theodp writes "As if having to pay $160 to replace a failed 80-GB drive wasn't bad enough, Dave Winer learned to his dismay that Apple had no intention of giving him back the disk he paid them to replace. Since it contained sensitive data like source code and account info, Dave rightly worries about what happens if the drive falls into the wrong hands. Which raises an important question: In an age of identity theft and other confidentiality concerns, is it time for Apple — and other computer manufacturers — to start following the practice of auto mechanics and give you the option of getting back disks that are replaced?"

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slick_shoes passes on an article in the Guardian about the Blue Brain project in Switzerland that has developed a computer simulation of the neocortical column — the basic building block of the neocortex, the higher functioning part of our brains — of a two-week-old rat. (Here is the project site.) The model, running on an IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, simulates 10,000 neurons and all their interconnections. It behaves exactly like its biological counterpart. Thousands of such NCCs make up a rat's neocortex, and millions a human's. "Project director Henry Markram believes that with the state of technology today, it is possible to build an entire rat's neocortex. From there, it's cats, then monkeys and finally, a human brain."

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Tomorrow and the next day are big Jewish holidays, it's the time when we all go out for Chinese or Indian food, and talk about anything but Baby Jesus. On Christmas Day I'm going to Santa Cruz to hang with Naked Jen, who has a tradition of seeing three of the movies that come out for the holiday, and then we're going out for a Jewish celebration probably with Chinese or Indian food.

To celebrate the holiday I've brought back the photographic Scripting News banner. It chooses a random graphic every time I update the home page. I may have some fun with a CGI script that chooses a random graphic every time you refresh the page. Let's see. (Update: done!)

In 2004 I recorded a podcast for the holiday that was the telling of O Henry's sweet story of love and generosity, The Gift of the Magi. I was reminded of it seeing several interviews with Carolyn Kennedy, the daughter of President Kennedy and Jackie O, who wrote a book about Christmas that included this story. It seems appropriate tonight to link back to the telling of the story. I was in Seattle when I recorded it, about to leave for Florida. It was the year of podcasting.

Speaking of podcasts, I just listened to a podcast of today's Meet the Press interview with Presidential candidate Ron Paul. What a refreshing person to be running for political office. He's very intelligent and talks back when Russert tried to corner him. I probably won't ever get a chance to vote for him, and I don't endorse him as a candidate, but I do endorse listening to the podcast. It's excellent politics. Refreshing.

Here are some of my favorite posts from the CRAFT blog this week:

• Funky Robot with Picture Pocket - Link.
• Light Emitting Wallpaper - Link.
• Vegan Cookie Ideas - Link.
• Clairigami - Link.
• More Wrap Art - Link.

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A woman who spent 72 hours shopping, eating, and sleeping in a 24-hour Walmart in Lilburn, Georgia, was finally kicked out of the store by police.

[I]t is likely that because of all the shoppers, the woman was able to blend in with the carts, crowds and chaos and go unnoticed for 72 hours a week before Christmas. When asked by Wal-Mart employees why she was there for so long she simply said, 'I'm shopping.'

The woman was escorted home by police after she paid for her merchandise.

Link (Via Nothing To Do With Arbroath)

No mobile phone is complete without one of these mutant Kewpie doll charms. Link

Martin and I engraved a calendar on our fingernails. As the months pass, we'll cut them off!

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morphovar forwards a writeup in Low-tech Magazine recounting an almost forgotten predecessor to email and packet-switched messaging: the optical telegraph. The article maps out some of the European networks but provides no details of those built in North America in the early 1800s. Man-in-the-middle attacks were dead easy. "More than 200 years ago it was already possible to send messages throughout Europe and America at the speed of an airplane — wireless and without need for electricity. The optical telegraph network consisted of a chain of towers... placed 5 to 20 kilometers apart from each other. Every tower had a telegrapher, looking through a telescope at the previous tower in the chain. If the semaphore on that tower was put into a certain position, the telegrapher copied that symbol on his own tower. A message could be transmitted from Amsterdam to Venice in one hour's time. A few years before, a messenger on a horse would have needed at least a month's time to do the same."

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Threadless contributor Stuart Colebrook created this "Bone Idol" t-shirt design. I dig it because it's very simple yet highly effective.
Link

Scrabblous sends in this analysis of the Pushdo Trojan downloader's backend code and control server. Pushdo is a complex Trojan downloader that meticulously tracks its victims; much of its innovation is not in the Trojan itself but in its control infrastructure. Quoting: "The Pushdo controller also uses the GeoIP geolocation database in conjunction with whitelists and blacklists of country codes. This enables the Pushdo author to limit distribution of any one of the [421 different] malware loads from infecting users located in a particular country, or provides the ability to target a specific country or countries with a specific payload. Pushdo keeps track of the IP address of the victim, whether or not that person is an administrator on the computer, their primary hard drive serial number..., whether the filesystem is NTFS, how many times the victim system has executed a Pushdo variant, and the Windows OS version."

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Boing Boing reader Damien, who is hanging out in the Marshall Islands, writes,

Sitting around in the Marshall Islands Resort hotel on Majuro, blasted from jetlag and too many hours inside whizzing aluminum tubes, I switched on the TV to the NHK channel... but instead of a soccer ball being kicked around on some grass, they showed this great pic below: [Due to copyright reasons, we cannot broadcast the images.]

Gotta love (if indeed the TV message is actually true...) copyright laws that somehow mess up the one thing TV is really good at -- showing pictures. As our government keeps trying to ram through new copyright restrictions, this is another object lesson about how a lot of overly-restrictive copyright laws make things difficult for companies just trying to do business, and can screw TV viewers out of seeing some good soccer action!

Link

This huge shoe, seemingly inspired by Mother Goose, is actually an armoire for a child's room. Opening the door and windows reveals shelves, drawers, and large storage. It's 9'H x 8'w x 3.5'D and made from solid foam cast and wood. The roof has cedar shingles and the attic window is actually a night-light. Each "Whimsical Shoe Armoire" is custom made upon order from Posh Tots. The price? Just $49,000.
Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

A number of early issues of the historic print zine Radical Software are available online. Looks like they've been on the web for a few years, but it's new to me. Snip from background:

[The publication] was started by Beryl Korot, Phyllis Gershuny, and Ira Schneider and first appeared in Spring of 1970, soon after low-cost portable video equipment became available to artists and other potential videomakers. Though scholarly works on video art history often refer to Radical Software, there are few places where scholars can review its contents. Individual copies are rare, and few complete collections exist.

Link. (Thanks, kerim)

The NYT reports today of a recently declassified document which reveals that longtime FBI head J. Edgar Hoover once planned to suspend habeas corpus in the US, and imprison 12,000 citizens he suspected of being disloyal.

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.

Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.

Link (thanks, 'Werewolf boy')

Boing Boing reader Marty Z created the image above, now also available on t-shirts and stuff and says,

My wife and I were inspired to create this after visiting our local Krispy Kreme shop, watching the donuts march towards the glazing machine.

Bre writes -

Martin has a laser lasernlasern.de and we laser etched calendars on our thumbs.

A calendar laser etched on to fingernails, clever - Link.

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Andy Updegrove writes "For a few years now we've been reading about the urgency of adopting open document formats to preserve written records. Now, a 74 page report from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences warns that digital films are as vulnerable to loss as digitized documents, but vastly more expensive to preserve — as much as $208,569 per year. The reasons are the same for video as for documents: magnetic media degrade quickly, and formats continue to be created and abandoned. If this sounds familiar and worrisome, it should. We are rushing pell-mell into a future where we only focus on the exciting benefits of new technologies without considering the qualities of older technologies that are equally important — such as ease of preservation — that may be lost or fatally compromised when we migrate to a new whiz-bang technology." Here's a registration-free link for the NYTimes article cited in Andy's post.

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First, thanks for the great comments on yesterday's post about Apple and the hard disk of my MacBook. People were universally positive and helpful, and I can say I really learned some really important things as a result of the discussion.

First, the cost of the data on the hard disk swamps the value of the value of the disk and even the value of the computer. There was source code on the computer, and other information, which if it fell into the wrong hands, could cause some serious problems for me.

I have no agreement with Apple that covers the security or privacy of the data. As far as I know they think they own the contents of the disk as well as the disk itself. The experience I had with them actually makes me think they probably do feel its theirs. This from a company that takes the security of its own private information very seriously, they seem to have almost no regard for the security of its customers' information.

You have no control over when a hard disk will crash, or any foreknowledge of when it's even likely to crash. So there's no way to protect against this kind of security issue. And that's what it is. What kind of sense does it make to invest in firewalls, and of what value is Apple's claim that Macs are inherently more secure, when all the data on one of my computers is now completely out of my control forever?

I'm not so concerned about the privacy issues, but I could imagine that other people might be. And if identity thieves are not aware of this backdoor way to get access to private information, how long before they are? Security experts always warn us that obscurity is not a good strategy for security.

So what to do?

Basically I've given up on trying to get Apple to do the right thing and give me my disk back. Some people at the Emeryville store are well-itentioned, and are just naive about the problems that can come when you trust people with all your data. Others just don't care. Either way it seems unlikely that I'm going to get it back, and even if I do, it's been out of my control for too long.

I'm going to go through the tedious job of changing the passwords on all my sensitive online accounts. That was overdue anyway. And next time a laptop blows its hard disk, I'm either going to replace it myself and shred the old disk, the same way I'd shred any sensitive documents before throwing them out, or just throw away the whole computer. I know this isn't green, but there seems to be no other course that's anything close to secure.

And always be aware that you could lose a laptop, or it could be stolen. So far it seems that this is not yet an identity theft concern, but you can't be sure, and it won't be long before it is.

Thanks again for all the good info, advice and vibe.

Richard Pritches writes in to let us know that MIT errata expert Evangelos Georgiadis has disproving 44 conjectures set by Dr. Stephen Wolfram (founder of Mathematica) in A New Kind of Science. The paper was published in the latest issue of the Journal of Cellular Automata and can be read in PDF form at Prof Edwin Clark's collection of reviews of Wolfram's ANKS. "The formulas provided by Wolfram for these [44] rules are not minimal. Moreover for 8 of these cannot be minimal even by simple inspection since minimal formula sizes for 3-input Boolean functions over this basis never exceeds 5."

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