Snip: "The Greenland ice cap is melting so quickly that it is triggering earthquakes as pieces of ice several cubic kilometres in size break off." Link.

While Mindbridge didn't start out as an open source company, it has since managed to save what they can only describe as "bunches of money" by switching to Linux. "Today, Mindbridge has repurposed itself as an open-source-friendly company, and revamped its infrastructure to run completely on Linux and other open source software. 'Having deployed [Linux servers] to our customers, we turned around and said, we can do the same thing internally and save bunches of money. We began a systematic but slow flipping of servers from the Microsoft world over to predominantly Linux — although there are a few BSD boxes around as well,' Christian says. 'It's to the point that today I only have two production Windows servers left, out of 15 or so.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While Mindbridge didn't start out as an open source company, it has since managed to save what they can only describe as "bunches of money" by switching to Linux. "Today, Mindbridge has repurposed itself as an open-source-friendly company, and revamped its infrastructure to run completely on Linux and other open source software. 'Having deployed [Linux servers] to our customers, we turned around and said, we can do the same thing internally and save bunches of money. We began a systematic but slow flipping of servers from the Microsoft world over to predominantly Linux -- although there are a few BSD boxes around as well,' Christian says. 'It's to the point that today I only have two production Windows servers left, out of 15 or so.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's no secret that not everyone realizes how wasteful they are of energy resources. However, apparently one city in the UK went to rather extreme measures to make that point clear to residents in the city. It hired a spy plane to fly over the city and take heat loss photos across the entire city. The photos were then matched to a city map, displaying which houses were leaking the most heat at the time the spy plane passed over. Eventually, the entire map was put online so everyone could see which buildings were wasting the most energy. What's unclear is whether or not these heat maps convinced anyone to actually do anything (or if it just freaked people out).

hhavensteincw writes "Intel has quietly launched a new online community that it plans to use to take feedback and suggestions from OEMs and end users for new features in its vPro chips and management software. Intel envisions that the community will grow to allow users to get answers from other community members faster than Intel's support group can answer questions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Among Apple's new iPod announcements was the inclusion of a 160Gb iPod Classic. As Steve Jobs noted, that means you could carry around 40,000 songs in your pocket. Forty thousand songs. Leave it to Bob Lefsetz to use this fact to point out how wrong the recording industry has been about music business models. He points out that this highlights how people want music -- in fact, they want lots of music -- and they want it conveniently and reasonably priced. That means at much cheaper prices (are you going to carry around $40,000 worth of music purchases in your pocket?) and without DRM.

He also highlights how the idiotic focus on getting more per song just as everything else about music and technology gets cheaper is hurting the record labels much more than it helps them. He compares the situation to how expensive it was to use mobile phones a dozen years ago. People were scared to use mobile phones because the charges were ridiculously high. You only used it in special circumstances. Today, however, the rates are much, much lower and that's massively grown the market for mobile services. Do you think the mobile operators would prefer to go back to $1/minute charges? Yet, why does the recording industry insist on $1/song charges when the infrastructure can support an entirely different model. Instead, make the music cheap and easily accessible. Take advantage of the infrastructure that allows people to carry around 40,000 songs in their pocket. Sell iPods that are pre-loaded with all kinds of music and watch them fly off the shelves. The record labels (and their supporters) will claim that it doesn't make sense to sell music for less when people are clearly willing to pay $1/song, but that's misunderstanding the market potential. People were willing to pay $1/minute for mobile phone calls too. And they were willing to pay $150/month for broadband access. But as all of those things got much, much cheaper it opened the markets up much wider, provided all sorts of new applications and services that made them more and more valuable -- and helped make the companies much richer by providing better services at cheaper prices. Why can't the recording industry understand that?

Science Daily reports that "the amount of the discount may be less important than the numerical value of the farthest right digit... The researchers show that 'right-digit effect' influences consumer perception of sale prices. When the right digits are small, people perceive the discount to be larger than when the right digits are large. In other words, an item on sale for $211 from the original price of $222 is thought to be a better deal than an item on sale for $188 from an original price of $199, even though both discounts are $11." Link (Via ComDig)

The Rolling Stone has a long article about the vast sums of taxpayer money pouring into the coffers of sleazy US contractors in Iraq -- and how that money isn't being used to make things better for anyone but the ultra-rich in the US.

In short, some $8.8 billion of the $12 billion proved impossible to find. "Who in their right mind would send 360 tons of cash into a war zone?" asked Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. "But that's exactly what our government did."

Because contractors were paid on cost-plus arrangements, they had a powerful incentive to spend to the hilt. The undisputed master of milking the system is KBR, the former Halliburton subsidiary so ubiquitous in Iraq that soldiers even encounter its customer-survey sheets in outhouses. The company has been exposed by whistle-blowers in numerous Senate hearings for everything from double-charging taxpayers for $617,000 worth of sodas to overcharging the government 600 percent for fuel shipments. When things went wrong, KBR simply scrapped expensive gear: The company dumped 50,000 pounds of nails in the desert because they were too short, and left the Army no choice but to set fire to a supply truck that had a flat tire. "They did not have the proper wrench to change the tire," an Iraq vet named Richard Murphy told investigators, "so the decision was made to torch the truck."

In perhaps the ultimate example of military capitalism, KBR reportedly ran convoys of empty trucks back and forth across the insurgent-laden desert, pointlessly risking the lives of soldiers and drivers so the company could charge the taxpayer for its phantom deliveries. Truckers for KBR, knowing full well that the trips were bullshit, derisively referred to their cargo as "sailboat fuel."

Link

Drumpants are the invention of a hacker called Odbol, "a set of pants that enable the wearer to produce drum sounds by hitting various parts of the pants with his hands. The wearer thusly becomes a cyborg musician, his body assuming the roles of both player and instrument, allowing for spontaneous electric hambone solos or even collaborations with other musicians in a band setting." Check out the videos for percussive thigh-slapping goodness. Link (via Engadget)

Brazil is set to adopt an American DRM system as mandatory for its national broadcast TV apparatus. This won't stop copying -- most of the foreign programs are broadcast without DRM in the USA and Europe, and will end up on the same Internet that Brazilians use. But it will create a system under which Brazil's culture and technology sector are subject to a veto by a foreign DRM consortium. After Brazil adopts DRM for its TV, local technology firms won't be able to build Brazilian TV equipment (including software for PC-based viewing) without paying license fees to (and getting permission from) the HDCP consortium. At the same time, Brazilian producers will only be able to offer their programs on the terms devised by a boardroom full of foreigners from rich, developed nations.

The entertainment companies haven't been able to get DRM mandates in the developed world. The US struck down the Broadcast Flag, Europe's proposal for its own version of the Broadcast Flag infection is stalled and may just die. Hollywood can't convince governments in the developed world to rewrite their broadcast policy to line their pockets, but they've managed to capture the government of a developing nation.

The Brazilian constitution demands that TV be "free and gratuitous" -- something that can't possibly be squared with a foreign-controlled DRM system that prevents saving, copying, and educational use of TV programs. Local activists are organizing -- if you're in Brazil, you need to get involved now.

In spite of all these arguments, the battle is being won by the broadcasters. There are only a few Ministries in Brazil who went public against the implementation of the DRM: the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Science & Technology, among others. Nevertheless, the almighty Ministry of Communications, led by Helio Costa - a former anchorman of the largest Brazilian broadcasting company (TV Globo) - totally supports the adoption of DRM...

Proprietary and expensive, HDCP system would make set-top boxes even more expensive than the "one hundred dollars" promised by Minister Helio Costa. Some recent estimates indicate that the set-top boxes might cost up to US$ 400 - and we are talking about a country in which 1/3 of the population have per capita incomes of less than US$90. Considering that more than 90% of the households have television sets, think about a television divide between those with and without access to digital television.

Link (Thanks, Pedro)

Designer Sasha Tseng (unlinkable Flash site here) has created this prototype toaster/notepad. Scribe your note on the tablet over the toaster, and it will burn the message into the bread. Link (via Cribcandy)

See also:
Transparent toaster "celebrates toasting"
ZUSE toaster "prints" low-res images
PlayStation2 toaster
Toaster burns skull-and-xbones into bread
Complicated, interesting "six-part" toaster

The Persian Puzzle Rug is made out of assemble-it-yourself water-cut rubber patterned after a traditional Persian rug. Each square meter of rug requires 1225 pieces -- and you can choose from monochrome or colored pieces. Link (via Cribcandy)

(Photo credit: Cropped thumbnail taken from a larger pic by Katrin Sonnleitner, found on Kidsmodern)

CRN Australia's piece on the economics of malicious software is fascinating. They assert that the days of intellectual curiosity-fuelled hacking are behind us and that today's botnetters and spyware creeps are all about the dough. However, competition seems to have crashed the price of some of the market's commodities, like infected PCs, which only generate a $0.30 payment to the infector. I wonder if botnet time itself has crashed -- with botmasters controlling botnets with tens of millions of PCs, you'd think it'd be pretty cheap to get ahold of ten or twenty thousand boxes to do some distributed computation or to zap that kid who just fragged you in Counter-Strike. I keep waiting to see spam for botnet time (apart from the spam offering to send spam, which, of course, is a kind of botnet rental) -- "GET A MILLION PCS FOR AN HOUR: ONLY $5!"

"There are programmers who are working for brokers, and the brokers are selling the malware to other criminals, who are then reselling the malware to other criminals," says Trend Micro's Parry. "When they capture a bunch of systems, they resell those systems to another criminal, and another criminal. The actual hacker types don't want to get their hands dirty with something that would actually send them to prison." Other groups build affiliate networks that tap into legitimate and semi-legitimate businesses. In a presentation at the Defcon hacking conference this year, Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland's Department of Computer Science described networks in which businesses would pay affiliates up to 30 cents for each machine they infect with spyware or adware...

Other operations mirror legitimate software as a service providers. These "malware-as-a-service" providers rent out access to botnets or Web-based attack tools. Gutmann noted one example in which a Russian group rented out its malicious Website. A prospective buyer could get the 100 visitors for free, but then had to pay US$4 per 1,000 visitors up to 5,000, US$3.80 per 1000 up to 10000, and US$3.50 per 1,000 if they bought 10,000 or more. "Software rental is just another way to get money out of this market," says Oliver Friedrichs, Symantec's Director of Security Response. "It's common to see authors who write keyloggers and botnetworks, and then rent them out to people ultimately who may launch a phishing campaign or a spam campaign."

Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

Defense contractor Northrop Grumman has published a comic book promoting drones and "nintendo warfare" for kids. Special Ops 5: UAS STRIKES! tells the story of a group of pinned-down US soldiers who extricate themselves by invoking satellites, robots, and drones that chase of balaclava-clad swarthy terrorists. Link (via Danger Room)

Today on Wired's HOWTO wiki, advice on writing a perfect email. Practically speaking, this is about how to send a perfect email to a stranger (since your friends already love you, bad email habits and all). I get a lot of email from strangers -- invitations to speak or write for a site or magazine, interview requests, questions about Boing Boing, Creative Commons, or writing, that kind of thing. I try to answer as much as I can (I get to about 90 percent of it), but it's often the case that the emails are structured in a way that makes them especially hard to answer. This, in turn, has really changed how I compose my own email when initiating a correspondence. This HOWTO includes a lot of great advice -- things you can do to make sure your mail gets answered.

Getting a lot of responses asking, "What do you mean?" Context is your problem. When you're asking a question, anticipate any missing details that could cause an extended back-and-forth. Each time someone sends you a reply, you've gone to the back of that person's line. Do what you can to make your emails count the first time.

And for god's sake, have a subject line. One that makes sense. Some of the most important emails I've received didn't have a subject, and they almost fell through as a result. Don't waste that space with words like "Important" or "Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:". If the topic changes, change the subject line to match it. Remember that on recipients' screens, your subject competes with a large number of others for their attention.

Old-school email users have a tendency to trim everything out of the body of an email except their replies. Don't do this. For example, if you send me an invitation to speak at a conference and I ask what the topic is, you might reply with just the topic, snipping out all the details of the conference. If I've forgotten about your email by the time you reply, this means that I've got to go back through an enormous email archive to find your original message in order to figure out what you're talking about. Even if I remember, it means that I no longer have the details to hand. Don't trim email. Let it run long. It's the 21st century: an email with an extra 10k of old text at the bottom of it isn't going to swamp my mailer (the 20,000 daily spams are doing that very nicely, thank you).

Link

The press has been buzzing about the fact that a Seattle man was arrested for identity theft earlier this week -- with most of the focus being on the fact that he used P2P file sharing software to find personal info about people which he then used in his identity theft scam to get credit cards under his victims' names, order products and then sell them online at half-price. Clearly, if he's found guilty of doing this, the guy was involved in a pretty massive fraud and deserves to go to jail. However, the P2P angle is an odd one, as one of the charges is "accessing a protected computer without authorization." The thing is, it wasn't without authorization. It was just that the individuals incorrectly configured their own file sharing software to expose private details. Just as some politicians want to blame P2P software for gov't employees misconfiguring it, it seems wrong to blame this guy for accessing documents that people stupidly made available. It sounds like the guy probably did plenty of other things that will get him locked up for a long time -- but unauthorized access isn't necessarily them.