The next issue of BB fave art magazine Hi-Fructose features the psychedelically sweet artwork of the magical Yoko D'holbachie! Check out editor Attaboy's blog for some preview spreads in the next few days.
Link to Attaboy's blog, Link to d'Holbachie's Cosmos (via Laughing Squid)

Well, this could get interesting. Following the leak of MediaDefender's emails, the folks behind The Pirate Bay now believe they have enough evidence to sue many major entertainment firms for "infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming." Basically, there's evidence in the emails that a bunch of firms, including Universal, EMI, Sony, Paramount and others were using MediaDefender to try to mess with The Pirate Bay's system. Whether or not the lawsuit actually goes anywhere may depend on a lot of factors (including Swedish laws, which I am totally unfamiliar with). There may be some questions about how the emails in question were obtained. And, of course, the entertainment companies will likely counter that they were just trying to protect their own materials -- which could find a sympathetic ear in a courtroom. Either way it would be quite a lawsuit.

GeekyBodhi writes "LessWatts.org is Intel's new website that hosts several power saving tools. As Linux.com reports, it also shares tips and tricks to help optimize power consumption on hardware from portable devices running on batteries to large data centers. 'LessWatts.org is not about marketing, trying to sell you something or comparing one vendor to another. LessWatts.org is about how you can save real watts, however you use Linux on your computer or computers.' As reported on Slashdot earlier, this isn't the first time Intel has tried to help Linux users cut their power bills. In May, the company launched the PowerTOP program that monitors individual processes to keep track of power consumption. The project comes at a time when more vendors are pre-installing Linux on handhelds and laptops." Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Australian government has had a long and storied history of trying to block porn on the Internet. But, this Thursday, a bill was introduced in Australia that would take this censorship even further. The bill would allow the federal police to alter the blacklist of sites currently controlled by the Australian Communications and Media Authority. With this, the federal police are empowered to blacklist any site that "encourages, incites or induces," "facilitate(s)" or "has, or is likely to have, the effect of facilitating" a crime. This brush is incredibly broad, and without proper checks and balances, it seems likely to be abused. Australian Police would be able to block any site they don't like, and claim that it is "likely" to facilitate crime. Australia's censorship trip down a very slippery slope takes a big second step here. First porn, now "criminal" sites. With this power, Australia is but a tiny step away from censoring valid free speech. Maybe Australia should just route all of its traffic through China's "Great Firewall" first -- that might be easier.

Earlier this year, a Cartoon Network marketing promotion became a huge story in the city of Boston when police assumed that some promotional light-up boxes were actually bombs. Rather than admit that they made a mistake and overreacted, the authorities in Boston continued to accuse the folks behind the promotion of perpetrating a "hoax" on the city. Of course, a hoax is where you try and trick people. None of the folks involved in the promotion were trying to trick anyone into believing the promotional devices were bombs. They were simply promotional. However, Boston still seems to be focused on calling any electronics device they don't understand a hoax device. The latest situation involves an MIT student wearing a sweatshirt that included a homemade electrical component that would light up LEDs on the sweatshirt. It's certainly understandable that security would want to check out the device and understand it. It's even somewhat understandable that they would be quite concerned about a homemade electrical device found in a sweatshirt. Walking into an airport with such a device is asking for trouble. However, to then accuse her of possessing a "hoax device," seems a bit absurd. This wasn't a "hoax" device at all. She wasn't trying to trick anyone.

Riding with Robots writes "The Mars Odyssey orbiter has come across what look to be openings to cavernous spaces under the surface of Mars. NASA reports the find is fueling interest in potential underground habitats and sparking searches for caves elsewhere on the Red Planet. These latest images follow other recent discoveries of intriguing places to explore. From the article: 'The find has led some to wonder if these or other caves on the planet may provide shelter to life or former life on the Red Planet. "Somewhere on Mars, caves might provide a protected niche for past or current life, or shelter for humans in the future," said Tim Titus of the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff. These caves, however, likely never hosted life due to the extreme altitude of their location. "Even if life has ever existed on Mars, it may not have migrated to this height," said Cushing.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel has been hyping up WiMax for ages, to the point that many people (including reporters) believed it existed when didn't. In fact, Intel even declared WiMax a proven success before it existed. Now that's marketing! While there's a decent chance that WiMax will eventually be successful, it's reached the point that we have a hard time believing anything Intel has to say about the technology. So, when they come out and say something like 2008 will be the year for WiMax consider us skeptical. The good news is that we're not the only ones. That Wired article is written by Bryan Gardiner who expresses his skepticism and quotes some WiMax skeptics and points to Intel's earlier overstated claims on the technology. Either way, the idea that 2008 will be the year for WiMax simply reminds me of the fact that some wireless company or analyst firm seems to have declared every year since 2003 the year for "3G wireless." Now that we're moving on to what some people consider "4G," it's only fitting that we have four or five years of people claiming that next year (no, really this time!) will be the year for WiMax.

inkslinger77 writes "DRM technology used in consumer media may be violating Canadian privacy laws, according to a new report. The study, done by University of Ottawa's Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, found that a number of services like iTunes, Visio, and Symantec's North SystemWorks require too much personal information in order to verify their users. 'Another issue cited by [study lead investigator David Fewer] concerned the disclosure of DRM-collected personal information from users of Intuit's QuickTax software."It wasn't the use of QuickTax itself that triggered the concern, but rather the use of Intuit's online filing service where we found buried in one of the disclosures the notice that, as an international corporation, Intuit would send information across the border," Fewer said.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Wednesday, the Software Freedom Law Center filed a lawsuit to enforce the GPL against a company that has been distributing GPL-derived software without disclosing the source code, as the GPL requires. The SFLC says this is the first US copyright infringement lawsuit it has ever filed for infringement of the GPL. Traditionally, SFLC head Eben Moglen has worked to settle disputes with companies without going to court. But in this case the lawsuit was filed less than a month after SFLC first contacted the defendant, Monsoon Multimedia, about its violation of the license. Luis Villa suggests a couple of possible reasons they moved so quickly. One is that Monsoon failed to respond to the SFLC's letters, leaving them little choice but to go to court. Another factor is the recent Jacobsen decision, which called into question the enforceability of open source software licenses. The SFLC may have felt its chances of winning on appeal were not as good with the Jacobsen case, which is more complicated and involves a less popular license. And so instead of appealing Jacobsen, they may have fast-tracked a case they believe will make it more likely they'll win on appeal.

This will be an important case because it will help clarify the legal status of the GPL and other copyleft licenses. The Free Software Foundation argues that the GPL is a license, and that any violation of the GPL results in copyright infringement. That would entitle the authors of GPLed software not only to monetary damages but also to prohibit further use of the software by the infringing party. But other legal scholars think the GPL may be interpreted as a contract, in which case only monetary damages would be available. And because GPLed software is given away for free, it's an open question how those damages would be calculated. It's conceivable that a judge could hold that the proper amount of monetary damages is zero since the software is being given away for free. The SFLC is clearly trying to avoid that outcome by emphasizing that the software in question is sold by "more than 100 manufacturers all over the world, including IBM, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard, and Siemens."

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

Naomi Wolf was on The Colbert Report last night talking about her book, The End of America, A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, which outlines ten steps that "fascist, totalitarian, and other repressive leaders [employ to] seize and maintain power, especially in what were once democracies.”

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

2. Create a gulag

3. Develop a thug caste

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

5. Harass citizens' groups

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

7. Target key individuals

8. Control the press

9. Dissent equals treason

10. Suspend the rule of law

Here's an essay on the 10 steps that Wolf wrote for the Guardian in April. Link to Colbert video

mytrip pointed out a News.com story about a new Microsoft program to allow PC makers to downgrade from Vista to XP if they so choose. They're still pushing the new version of Windows very hard, but the option now exists for PC resellers to offer the now venerable OS. This is especially interesting as the article points out that OEM licenses for XP officially run out at the end of January. "Hewlett-Packard also started a program in August for many of its business models. 'For business desktops, workstations and select business notebooks and tablet PCs, customers can configure their systems to include the XP Pro restore disc for little or no charge,' HP spokeswoman Tiffany Smith said in an e-mail. She said it was too soon to gauge how high customer interest has been. 'Since we've only been offering (it) for about a month, we don't really have anything to share on demand.' A Microsoft representative confirmed there were some changes made over the summer to the options computer makers have with respect to XP, but the representative was not immediately able to elaborate on those changes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few weeks ago a well-respected developer wrote a blog post about something he called the "social graph." A graph, to most people, is a diagram like the one on the right, which plots the value of a stock over time. For 99.99 percent of the people this is what a graph is. For a very small group of people, a graph is also something like this:



This is the kind of thing you study in a branch of mathematics called Graph Theory. I know a bit about this because when I was an undergraduate, getting a degree in math, I studied this stuff. I proved theorums about how many edges you'd have to traverse to get from one point to another on this kind of graph. There are many types of graphs, directed and undirected, for example. Some that you'd need two colors to paint, or three, but none need more than four (a theory that has been proven since I left school, thanks to computers).

Graphs are useful for modeling stuff that goes on in computers. They are also part of a field of math called combinatorics that's related to statistics, and also related to a highly theoretical area of math called topology.

Now if you showed that diagram to most educated people, they probably would call it a network, and before we talked about social graphs we called them social networks, and you know what -- they're exactly the same thing, and social network is a much less confusing term, so why don't we just stick with it? (Answer: we should, imho.)

So if you want to sound like an idiot, call a social network a social graph, and everyone who knows anything about math or computer science with think you're a monkey. Or call it a social network and stand up for your right to understand technology, and make the techies actually do some useful stuff instead of making simple stuff sound complicated.

PS: This Google search illustrates. Most of the definitions of "graph" are what you'd expect. There is one search result for "graph theory" -- when they talk about the social graph that's what they're talking about.

That's How it Happened presents a puzzle to ponder before the weekend begins.

You're a cowboy, and get involved in a three way pistol duel with two other cowboys. You are a poor shot, with an accuracy of only 33%. The other two cowboys shoot with accuracies of 50% and 100%, respectively. The rules of the duel are one shot per cowboy per round. The shooting order is from worst shooter to best shooter, so you get to shoot first, the 50% guy goes second, and the 100% guy goes third, then repeat. If a cowboy is shot he's out for good, and his turn is skipped. Where or who should you shoot first?

(CC-licensed photo by Rick)

Link

Japanese scientists have created this cute-as-a-bug see-thru froggy.

the transparent frog is the result of breeding two specimens of Japanese brown frog (Rana japonica) that had a genetic mutation giving them pale skin. By selectively breeding their offspring, the researchers were able to create a frog that remains transparent for its entire life cycle. Most of the world’s known transparent creatures live underwater, and transparent four-legged animals are extremely rare.

Link

Billosaur writes "In what can only be seen as the opening salvo in an attempt to control what users can do with content, the German parliament has approved a controversial copyright law which will make it illegal to make copies of CDs and DVDs, even for personal use. The Bundesrat, the upper part of the German parliament, approved the legislation over the objections of consumer protection groups. The law is set to take effect in 2008, and covers CDs, DVDs, recordings from IPTV, and TV recordings."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael says: "A man in Japan has been taking a photo of the same vending machine every day and intensely noting the changes. He compares to previous years, draws diagrams of movements, and keeps complete tabs on everything else. Also remarkable is how clean and unbroken it remains the entire time. How long could an outdoor machine like this last in America?" Link

Amanda Visell created this snazzy "I Heart Tripods" cat shirt to help cover the vet bills of owners of cats that must have a leg amputated for one reason or another. It's $30. Link

For years the big research companies have been putting out report after report after report claiming that mobile broadcast TV is going to be a huge moneymaker. However, there seems to be almost no real evidence to support this. In the 80s there was an attempt at mobile TV that went nowhere. Yet, the studies keep coming. The latest is from Juniper Research predicting that mobile-broadcast TV services will be a $6.6 billion market by the year 2012, which is very soon for a market that there are still a ton of questions around. This isn't to say that mobile video isn't an interesting service, but it's difficult to believe that the market for broadcast style TV is one that many people would ever pay for. There are many reasons why. First off, mobile users are quite often "on the go," meaning that they don't necessarily have the time or inclination to be watching broadcast TV programs. Instead, they're more likely to want to do mobile specific things -- short clip videos or videos that are more communication than content. Most importantly, however, it's difficult to believe that there's really money in mobile broadcast video because a combination of tools like TiVo and Slingbox mean that people aren't going to have to pay to watch what they want, when they want, where they want. I can already get mobile broadcast TV on my phone today -- thanks to a Slingbox and a smartphone with unlimited data. Why would I possibly pay more for it?