Cory Doctorow: Richard Kadrey -- a charter member of cyberpunk's original vanguard, author of the wonderful Metrophage -- has a new novel out at long last, and it was worth the wait.

Butcher Bird is Kadrey's extended, mythological celebration of all things deviant, transgressive, queer, perverse and broken. Spyder Lee, a San Francisco tattoo artist, is mugged by a demon who was summoned by the "tribal" art on his skin, the meaning of which Spyder has never been clear on.

Thus begins Spyder's journey into the half-world, the hallucinogenic freakshow that lurks just below the surface of the real world, where beasts and men of all description cavort, just out of our site. Spyder finds himself on a quest with a host of strange companions -- Lulu, his piercing-artist business partner; Blind Shrike, a lost princess ninja who fights though she has no vision, and many others. It is with these people that Spyder must venture into hell and steal the lynchpin of the universes, to redeem himself, his world, and his friends.

This is a Dante book, a tour through the author's bent and ferocious imagination. Kadrey is a connoisseur of transgression, an ardent admirer of counter culture, burnouts, and glorious losers. In Butcher Bird, he marshals his prodigious knowledge of the freakish and odd in a series of exciting set-pieces that make up a gallumphing action-adventure novel. This is like being in a Breugel painting, or a Jim Woodard painting, or maybe both at the same time.

Kadrey is a multi-talented man: photographer, novelist, video producer, comics writer. But no matter what medium he works in, you always know that it's his stuff -- his signature is his romantic obsession with the steamy underbelly. In Butcher Bird, he consummates it. Link

Xeni Jardin: Wow, didn't see this one coming: Link vs. Link.

mattatwork writes "NY Times writer Brad Stone figured out the real identity of Fake Steve Jobs. With classic nick names like 'freetards' and 'beastmaster' Fake Steve captured an audience of 700,000 visitors to the site and around 50 emails a day. According to Daniel Lyons, the senior editor at Forbes magazine who maintained the blog, there is no definite plan for the future of the site. 'Mr. Lyons said he invented the Fake Steve character last year, when a small group of chief executives turned bloggers attracted some media attention. He noticed that they rarely spoke candidly. "I thought, wouldn't it be funny if a C.E.O. kept a blog that really told you what he thought? That was the gist of it." Mr. Lyons says he recalled trying out the voices of several chief executives before settling on the colorful Apple co-founder. He twice tried to relinquish the blog, but started again after being deluged by fans e-mailing to ask why Fake Steve had disappeared.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roland Piquepaille writes "Yesterday, I told you about virtual beer. Today, we follow two North America researchers who are studying the physics of real beer bubbles. 'Singly scattered waves form the basis of many imaging techniques such as radar or seismic exploration.' But pouring beer in a mug involves multiply scattered acoustic waves. They are more complex to study, but they can be used to look at various phenomena, such as predicting volcanic eruptions or understanding the movement of particles in fluids like beer. They also could be used to monitor the structural health of bridges and buildings or the stability of food products over time. Read more for additional references and a photo showing how the researchers monitor beer bubbles."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

frooge writes "With the recent release of iD's catalog on Steam, it appears DOSBox is being used to run the old DOS games for greater compatibility. According to a post on the Halflife2.net forums, however, this distribution does not contain a copy of the GPL license that DOSBox is distributed under, which violates the license. According to the DOSBox developers, they were not notified that it was being used for this release."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xeni Jardin: I've been a fan of Jim Cramer for many years, and I've seldom seen him flip out as epically and fantastically as he does in this clip.

On CNBC's Mad Money Friday, he screamed at Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to slash interest rates, in order to help the stock market and assist people who are losing their jobs. Video Link. The money quote: "No, we HAVE Armageddon."

Also, is it just me, or does he look pretty awesome at 62? The lame-ass bobblehead is utterly unconvincing, tho. (thanks, Kent!)

Xeni Jardin:

In the southern African nation of Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe has enacted a law granting state security agents full authority to surveil landline and mobile phones, postal mail and what little internet is available anyway, according to a government notice published on Friday. Snip from wire service report:

The law gives police and the departments of national security, defence intelligence and revenue powers to order the interception of communications and provides for the creation of a monitoring centre.

Postal, telecommunications and internet service providers will be required to ensure that their "systems are technically capable of supporting lawful interceptions at all times".

Critics have said the law is a government ploy to keep tabs on the opposition at a time when political tensions are mounting and Mugabe is deflecting growing criticism from Western powers.

At least we can rest comfortably here in America, knowing such a thing would never happen in a civilized, Western democracy.

Link (Thanks, Johan).

The move comes as economic and state structures in the world's fastest shrinking economy approach the point of absolute collapse: Link.

Previously on BoingBoing:

Africa -- Zimbabwe passes "interception of communications" law

Zimbabwe crisis: a view from South Africa on data intercept laws

Zimbabwe's Internet cut off due to lack of foreign currency

In Zimbabwe, bloggers and journalists pay a high price.

An anonymous reader writes "The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reports that its inspectors were able to get IRS employees to improperly disclose their user names and passwords over 61% of the time. 60,000 of the IRS's 100,000 employees and contractors thus are susceptible to computer hackers, putting personal taxpayer information at risk for unauthorized disclosure, theft and fraud. 'Only eight of the 102 employees contacted either the inspector general's office or IRS security offices to validate the legitimacy of the caller ... The IRS agreed with recommendations from the inspector general that it should take steps to make employees more aware of hacker tactics such as posing as an internal employee and to remind people to report such incidents to security officials.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes "DefCon usually focuses on electronic security, but Saturday a talk was held that focused on possibly the oldest form of hacking — lockpicking. As software security becomes better and better, the focus may be shifting towards simple hacking tips like looking over someone's shoulder for their password, faking employment or just picking the locks to gain access to the building where machines are left on overnight. From the article: 'Medeco deadbolt locks relied on worldwide at embassies, banks and other tempting targets for thieves, spies or terrorists can be opened in seconds with a strip of metal and a thin screw driver, Marc Tobias of Security.org demonstrated for AFP ... Tobias says he refuses to publish details of 'defeating' the locks because they are used in places ranging from homes, banks and jewelers to the White House and the Pentagon. He asked AFP not to disclose how it is done.' I'm sure all Slashdot readers are savvy enough to use firewall(s) but do you know and trust what locks 'physically' protect your data from hacks like these?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My new car, which I love, is missing a couple of features my old car had (backup camera, sonar) that I totally miss. But there's a feature no car has ever had that I want so bad that I miss it even though I've never used it.

You can see auto manufacturers creeping up to the obvious feature, they can play MP3s, some have built-in hard drives, many have iPod interfaces (mine does, it understands playlists!). The final obvious step in this evolution is to allow a car to access services over the net, and to be accessed over the net from my laptop or desktop. Rather than carry an iPod with me to the car, and remember to take it with me when I leave, I'd rather just copy music, audiobooks and podcasts over to the car's hard disk, if its parked within range of my home's wifi (it is) or within range of a friend's wifi, the same way my iPhone can connect with wifi when it finds it.

There's no doubt Apple and Microsoft are thinking this way. I hope the car manufacturers are too.

Cory Doctorow:
In the 8-minute animated short "A Gentleman's Duel," what starts off as a sexist little cartoon about a Frenchman and a Brit vying for the attention and affection of an improbable-breasted bimbo builds up a rapid head of steam as the antagonists climb into their giant Victorian mecha suits and kick the snot out of each other, with a lot of Road Runner-esque funny gracenotes. Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

imashoe writes "Ever wonder how Spore works under the hood? The game seems to be insanely huge and how is it that there can be an infinite amount of different creates created in the game? The answer is Procedural Programming."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cory Doctorow:
Last September, I reviewed Lost Girls, the incredible, pornographic three volume comic created by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie -- a retelling of the lives of Dorothy from Oz, Alice from Wonderland and Wendy from Peter Pan.

SexTV has aired a fascinating feature on the comic, including interviews with Moore and Gebbie and bookstore owners, along with stills from the book.

Lost Girls is a controversial and wonderful work of erotica and remix culture. Moore and Gebbie have a lot of smart things to say about writing about sex and the artistic impulse behind erotica. I've never heard anyone read from a comic before, but it really works, especially in combination with a slideshow of stills from the art. NSFW Link (Thanks, http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/">Jeff!)

I'm beginning to think that my copy of iTunes is hosed.

I can't copy AVI files into the list, even ones that I was able to copy before. When I do, it just rejects the file, no error dialog explaining why, it just refuses to copy the video.

When I plug in my iPhone it says there's an update available, but when I say yes, go download and install it, it claims it can't find the update server over the Internet (yet it was able to tell that an update was available, and the Internet is working fine otherwise).

I click on the Radio icon, and it can't find the list of radio stations.

So the question is: how to install a fresh copy?

Advice is welcome.

nettxzl writes ""Sentient Developments revisits the Fermi Paradox which is "the contradictory and counter-intuitive observation that we have yet to see any evidence for the existence of Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (ETI) although the size and age of the Universe suggests that many technologically advanced ETI's ought to exist." Sentient Development's blog post on the Fermi Paradox states that "a number of inter-disciplinary breakthroughs and insights have contributed to the Fermi Paradox gaining credence as an unsolved scientific problem" Amongst these are "(1)Improved quantification and conceptualization of our cosmological environment, (2) Improved understanding of planet formation, composition and the presence of habitable zones, (3) The discovery of extrasolar planets, (4) Confirmation of the rapid origination of life on Earth (5) Growing legitimacy of panspermia theories" and more ... So, where is everyone?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jamie ran across a story about censorship on MSN. Essentially, a number of suspicious strings result in silent failure of delivery. The strings are unsurprisingly things like .scr and .info. They've started maintaining a list if you're interested. Personally, I'd rather they fix the vulnerabilities that make those strings dangerous in the first place: it's not like IM is the only place a URL can get on your machine.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "I'm the Senior Developer at a fairly large agency, we're currently a 100% LAMP shop, but I've heard a reliable report through the grapevine that the management a few levels above our office wants to standardize our region on MS .NET. As I'm sure most of you can appreciate, to do such a thing would be... counterproductive, and I could really do with a hand conveying this to a manager whose only real knowledge of Linux is "if it's so good, why would you give it away for free"?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "The House of Representatives voted 227-183 to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to allow warrantless wiretapping of telephone and electronic communications. The vote extends the FISA amendment for six months. 'The administration said the measure is needed to speed the National Security Agency's ability to intercept phone calls, e-mails and other communications involving foreign nationals "reasonably believed to be outside the United States." Civil liberties groups and many Democrats said it goes too far, possibly enabling the government to wiretap U.S. residents communicating with overseas parties without adequate oversight from courts or Congres.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.