Molly "Porkshanks" Friedrich's Ludiculous Skytop Zeppelin Hat is a sky-blue, cloud-decorated leatherette top-hat, featuring a miniature zeppelin on its brim. Link (Thanks, Jake!)

Kembrew sez,

American University Professors Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi -- who were behind the very successful Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use -- just released a new study that focuses on user generated video content. The study, titled "Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video," will be presented and discussed on Monday, Jan. 7 at the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show. This report finds that many online videos creatively use copyrighted materials in ways that are eligible for fair use consideration under copyright law. In short, they are potentially using copyrighted material legally. These uses—an exercise of freedom-of-speech rights--are currently threatened by anti-piracy measures online.

Researchers in the Washington College of Law and School of Communication followed thousands of links for videos on 75 online video platforms and discovered nine popular kinds of use (extensive database of examples at centerforsocialmedia.org/recutvideos). They are:

1. Parody and satire: Copyrighted material used in spoofing of popular mass media, celebrities or politicians (Baby Got Book)

2. Negative or critical commentary: Copyrighted material used to communicate a negative message (Metallica Sucks)

3. Positive commentary: Copyrighted material used to communicate a positive message (Steve Irwin Fan Tribute)

4. Quoting to trigger discussion: Copyrighted material used to highlight an issue and prompt public awareness, discourse (Abstinence PSA on Feministing.com)

5. Illustration or example: Copyrighted material used to support a new idea with pictures and sound (Evolution of Dance)

6. Incidental use: Copyrighted material captured as part of capturing something else (Prisoners Dance to Thriller)

7. Personal reportage/diaries: Copyrighted material incorporated into the chronicling of a personal experience (Me on stage with U2 -- AGAIN!!!)

8. Archiving of vulnerable or revealing materials: Copyrighted material that might have a short life on mainstream media due to controversy (Stephen Colbert's Speech at the White House Correspondent's Dinner)

9. Pastiche or collage: Several copyrighted materials incorporated together into a new creation, or in other cases, an imitation of sorts of copyrighted work (Apple Commercial)

Link

Bilal sez, "I just made a laser cutter that costs less than 50 dollars. The link is to the instructables detailed description of it's construction. I hope this gives you hope for a city completely plastered in intricate stencils impossible to cut by hand."

Here's the list:
1x Laser diodes Ebay Store $36 dollars for 2
2x Old Scanners Salvation Army $10 Dollars each
2x ULN2003 Electronic Connection $5
1x Prototyping board RadioSchack $2
2x 3/8" Aluminum Rod Home Depot $3 each
1x 3/8" Aluminum Tube Home Depot $3
10x Brass Brackets Home Depot $1
1x 2" cube of wood Home Depot $1
A bushel of Patience

Link (Thanks, Bilal!)

I'm quite taken by Ukrainian artist Andrew Severynko's "Gourmand" junk-sculpture. I think it's the glass beaker combined with the kitsch souvenir suit-of-armor head, and the overall quality of predation in this thing, as though it spent its nights squirming through fantastic junk shops, eating their best pieces. Link (Thanks, Owen!)

time961 writes "In Service Pack 3 for Office 2003, Microsoft disabled support for many older file formats. If you have old Word, Excel, 1-2-3, Quattro, or Corel Draw documents, watch out! They did this because the old formats are 'less secure', which actually makes some sense, but only if you got the files from some untrustworthy source. Naturally, they did this by default, and then documented a mind-bogglingly complex workaround (KB 938810) rather than providing a user interface for adjusting it, or even a set of awkward 'Do you really want to do this?' dialog boxes to click through. And of course because these are, after all, old file formats ... many users will encounter the problem only months or years after the software change, while groping around in dusty and now-inaccessible archives."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

cagnol writes "The Washington Post reports that Jimmy Wales, the founder of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has announced the launch of a new open-source search engine, Wikia Search, on January 7th, 2008. The project will allow the community to help rank search results, in a model close to Wikipedia. However the company is a for-profit organization. This new search is supposed to challenge Google and Yahoo."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

drewmoney writes "According to an article on Groklaw: It's begun in a Nigerian court. LANCOR has actually done it. Guess what the Nigerian keyboard makers want from the One Laptop Per Child charitable organization trying to make the world a better place? $20 million dollars in 'damages,' and an injunction blocking OLPC from distribution in Nigeria."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lucas123 writes "According to a Computerworld survey of IT managers, data storage projects are the No. 2 project priority for corporations in 2008, up from No. 4 in 2007. IT teams are looking into clustered architectures and centralized storage-area networks as one way to control capacity growth, shifting away from big-iron storage and custom applications. The reason for the data avalanche? Archive data. In the private sector alone electronic archives will take up 27,000 petabytes (27 billion gigabytes) by 2010. E-mail growth accounts for much of that figure."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 1980, I signed a deal with a company to market a product I was developing. The contract required me to turn over the source code, which I did. One day I went to a meeting at the office of the company, and there on the product manager's desk, next to a door that opened to the outside, was a floppy labeled "Dave Winer's source code" in big letters.

If you own a Mac you may soon find out what that felt like.

It's amazing to me that the tech blogosphere doesn't treat Apple's policy re broken hard disks as the huge gaping security hole that it is.

Think about it. We worry about bad people getting their hands on little pieces of data that, when added together, give them the power to be us in banking and credit transactions.

Think about what you would do if your laptop was stolen.

Well, if you own a Mac and its hard disk goes bad, and you make the mistake of bringing it to Apple for service, you will turn over all that data to Apple. Not "may" or "might" but "will." What Apple in turn does with that data is none of your affair. They don't sign anything or offer any guarantees that they won't sell the disk to a data miner. Think it can't happen or that it's unlikely? I don't gain much comfort from your feeling of security.

I've been writing about this issue since December 22. Usually when I write something critical of Apple, the results are mixed. Some people are supportive, but far more people attack. This time the ratio is very different. Almost everyone who has commented gets that there's a huge problem here.

Some say that other vendors do this too. That gives me less comfort, not more. That means there's no escaping this crazy way of treating user's confidentiality. Ultimately it hurts the vendors because people can't use their computers for things the manufacturers say we can.

Further, it's got to be an issue for the banks, brokerage firms, credit agencies. If you are a newspaper and you employ reporters and they use a computer, how exactly are you guarding the confidentiality of your sources? If you're a confidential source, don't you have an interest when the reporter gives their computer manufacturer all their data to do with as they please?

Imagine what you would do if it turned out there was a bug in a Netgear or Linksys router that allowed, under special circumstances, a mailicous person to gain access to the full content of your hard disk at any time. Would you have a problem with that?

This is worse than Microsoft's neglect of malware that got me to stop using their computers. In that case it was Microsoft being neglegent. This time Apple itself is the source of the problem. It's as if they planted a virus in their operating system that entitled them, under special circumstances, completely out of your control, to gain access to everything on your disk, with as much time as they want, with no way for you to prevent or even detect the intrusion.

See also: My letter to Steve Jobs.

PS: Re yesterday's post, Apple does not have a store in Shanghai. I assume the customer is sincere, he thought he was at an Apple-owned store. Here's a picture of the place he probably went to. BTW, I'm 100-percent sure that the store in Emeryville is owned by Apple. You can find it on Apple's store website.

crush writes "The Linux Game Tome notes that the final team to produce a fully Open Source 3D game using the CrystalSpace engine and Blender has been chosen. The project (known as Apricot) aims to produce a cross-platform, 3D game with completely Free (CCA) graphics, music and code. An important side-effect of the project is to improve open source tools for the professional game development industry." I look forward to more 3D games on my desktop, even if this one won't be the first. (And where is the bus-driving equivalent open-source equivalent to the under-rated FlightGear?)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael sez, "It's January 1st! Do you know what works are passing into the public domain in the life+50, and life+70 countries? Lots! Here in the USA (where basically nothing published in 1923 or later will ever enter the public domain, to protect Disney's 'Steamboat Willie'), only unpublished works of the life+70 class of authors enter the public domain. Whew. Thank goodness for small favors, right?. We can now expect the unpublished works of George Gershwin, H.P. Lovecraft, Amelia Earhart, J.M. Barrie, and John Davison Rockefeller (yeah right), among many others, to be free and clear of copyright encumbrances for those who wish to publish them. Boy, unpublished works! Wow! After 70 years since they died, there must be lots of those hanging around, right? Right?"

John Mark Ockerbloom, online librarian, sez, "For this year's Public Domain Day, I'm blogging about both what the public domain can do for us, and what we can do for the public domain. In particular, this is the first New Year's Day that's more than 14 years after the 1993 introduction of NCSA Mosaic, the browser that started the explosive growth of the World Wide Web. 14 years is also the initial term of copyright specified in the Statute of Anne and the US's first copyright law. So in honor of that, I'm dedicating the copyrights of the 1993 versions of my web sites, which include the still-going-strong Online Books Page, to the public domain. And I invite other Net old-timers to make similar dedications of their old online content."

The life+50 class of the newly-Public Domain includes works by American novelist Anne Parrish; British novelist Dorothy Richardson; Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias; Romanian poet George Bacovia; Canadian-American geologist Reginald Aldworth Daly; American journalist, novelist, dramatist and poet Kenneth Lewis Roberts; Australian children’s author Gladys Lister; American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.; Irish-British mystery author Freeman Wills Crofts; American architect Julia Morgan; Swiss-Canadian geologist Carl Faessler; Canadian historian John Bartlet Brebner; Swiss artist Adolf Dietrich; American Prohibition agent Eliot Ness; Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi; American novelist and poet Christopher Morley; Italian author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; English theologian, priest, and crime writer Msgr Ronald Arbuthnott Knox; American geologist William H. Twenhofel; British lawyer and self-styled explorer Sir Randle F.W. Holme; Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral; British physician and medical historian John Joyce Keevil; American ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore; author and Esperantist James Denson Sayers; British biophysicist Rosalind Franklin; American artist Adaline Kent; British detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers (aka “Mrs Fleming”); American author Peter B. Kyne; American Western novelist Eugene Cunningham; Ukrainian-born writer Mark Aleksandrovich Aldanov; Anglo-Irish fantasy writer Lord Dunsany; Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis (“Zorba the Greek”, “Last Temptation of Christ”); Irish artist Jack Butler Yeats; American explorer and aviator Richard Evelyn Byrd; American collector of Native American antiquities George Gustav Heye; British-born philatelist Bertram William Henry Poole; British architect and urban planner Sir (Leslie) Patrick Abercrombie; British journalist and author Helen Pearl Adam; Irish physician and poet Oliver St John Gogarty; Canadian geologist Joseph Burr Tyrrell; Danish artist Kay Nielsen; American journalist Burton Rascoe; Italian poet and novelist Umberto Poli (“Umberto Saba”); German film director Max Ophüls; Canadian Parliamentarian Martha Louise Black; American astronomer Mary Proctor; Finnish composer Jean Sibelius; Hungarian-American mathematician John Von Neumann; Austrian-born anthropologist Felix Bryk; English writer and poet Rose Fyleman; Austrian-American composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold; Austrian-American psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich; British “boys stories” novelist Frederick Sadleir Brereton; American political scientist and philosopher Arthur F Bentley; Australian archaeologist and historian Gordon Childe; Canadian political scientist and historian William Bennett Munro; German physicist Johannes Stark; American pulp sci-fi author Ray Cummings...

Link (Thanks, Michael and John!)

Hugh Pickens writes "Four out of five people who make New Year's resolutions will eventually break them and a third won't even make it to the end of January says the NY Times. But experts say the real problem is that people make the wrong resolutions. The typical resolution often reflects a general desire. To engineer better behavior, it is more productive to focus on a specific goal. '"Many clients make broad resolutions, but I advise them to focus the goals so that they are not overwhelmed," says Lisa R. Young. "Small and tangible one-day-at-a-time goals work best."' Here are some resolutions that experts say can work: To lose weight, resolve to split an entree with your dining partner when dining out. To improve your fitness, wear a pedometer and monitor your daily activity. To improve family life, resolve to play with your kids at least one extra day a week. To improve your marriage, find a new activity you and your spouse both enjoy such as taking a pottery class. On a lighter note: What was Steve Jobs' New Year's Resolution?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

chrisd writes "The Edge 2008 question (with answers) is in. This year, the question is: 'What did you change your mind about and why?'. Answers are featured from scientists as diverse as Richard Dawkins, Simon Baron-Cohen, George Church, David Brin, J. Craig Venter and the Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, among others. Very interesting to read. For instance, Stewart Brand writes that he now realizes that 'Good old stuff sucks' and Sam Harris has decided that 'Mother Nature is Not Our Friend.' What did Slashdot readers change their minds about in 2007?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

twitter writes "The Vista Death Watch is PC Magazine's most popular column. That is just one of many items in Dvorak's review of yet another 'disappointing' year in Technology. 'I was not a fan of 2007. It was another crappy tech year--just the latest in a string of bad years dating back to 2000. Let's see some of the highlights and lowlights in no particular order ... The whopper for Intel, though, was its Viiv initiative, which was a dog from the get-go and was dropped--finally. Somewhere along the way, Intel bought into the Silicon Valley crock that CPUs were not important any more. What a laugh. Luckily for the company, it refocused on processor chips and found itself in the driver's seat once again. Of course, Intel will fall off the path again, of that you can be sure.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "The One Laptop Per Child project suffered a blow Monday, with CTO Mary Lou Jepsen quitting the nonprofit to start a for-profit company to commercialize technology she invented with OLPC (the first of Jepsen's pending OLPC patents was published by the USPTO on Dec. 13). The OLPC project halted consumer sales of the cheap laptop at the end of December."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Glyn Moody writes "Google always plays down suggestions that there's any looming clash of the titans between itself and Microsoft. Meanwhile, the search giant is pushing open source in every way it can. They're contributing directly by contributing code to projects and employing top hackers like Andrew Morton, Jeremy Allison and Guido van Rossum, and indirectly through the $60 million fees it pays Mozilla, its Summer of Code scheme and various open source summits held at its offices. Google+OSS: could this be the killer combination that finally breaks Microsoft?"

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supersat writes "At the stroke of midnight New Year's Eve, Seattle's fireworks show ground to a halt. The source of the problem is reported to be a corrupted file that wasn't checked until the last minute. After two reboots, the fireworks had to be detonated manually. And yes ... one blog commenter, claiming to have worked on prior shows, said that the shows run on Windows."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anonymous writes "At the end of this piece at Channelweb.com, it's reported that Microsoft paid Novell $355.6 million last year as part of their 'interoperability' deal. It's no small wonder, then, that Novell executives are saying the deal has been a huge success so far."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.