Stony Stevenson alerts us to news out of CES that Sony has kick-started another standards war, this time over wireless USB. Ars notes that Sony "[never was] one to settle for an open standard when the opportunity to push a proprietary alternative presents itself." Sony's TransferJet technology uses low-power UWB at very short distances to transfer data at a nominal 520 Mbps. Almost every other large technology company — including Intel, Microsoft, HP, and Samsung — has embraced the W-USB standard, which promises transfer speeds of 480 Mbps at distances up to 3 meters, vs. TransfeJet's 3 centimeters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

They are running for the hills but the end of the trail is Little Big Horn, where Custer made his last stand, and lost his life. Of course the Indians didn't do too well either.

AP: "Girding for a potential threat from Apple Inc., online DVD rental service Netflix Inc. is lifting its limits on how long most subscribers can watch movies and television shows over high-speed Internet connections."

Please oh Netflix strategy gods, get a copy of Marketing Warfare and read it.

Netflix owns what used to be a great hill, for some it might still be one, the movies-by-mail hill.

They obviously feel they need to be in the Internet movie business, and in that they have a huge head start that they aren't using. They are being too damned fair to their competitors.

Give the users the ability to grant other sites access to their movie ratings. Build Netflix into the social network of movies. You're already there, but you need to make every other social network connect up to Netflix. You need to be the hub for movie-watching on the net. You're lucky that so far that's what you are. But soon you will have to fight for that too, and then it will be too late to try to force your competitors to connect to your site. They will have data that you want. Then the nature of the negotiating will change. Right now you have the data. Use that power!

Make the users everyone think of Netflix as the place on the Net for Flix.

The AP has a story on Netflix's move to head off expected competition from Apple: the company will lift limits on streaming its movies for most subscribers. The story reports on rumors of an Apple movie-download service that may be announced by Steve Jobs on Tuesday. In the past Netflix has imposed limits on how long its subscribers could watch streamed movies; for example, those who paid $16.99/mo. could stream up to 17 hours per month. The limits will end on Monday for most subscribers (except for those paying $4.99 for two DVD rentals a month, said to be a small minority). The company has 6,000 movies available for streaming, compared to 90,000 that you can get delivered in the mail.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The AP has a story on Netflix's move to head off expected competition from Apple: the company will lift limits on streaming its movies for most subscribers. The story reports on rumors of an Apple movie-download service that may be announced by Steve Jobs on Tuesday. In the past Netflix has imposed limits on how long its subscribers could watch streamed movies; for example, those who paid $16.99/mo. could stream up to 17 hours per month. The limits will end on Monday for most subscribers (except for those paying $4.99 for two DVD rentals a month, said to be a small minority). The company has 6,000 movies available for streaming, compared to 90,000 that you can get delivered in the mail.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sunday Scientist writes "Minnesota researchers have created a beating heart in the laboratory. In a process called whole organ decellularization, they grew functioning heart tissue by using dead rat and pig hearts as a sort of flesh matrix, and reseeding them with a mixture of live cells. The goal is to grow replacement parts, using their own stem cells, for people born with defective tickers or experiencing heart failure."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at Laughing Squid, Scott Beale has a neat post up about these fried-egg molds from Urban Trend that allow you to cook your sunny side ups in the shape of a gun. There's a lethal cholesterol joke in here somewhere, but my arteries are too clogged to think it up. Link.

The latest volume of the magazine Index on Censorship focuses on issues related to free speech online. I'm among the contributors. Here's a snip from the issue overview:

The Internet was supposed to spell the end of censorship – instead governments now have unprecedented possibilities for controlling what we do and what we read. But this is a revolution in free expression that can’t be stopped. Index examines the explosion in communication, the rise in new forms of censorship (and the ways to get round them) and the impact on social attitudes.

I wrote about what I've learned about internet filtering technology from my experience co-editing BoingBoing, which is routinely blocked by various censorware applications for all sorts of silly, inaccurate reasons. Nearly every day (certainly every week) we receive a perplexed message from a would-be reader asking "why is BoingBoing blocked from [library/airport/hotel/whatever place name] in [location name somewhere in the world]?"

Subscribe to the Index in print here. Longer list of other contributors to this issue, and their chosen topics, after the jump. This is a fine publication, and a fine bunch of writers from around the world sharing important ideas and testimonies -- what a shame the contents are not freely available online.

Nart Villeneuve how to beat the censors; Jon Garvie on free trade free speech; David Weinberger the Internet race for the White House; Shiraz Maher on cyber jihad; Emily Bell on the engineers of expression; Steven Murdoch and Ross Anderson new borders; David Livingstone the challenge of extremism; Gus Hosein Big Brother comes of age; Ethio Zagol blogging in Ethiopia; Yetaai taking China Telecom to court; Andrew Wasley new activism; Nii Ayikwei Parkes the view from Ghana; Stan Cohen on how downloading became a crime; Bill Thompson on the end of privacy; Richard Morgan on a science fiction writer resists the messianic urge; Jimmy Wales, Don Tapscott, Iran Proxy and others call for freedom online; Geoffrey Robertson and Andrew Nicol examine the state of the media freedom; Leo Murray direct action on the front line; Alex de Waal on Darfur; Kamila Shamsie dissects the West’s image of Pakistan; Maleiha Malik takes on incitement; Martin Rowson on Stripsearch.

mmuch writes "In the wake of the recent copyright debate in Swedish mainstream media, the P2P Consortium has published an interview with Rick Falkvinge, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party. He comments on the mainstream politicians starting to understand the issues, the interplay between strict copyright enforcement and mass surveillance, and the chances for global copyright reform." Some choice Falkvinge quotes: "What was remarkable was that this was the point where the enemy — forces that want to lock down culture and knowledge at the cost of total surveillance — realized they were under a serious attack... for the first time, we saw everything they could bring to the battle. And it was... nothing. Not even a fizzle. All they can say is 'thief, we have our rights, we want our rights, nothing must change, we want more money, thief, thief, thief'... Whereas we are talking about scarcity vs. abundance, monopolies, the nature of property, 500-year historical perspectives on culture and knowledge, incentive structures, economic theory, disruptive technologies, etc. The difference in intellectual levels between the sides is astounding... When the Iron Curtain fell, all of the West rejoiced that the East would become just as free as the West. It was never supposed to be the other way around."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Since last June, I've been podcasting a weekly reading from Bruce Sterling's 1992 classic journalistic history of the founding of the online civil liberties movement, The Hacker Crackdown, which chronicles the events that led to the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer. Hacker Crackdown was the first book I ever read electronically, the first piece of "literary freeware" I ever met. It's a fantastic book and it was a fantastic read.

Yes, I'm done. It took 28 installments, and included some of the strangest stuff I ever read aloud (for example, a mind-bogglingly bureaucratic phone company document around which a great deal of controversy once swirled). Now that I've finished it, I've put together an XML feed for all 28 parts, as well as direct MP3 and Ogg download links -- it's all under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. I hope someone'll download all the parts, normalize 'em, trim out the intros, and piece them together into a single file.

I need to thank Bruce Sterling here for his gracious permission in allowing me to read this aloud. Reading Hacker Crackdown back in 1992 -- actually, 1991, since I got hold of an advance copy through Bakka, the bookstore I worked at in Toronto -- absolutely and permanently transformed my life. Reading it again has made me revisit more than a decade's worth of striving, writing, imaginging, working and agitating. This book's an education and a half.

Thanks, Bruce.

MP3s: Part 01, Part 02, Part 03, Part 04, Part 05, Part 06, Part 07, Part 08, Part 09, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25, Part 26, Part 27, Part 28,

Ogg: Part 01, Part 02, Part 03, Part 04, Part 05, Part 06, Part 07, Part 08, Part 09, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25, Part 26 Part 27 Part 28

Podcast feed of the whole book

My podcast feed

After a brief period of unstyledness, we’re back with a realign and overhaul of simplebits.com. Aesthetically, it’s not much of a departure from the previous design — but under the hood is new markup, new stylesheets and a strict grid layout based on ems. After moving into new physical digs last month (more on this later), it only seemed appropriate to spruce up the virtual ones as well.

As usual, the overhaul started innocently enough, with a little tinkering here and there that snowballed into tearing the old CSS out, while the site embarrassingly stood naked for a week. But the challenge of creating a em-based grid was too tantalizing (the second time I’ve used that word in as many days).

A few notes when trying to create a grid layout using ems:

• Using the 62.5% method for sizing text has the advantage of setting gutters, borders, etc. at values of ten (e.g. 1em = 10px).
• Remember to avoid specifying widths and font-size on the same element (or at least be consistent about it).
• Realize that when adjusting text size in Safari, the grid will only stay perfect on a random bump. Firefox seems to stay intact at all times. I assume this is due to a rounding discrepancy.
• Understand that when building an already-wide layout, it’ll get really wide, really fast. That’s OK. Wide is the new drop shadow.
• Have plenty of coffee at hand.

A large motivation for this tinkering had to do with the Notebook entry styling. I’ve tweaked the MovableType templates to enable posting of quotes and photos as well as long entries and QuickBits (links). A “tumblelog” as the kids would call it. That doesn’t mean there’ll be 100 posts a day — but it does mean (I hope) more posting in general.

Now if you’ll excuse me, there are several dusty corners to clean up around here.

sjbe sends in an old story with a poetic justice ending. Almost a year ago Chris Soghoian blogged about multiple security holes exposing visitors to a TSA site to possible identity theft. Wired and others picked up the story and the TSA took down the insecure site and fixed the problems. On Friday the US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released a report (PDF; HTML summary) finding that the TSA contractor, Desyne Web Services, had received a no-bid contract for the faulty site from a former employee who was then a TSA project manager. TSA has taken no action to sanction the responsible parties for the vulnerabilities. The poetic justice is that Soghoian had been investigated for 6 months by the FBI and TSA because he pointed out a vulnerability in the US air transport system; no charges were ever filed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Our friends at the gaming blog Kotaku did a neat feature in which workspaces of gaming biz / blogging biz / news biz folks are displayed, with little descriptions about the person behind them: Link. Featured workaholics include Sid Meier, Ken Levin, Dylan Jobe, Peter Molyneux, some Naughty Dog and Sims folk, and many others -- including BB Gadgets' own Joel Johnson, and yours truly. One snap from my "office" on the road for the past few weeks in the rural Guatemalan highlands is above. Full description of each item in that massive pile of crap after the jump. (thanks, Brian Crecente and Brian Ashcraft!)

A room where I'm working tonight in a village in the department of Sololá, Guatemala, Central America.

In my "office," MacBook pro. As I type this, I'm editing some footage that documents K'iche Mayan children using computers for the first time in an education center I'm helping to develop here with friends and family.

More stuff on my "desk":

Sony HDR-HC3 camcorder

iPhone (roaming data service works great out here on local provider Claro, but is crazy costly)

supercompact Canon Elph (around $200, tiny and inconspicuous, but captures amazingly good video)

Marantz PMD 660 digital audio recorder (clunky but high quality results, swear by it for all the work I do for NPR)

Edirol digital audio recorder (smaller, trying it out for the first time, lower-quality but more portable and no external mic required)

an omnidirectional mic with a shotgun grip that airport security personnel sometimes think is an actual shotgun

Cheap Nokia cellphone (on provider Tigo), only cost US $10 with 100 minutes included, works great out in more remote areas where other voice providers don't

some external hard drives and various flavors of memory cards

Skype credit and headphones

K'ichee' language grammar books and dictionaries

a hand-loomed shawl I received as a gift from one of the tejedoras in the pueblo where we're building the computer center and working to help rebuild infrastructure

bottles of Cipro, Norfloxacin, and Loperamide just in case. Potable water here is not so easy to come by, and, as they say, the shits happen.

An anonymous reader writes "I've been working on a financial application which I've decided to release to the public. I want to make some money from the application, though I certainly don't expect to become a millionaire. The problem is that I'd like nothing better than to open-source it. There are many aspects of the application that I don't have time to refine, and other developers could definitely improve upon my work. However, I don't know how I earn money from something once I've made it open source. How have you dealt with trying to turn a reasonable profit on your work while remaining open-sourced?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

diewlasing points us to a story about a hydrogen cloud, eleven thousand light-years long, which will collide with the Milky Way in a devastating crossfire of shock waves and star formation...in 20-40 million years. Mark your calendars. At least it will give us something to watch while we're waiting for Andromeda to hit us in a few billion years. Hopefully, it will look at least this cool. "The detailed GBT study dramatically changed the astronomers' understanding of the cloud. Its velocity shows that it is falling into the Milky Way, not leaving it, and the new data show that it is plowing up Milky Way gas before it as it falls. 'Its shape, somewhat similar to that of a comet, indicates that it's already hitting gas in our Galaxy's outskirts,' Lockman said. 'It is also feeling a tidal force from the gravity of the Milky Way and may be in the process of being torn apart. Our Galaxy will get a rain of gas from this cloud, then in about 20 to 40 million years, the cloud's core will smash into the Milky Way's plane,' Lockman explained."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This standard mouse has been remade by taking every plastic component and re-casting it in stainless steel. It's probably a little heavy, but it sure gleams. Link (Thanks, BouncingBall!)

twitter brings us a story about the increasing number of digital devices reaching consumers with malware already installed. In this case, digital photo frames from three different Sam's Club stores were found to contain the same type of malicious code. We discussed a similar problem with iPods a while back, as well as a more recent situation with Maxtor hard drives. Quoting the Register: "While a compromise at the manufacturer is the most likely scenario, ISC's Sachs also pointed to retailers as a possible point of infection. Returned products, which could have been infected by the consumer, are frequently put back on the shelf, if they are in sale-able condition, and attackers could take advantage of a store's poor digital hygiene, he said. 'Trying to (infect a product) all the way back at the factory — getting it through all the checks and balances — would be pretty hard to do,' he said. 'But doing it at the store, where there might be loose return policies, and (where) they put it back on the shelf - you are not going to get a million infections, but you might get a person from an investment bank next door.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

twitter brings us a story about the increasing number of digital devices reaching consumers with malware already installed. In this case, digital photo frames from three different Sam's Club stores were found to contain the same type of malicious code. We discussed a similar problem with iPods a while back, as well as a more recent situation with Maxtor hard drives. Quoting the Register: "While a compromise at the manufacturer is the most likely scenario, ISC's Sachs also pointed to retailers as a possible point of infection. Returned products, which could have been infected by the consumer, are frequently put back on the shelf, if they are in sale-able condition, and attackers could take advantage of a store's poor digital hygiene, he said. 'Trying to (infect a product) all the way back at the factory - getting it through all the checks and balances -- would be pretty hard to do,' he said. 'But doing it at the store, where there might be loose return policies, and (where) they put it back on the shelf - you are not going to get a million infections, but you might get a person from an investment bank next door.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.