorama)

It was 8 years ago we went public with what was then the biggest first day jump in stock price in IPO history....

If you didnt know broadcast.com, or dont remember it, we were serving audio and video live and on demand to more than 1mm unique users per day in 1999. I dont even remember how many audio and video files we served per day, without 100mb or 10min limits, encoded up to 700k.

We had full length audio books, full length CDs, full length movies, TV shows. You name it. And unlike today, we actually got licenses for them before they were on our site.

We had preroll commercials. We had inserted commercials. We even inserted video commercials into audio files and streams.

And user generated content ? Yep. Mostly corporate, since back then thats who could afford the tools to edit video. Companies or individuals could upload full videos with synchronized slideshows and we even allows hot spots in the videos. And of course we gave you realitime statistics of how many people were watching your video, and if you required registration, which we offered, you knew exactly who was watching. We had companies that had ongoing "shows", like Breakfast with Dell and we have individuals who did their own thing and we hosted it.

Just think if we had put up a discussion forum and called ourself a Social Network. Its deja vu all over again.

If you want to take a trip down memory lane, here is our video , courtesy of bandwidth subsidy from Google Video (which i have no problem doing given how often our content is pirated on their websites and how much money we have to spend to policing their sites and sending and processsing the legal back and forth of takedown notices)

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Xeni Jardin: A 26-year-old blogger in Kuala Lumpur named Nathaniel Tan (jelas.info, suarakeadilan.com, bangkit.net) has been arrested for posting political parody content on the internet.

Link 1, Link 2, Link 3.

Supporters are posting the image shown at left on their blogs: Link. Tan is considered a prominent online voice in Malaysia. He was reportedly first detained under an "Official Secrets Act," then later under an "Internal Securities Act" for charges including "publishing lies on the Internet" and alleged possession of classified official documents (thanks Bash, Sean Bonner).

hankmt writes "The state of Georgia just granted Range Fuels a permit to create the first cellulosic ethanol plant in America. Cellulosic ethanol produces ethanol from cellulose, which all plants have, instead of from sugar, which is only abundant in food crops. Corn ethanol only produces 1.3 units of energy for every unit of energy that goes into growing the crop and converting the sugar to ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol can produce as much as 16 units of energy for every one unit of energy put into the process. The new plant will be online in 2008 and aims to produce 100 million gallons of ethanol a year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

tarball_tinkerbell sends us to the NY Times for word on a book due out next year that claims that beginning in the late 1990s, on average patents cost companies more than they earned them. A big exception was pharmaceuticals, which accounted for 2/3 of the revenues attributable to patents. The authors of the book Do Patents Work? (synopsis and sample chapters), James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer of the Boston University School of Law, have crunched the numbers and say that, especially in the IT industry, patents no longer make economic sense. Their views are less radical than those of a pair of Washington University at St. Louis economists who argue that the patent system should be abolished outright.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xeni Jardin: Emeka Okafor points us to an interesting op-ed in the Washington Post today by "Beasts of No Nation" author Uzodinma Iweala:

Last fall, shortly after I returned from Nigeria, I was accosted by a perky blond college student whose blue eyes seemed to match the "African" beads around her wrists.

"Save Darfur!" she shouted from behind a table covered with pamphlets urging students to TAKE ACTION NOW! STOP GENOCIDE IN DARFUR!

My aversion to college kids jumping onto fashionable social causes nearly caused me to walk on, but her next shout stopped me.

"Don't you want to help us save Africa?" she yelled.

It seems that these days, wracked by guilt at the humanitarian crisis it has created in the Middle East, the West has turned to Africa for redemption. Idealistic college students, celebrities such as Bob Geldof and politicians such as Tony Blair have all made bringing light to the dark continent their mission. They fly in for internships and fact-finding missions or to pick out children to adopt in much the same way my friends and I in New York take the subway to the pound to adopt stray dogs.

This is the West's new image of itself: a sexy, politically active generation whose preferred means of spreading the word are magazine spreads with celebrities pictured in the foreground, forlorn Africans in the back. Never mind that the stars sent to bring succor to the natives often are, willingly, as emaciated as those they want to help.

Link.

exigentsky writes "Having looked at BeOS technology, it is clear that, like NeXTSTEP, it was ahead of its time. Most remarkable to me is the incredible responsiveness of the whole OS. On relatively slow hardware, BeOS could run eight movies simultaneously while still being responsive in all of its GUI controls, and launching programs almost instantaneously. Today, more than ten years after BeOS's introduction, its legendary responsiveness is still unmatched. There is simply no other major OS that has pervasive multithreading from the lowest level up (requiring no programmer tricks). Is it likely, or at least possible, that future versions of Windows or OS X could become pervasively multithreaded without creating an entirely new OS?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David Pescovitz:
Artist Ellen Lynch of Saint Anthony, Idaho, collects "natural relics," including dead animals, that she finds near her ranch. She then arranges, photographs, and paints them to create digital prints. I find her work to be deeply moving and lovely. [Seen here, "Dutch Owl" (23" x 23")]. From Lynch's artist statement:

As we pass from Earth, we leave behind the shell that served as the relic of our spirit. It is commonly believed that such relics maintain the special gifts attributed to the spirit of the departed, continuing to perform miracles or provide the faithful with powers inherent to the earthly body.

Link (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

Several readers sent us notice of an article in the Wall Street Journal in advance of the tenth anniversary of the blog (by some definitions and accounts). The Ur-blogger in this version of history was Jorn Barger and the blog was Robot Wisdom. Barger wrote, "I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff." The Journal article has statements from a baker's dozen of bloggers and/or blogwatchers and a handful of videos of bloggers talking about how and why they do what they do.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xeni Jardin: Global Voices contributor Rebecca MacKinnon (who is also a Journalism prof at the University of Hong Kong), writes:

A Global Voices editor, Oiwan Lam (shown here), faces obscenity charges in Hong Kong for posting an artsy picture of a bare-breasted woman on InMedia HK, a local citizen media website. The picture came from Flickr.

A month *AFTER* Oiwan posted the photo but *BEFORE* Oiwan's article was ruled "indecent" by Hong Kong's Obscene Articles Tribunal, the photo was censored to Hong Kong's Flickr users as part of Flickr's new geo-censoring system which has just been rolled out in an effort to comply with local laws.

There are many unanswered questions about causes, effects, and implications.

In this blog post, I raise a few.

Link to full text on MacKinnon's blog (thanks, Ethan Zuckerman).

Previously on BoingBoing:

Hong Kong: blogger faces 12 months or $HK400K for linking

Hong Kong: the Flickr'd photo that got blogger Oiwan in trouble

Xeni Jardin:

Following up on a previous BB post about internet-related aspects of the current meltdown in Zimbabwe, BoingBoing reader Bretton Vine writes:

I'm in from South Africa, currently experiencing what the popular media calls a 'human tsunami' of illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe across our borders for everything from work to medicine and even basic foodstuffs which are smuggled back into Zimbabwe for resale.

The recent enforcing of price controls has left Zimbabwe shelves empty, militia going ape, major cross-border escape (5000 captured in last two weeks, and that's barely a dent in the number that make it though).

Add to this is bittersweet irony that the 'Rainbow Nation' of South Africa is experiencing a form of African xenophobia historically unparalleled despite more than a decade since apartheid become the past. But this is another heated discussion not related to my email.

I just wanted to point out that the Internet Service Providers' Association of South Africa hosts an annual free Internet conference every year, with this year being out 6th.

Back in 2004 we had Declan McCullagh out for one of the talks[1, 2]. While he certainly seemed to enjoy himself, he also left a huge impression over interception issues (and made some government people quite uncomfortable in the process). At last year's event (10th anniversary for ISPA, 5th for iWeek) we even had vendors for lawful intercept technology exhibiting and giving talks [3] along with talks from Wim Roggeman[4], Prof Michael Rotert[5] and representatives from the OIC (central interception spooks, not clearly functional yet) trying hard to remain inconspicuous in their suits among geeks of varying shapes and sizes.

With regard to the whole Interception in Zimbabwe issue it's a little bit of a non-event given so few people have access to either phones or the Internet in that country, and that no Zim ISP can afford to purchase the equipment necessary to implement anyway.

It's a slightly similar situation here in South Africa, except for the following...

* our legislation is older :-P

* we have 30+million cellphone users

* we have ~5 million internet users (give or take a few)

* ISPs/ISOC have been fighting the fight for a decade, and especially with regard to issues such as forcing ISPs to pay for interception equipment from the ISPA perspective

* we *didn't* more than 50 stories within 7 days in all the world's major newspapers (online and off) despite having just as draconian an attempt at legislation.

* we're hosting the FIFA world cup in 2010. If you have a cellphone, and are an international visitor you either won't be able to use it, or if you try and obtain local cellular/internet access you'll have to prove identity (original and certified copy) plus understand that the providers are forced to provide intercept capabilities as well as other inane things.

* the ECT act requires authors/developers/publishers of cryptography software to register and make themselves available for 'decryption assistance' or 'decryption warrants' (clearly the repeated attempts at explaining public-key crypto were ignored ...)

There's a mountain more relevant information, but the following is from sites I maintain: Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, Link 4.

And this site needs an update, we're just for workload to drop but the relevant legislation is there: Link.

At the moment due to uncertainty over ETSI standards and overseas policy it seems that the OIC is sticking to real-time intercept capabilities as