Copro Nason Gallery in Santa Monica is hosting a show of ouija boards and ouija-inspired work by more than a dozen Pop Surrealist artists. "Talking Board Show" includes spooky-beautiful pieces by the likes of David Stoupakis, Carrie Ann Baade, and Meats Meier. Seen here at very top, Christopher Owen's "Goober's Ghost Chasing Kit," and, above, Travis Louie's interpretation of the Ouija. The show runs through Halloween and all of the art is also viewable online. Link

A number of readers are writing in to tell us that Google is rolling out IMAP support for Gmail accounts. Several people say that some of their gmail accounts offer the IMAP option (in Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP) and others do not.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times has an interview with Steve Jobs about Apple's plans for Mac OS X over the next decade, and it appears that Jobs had his famous Reality Distortion Field cranked up to full power. In the interview, Jobs says "I'm quite pleased with the pace of new operating systems every 12 to 18 months for the foreseeable future," he said. "We've put out major releases on the average of one a year." The story then notes that Microsoft took "almost seven years" between XP and Vista, and notes that the next version of Windows is slated for 2010. The reporter states that "At Apple's current pace, it will have introduced two new versions of its operating system by then." Now maybe I'm bad at math, but I'm pretty sure that recent versions of Mac OS X haven't been released a year or even 18 months apart. The last version of Mac OS X was released two and a half years ago, and the one before that was released four years ago this week. So Apple has actually be averaging about 2 years per release, suggesting that "at Apple's current pace," they would release 10.6 (or whatever it's called) in October 2009, and 10.7 in October 2011. On the other hand, if you think the next version of Windows will be out before the end of the decade, I've got some real estate in Florida you might be interested in.

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.

How Appealing reports that a court has struck down age verification requirements for porn sites, as a First Amendment violation. Here is the ruling (PDF). While the average reader here has never been to such a site, porn has been a driving force in the economics and technology of the Net. The age verification requirements of U.S.C. Title 18, Section 2257 were yet another attempt to regulate to death what the government can't outright prohibit. The requirements intruded on the privacy and safety of performers and created headaches for sites like flickr and photobucket that host images. It is has long been thought that the requirements wouldn't hold up in court, but this is the first actual ruling.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in 2005, we noted that Verizon Wireless was following the tactics of others in advertising "unlimited" wireless broadband services, while the truth was they were quite limited. As people later worked out, despite the claim of "unlimited," VZW was cutting off anyone who used more than 5 gigs of data per month. That's pretty limited, actually. When confronted about this, the company tried to argue that by "unlimited" it really meant "It's unlimited amounts of data for certain types of data." And they followed it up with this gem: "It's very clear in all the legal materials we put out." Right, see, that's the legal materials -- the stuff you know no one reads. Yet in the marketing materials it's quite clear that you're claiming "unlimited" and that has a pretty clear meaning. After many such complaints, Verizon Wireless finally started to back down from the false claim of "unlimited" earlier this year. Turns out that it wasn't because of any realization that lying to your customers is a bad idea, but because NY State was investigating the practice. NY has now fined Verizon Wirelss $1 million to be given out to customers who had their service unfairly terminated for actually believing that "unlimited" meant "unlimited." Of course, Comcast might want to start paying attention right about now. While lawyers everywhere are rushing to file lawsuits over its decision to jam broadband user accounts, before that happened Comcast was famous for many, many years for being one of the biggest ISPs to lie about offering unlimited service. It's a story that comes up in the press every year or so, and every year Comcast gives its own doublespeak about how it only cuts off the worst "abusers." However, it's still false advertising to claim unlimited service when that's not what you supply -- and it's hardly "abuse" if people are merely doing what you told them they could do.

Designer Roger Arquer makes non-lethal mousetraps from household items.

Using everyday household objects like a clear drinking glass, metal springs, paper clips, and a metal nut, this "friendlier" mousetrap won't kill off your rodent infestation, but instead will just provide an easy way for you to transport them outside. The designer's intent is that you can re-use the objects after you catch the mouse. I think I would probably wash them a few hundred times first.

Link

Kevin Mack is a special effects genius that I profiled in Wired in 1999. He's also an excellent artist.

Mack's work is the result of ongoing research in a wide range of fields from the mathematics of complexity to neuroscience and human perception. His work in artificial life and rule based systems, used on What Dreams May Come and Fight Club, inspired the development of tissue simulation software that is now being used for virtual stem cell research. In 2006, Mack received the title of Honorary Neuroscientist, from UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, for his lectures there on perception, visualization and creativity.

Link

Just as it looks like Amazon may be losing its infamous "one-click" patent (though, there's still an appeals process to wait through), the company may have just received yet another ridiculous patent. As pointed out by Slashdot, Amazon has been granted a patent on adding a search string at the end of a URL, without having to include additional characters like "&q=search+query." This technique, of course, was first seen at Amazon's search subsidiary A9 when it launched. At the time, we thought it was neat, but it hardly seems deserving of a patent. This is clearly not what the patent system was designed to protect. It's for major breakthroughs, not how you happen to set things up. This would be like allowing a restaurant to patent the idea of hanging a menu in the window. It's a nice idea, but what's wrong with letting others do it as well without having to pay up first?

alphadogg sends us to Network World, as is his wont, for a summary of a new study of identity theft based on the outcomes of more than 500 Secret Service cases from 2000 to 2006. Here is the study report (PDF). The AP has coverage emphasizing other slants on the findings. Among the surprises: just 51% of convicted ID thieves were sent to prison. Only 20% of the cases involved use of the Internet, and such cases may be on the decline. More perpetrators used good old-fashioned dumpster diving and stealing stuff out of mailboxes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hulk smash puny trick-or-treaters!

Alek says:

After wasps and bats, I thought you might get a chuckle out of this. A guy was selling a giant Hulk inflatable on eBay and asked permission to use the images from my site. After thanking him for being polite enough to ask (my stuff is scraped all the time), we chatted a bit and I ended up buying it. The shipping cost was half of the sale price! So Hulk's long-lost twin brother is up for Halloween.

While the Hulk Brothers aren't controllable, everything else on the crazy Halloween display is using X10 powerline control technology ... plus there are three live webcams to keep an eye on all of the action.

While the site is totally free, over $18,000 has been raised via voluntary contributions for Celiac Research at the University of Maryland.

Alek's sons have celiac disease (a gluten intollerance), so consider donating a few bucks to help find a cure so when they grow up, they can go out for a beer and pizza with his old man. Link

Loren Coleman detours into "cryptobotany" as he comments on a strange news report from Uppinangady, Mangalor, India about a carnivorous tree that allegedly has a taste for cattle. From the Express News Service:

(Cow owner) Anand Gowda and the villagers struck mortal blows to the branches that turned limp and the cow was rescued. Uppinangady range forest officer (RFO) Subramanya Rao said the tree was described as ‘pili mara’ (tiger tree) in native lingo. Link

And from Loren's post at Cryptomundo:

In Roy Mackal’s book, Searching for Hidden Animals (NY: Doubleday, 1980), his last chapter is entitled “The Monstrous Plants.” It was not about cryptozoology, needless to say, but about cryptobotany, being a short treatise on the Victorian accounts of man-eating plants...

Mackal spends his final chapter detailing mostly the reports from the 1850s through the 1940s of the “Man-Eating Tree of Madagacar,” and the expeditions that searched (unsuccessfully) for the species. Link

Last week on an episode of Boing Boing tv, we featured an infauxmercial by Gabe Delahaye and Max Silvestri about How to Get the Dream Life of Your Dreams Using the Internet..

Since airing that episode, we've been overwhelmed with messages (bing bong, you got your emails) from viewers who wanted to know how they could get more out of the Internet with new technologies like blobs, and emails, and Myspaces such as the MySpace and Friendsters.

So we reached out to Gabe & Max and asked if they'd conduct a sort of internet video advice session JUST FOR BOING BOING. They agreed.

Now comes the excellent part: You, yes you, for the low low price of zero dollars, can ask your VERY OWN QUESTIONS to Gabe and Max using this internet comments form on this very post.

Act now and Ask now! Gabe & Max will answer you in a future episode of Boing Boing tv.

Previously: BBtv - Internet Cookies/Internet... Thing

With all the fuss over Comcast's decision to jam certain types of traffic without being even remotely transparent about it, people are starting the countdown to the inevitable lawsuits. This is beginning to take on some similarities to Sony's rootkit debacle, which started to spread in a similar matter. And, just like Sony responded initially by saying rootkits were okay because no one knows what they are, Comcast has said that people shouldn't worry about this because most people won't be able to detect it. In other words, just like Sony, Comcast is seriously underestimating what this is doing for the company's brand. As the link above notes, someone could make a pretty good case that Comcast's method of jamming traffic violates certain state laws forbidding impersonating others -- since, technically, that's exactly what Comcast is doing to jam the traffic. There's also the question of whether or not it becomes an FTC issue for misleading customers into believing they could do certain things with their connection that they could not. If Comcast wants to avoid a full Sony rootkit style mess, it would be good for the company to come right out and make it clear what they do and what that means for its customers.

ricegf writes in with the account of one Rupert Goodwins writing in ZDNet UK. Goodwins has 7 computers running various versions of Windows and Linux, and explains why he chooses to do most of his work on the Gibbon. "So here's the funny thing. I've used Windows since 1.0. I've lived through the bad times of Windows/386 and ME, and the good times of NT 3.51 and 2K. I know XP if not backwards, then with a degree of familiarity that only middle-aged co-dependents can afford each other... Then how come I'm so much more at home with Ubuntu than Vista? It boils down to one abiding impression: Ubuntu goes out of its way to get out of your way... Vista goes out of its way to be Vista and enforce the Vista way."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wired Test is available from Cool Tools as a free PDF.

Since it debuted a few years ago, I've eagerly awaited the arrival of these product-packed issues of Wired. Tested, reviewed and rated are pretty much every gadget imaginable in every category imaginable (much of it very newly-released, too). Again, exclusively for Cool Tools readers, Wired's editor in chief Chris Anderson has graciously provided a pdf of the Fall issue (on newsstands today). What you get: 125 pages of solid content broken into specific sections and spreads, everything from A/V to office to kitchen to automotive to garden to gaming equipment and accessories. This means: flatscreens, laptops, lawnmowers, headphones, pocketcams, DV cams, blenders, cell phones, wine openers, strollers, and more, ranging from cheap to relatively affordable to the 'yeah right.'

Link

Bruce Eisner's remembers Timothy Leary's birthday, which was yesterday.

If Timothy Leary were alive, he would be 87 years old today. But Timothy Leary is dead, having passed from our lives in 1996.

In remembering Timothy on his birthday, I Googled for a portion of his autobiography, Flashbacks called "My Conception of My Conception" in which he "describes" the experience of being born.

I got lucky and found this video on YouTube which appears to have been made by some of the folks living at Tim's house in Beverly Hills when he passed away. One of them reads the section from Timothy's autobiography Flashbacks that I was looking for.

Link

mytrip sends word that Turbolinux has followed Novell, Linspire, and Xandros in signing a patent and technology agreement with Microsoft. Microsoft pledged not to sue Turbolinux's users for patent infringement. Turbolinux, headquartered in Japan, sells Linux systems mostly in emerging markets such as China and India. The Betanews story speculates on some of the technology benefits Turbolinux might get out of the deal.