Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: non-science-fiction movie posters redone with stfnal elements. Link

Designer Nicholas Feltron produced a corporate annual report for his life last year, chock full of infographics, statsporn, and even a flowchart! Link (Thanks, Nicholas!)

UNIMurph sends word out of Stanford University that researchers have discovered a way to increase battery life tenfold by using silicon nanowires. Quoting News.com: 'It's not a small improvement,' [lead researcher Yi] Cui said. 'It's a revolutionary development.' Citing a research paper they wrote, published in Nature Nanotechnology, Cui said the increased battery capacity was made possible though a new type of anode that utilizes silicon nanowires. Traditional lithium ion batteries use graphite as the anode. This limits the amount of lithium — which holds the charge — that can be held in the anode, and it therefore limits battery life... 'We are working on scaling up and evaluating the cost of our technology,' Cui said. 'There are no roadblocks for either of these.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vienna-based art-pranksters monochrom teach us how to "hack the urban context" with campfires, wiener schnitzel, beer, and an elderly Austrian gentleman who speaks LOL. In the second segment of today's episode, someone constructs a campfire, complete with beer bottles and half-cooked schnitzel, right in the middle of the Vienna airport. American kids, don't try this at home unless you want a one-way to Camp X-Ray.

Link to BBtv post with video and comments.

Previously on Boing Boing tv:

Falco Stairs/Fuji Apple

Bar code artist Scott Blake / Falco stencil memorial

Human USB Hack / Very Simple Motor

Mark's Curie Engine / Monochrom's love song for Lessig

Writer Susannah Breslin (of Reverse Cowgirl), whose work I've blogged many times here on Boing Boing, has launched two new projects: Letters from Working Girls, and Letters from Johns.

As the titles suggest, the blogs consist of first-hand accounts from real sex workers, and from real clients of sex workers.

Here's a snip from "Working Girls":

I am 26. I'm a grad student in New York. Internet men pay to spank me. If I don't maintain certain grades, I lose my scholarship, and at the beginning of the semester I was flipping my shit about this one class, insisting I was going to fail and whatnot. I was wondering how I was going to pull three or six thousand dollars out of my ass, depending on how bad I did, and my friend said, "It's too bad you don't live upstate, because my friend Mary has a dude that pays her a fuckton of money to just spank her. No sex." So I had to figure that if Mary can find a dude like this upstate, there HAS to be people like this in NYC I can find. And I have a high tolerance for pain and a passing interest in spanking, so it was on.

And here's a snip from "Johns."

I started seeing her once or twice a month and have kept on doing so even though I've been in relationships. I won't lie and say I don't think of it as cheating, it is. I finally stopped when I met a woman who, to be honest, shared a lot of similarities with B. I told B about this and she wished me nothing but happiness. We've spoken a few times since and seen each other socially. It's a bit like work friends after one person has moved to a different job.

The NY Times "debate" between law professor Tim Wu and NBC Universal General Counsel Rick Cotton that began Monday now continues. It's actually not much of a "debate" because each are simply answering the questions posed by the moderator, Saul Hansell. However, the latest concerns whether it makes sense to require third party companies, such as ISPs or consumer electronics firms to filter or block content in an effort to protect copyright holders from unauthorized use of their content. Wu's answer focuses on a slightly different question: whether it makes sense for the government to step in and mandate such solutions, and provides a reasonable answer questioning why the government should be protecting one industry's business model at the expense of others'. Cotton's response is quite similar to the one he gave last week at CES. Effectively, it's "there's so much piracy going on, that we need to have others step in and protect our business model."

I'm curious if Cotton believes that automobiles should have been forced to go 3 mph with people walking in front of them waving red flags, for the sake of protecting the market for horse-drawn carriage makers? Or, should consumer electronics companies been forced not to allow VCRs to record TV? Both examples involved "big" problems that were seen as "threats" to an existing business model. Yet, rather than being actual threats (after some bogus lobbying/court cases), companies realized that these were actually huge opportunities to expand markets and make even more money. So why is it this time it's suddenly a big threat and not an opportunity? And even if it is a threat, why should it be seen as something that a third party needs to handle? What happens when the required filtering in the US means that foreign consumer electronics makers come up with the next great innovation that isn't possible in the US and we fall behind in terms of the next important innovation? None of that seems to be of concern to Cotton, whose sole focus is on preserving a business model that is certainly not the most efficient nor effective for the industry. I recognize that it is Cotton's job at NBC Universal to make these kinds of statements, but it should be his fiduciary responsibility to the company to suggest that there are better paths to adapting to the changing market place, rather than clinging to an obsolete business model and dragging down other industries with it.

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Link, and apologies for the Godwinian implications (thanks, Russ Gooberman!)

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Swedish prosecutors appear to be close to finally pressing charges against The Pirate Bay, having served them with 4,000 pages of legal papers. While this might appear bad, the administrators have already moved some of the servers out of the country, so Swedish prosecutors can't shut it down, even if they want to. Moreover, the people of Sweden are decidedly on their side, with the Pirate Party, which is sympathetic to TPB's cause, being one of the top ten political parties in the country. Still, this looks like a dirty trick on the part of the prosecutors — like they're dumping all of this on the defendants in the hope that they won't have enough time to sort through it and defend themselves. For comparison, the second-biggest murder case in Sweden required only 1,500 pages."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at DaddyTypes, Greg discusses dakigokochi, Japanese baby announcements in the form of a shippable bag of rice with the newborn's photo and stats printed on it. The bag is filled to match the baby's birth weight.
Link

Hungarian rapper "Speak" covers a lot of territory in this supremely awful -- i mean awesome -- video. It's about people who make a war. It's about Tupak Shakur. Yee, comeon, thasright, check, peas. Link. (thanks, Matti Laakso)

Rick Falkvinge, the head of Sweden's Piratpartiet has just given a new interview, and it's worth a read. As you might expect from the leader of a pro-piracy political party, he's rather bullish on the future of filesharing:

[A]nonymous encrypted P2P is just a few years off (and encrypted BitTorrent is already becoming ubiquitous). More interestingly, our cellphones are increasing in capacity dramatically. When P2P debuted with Napster in 2000, the average hard drive was the same size as my cell phone memory is today. Using technology already available, BlueTooth 2, I can share content from my cellphone anonymously — say, in a café or so. This will probably just accelerate, with cellphones being more and more capable, holding more and more data, and opening up to customized applications. I'm betting that a P2P app operating on Bluetooth is not far off for the iPhone, for example. Imagine the anonymous sharing that will happen in the background just on the average subway train! The possibilities are very, very encouraging.

File sharing will find new ways — any measure to stop it will be ineffective the instant it is in place.

I can't say that I agree with everything Falkvinge says here. Although it's true that Bittorrent encryption is fairly widespread, the technique is employed to avoid ISP throttling, not as a useful means of protecting filesharers' identities. And anyone who's paid any attention to Bluetooth's miserable security record — or who has just been frustrated when trying to get two devices to pair — can be forgiven for laughing wryly at the idea of the protocol evolving into something suitable for ad-hoc high-speed filesharing.

Falkvinge's optimism about anonymous P2P is perhaps the most interesting part of his filesharing triumphalism. In truth, it's a considerably harder problem than he implies: the internet is simply not designed for two-way communication with a truly unknown party. Sure, black hats can spoof IP addresses — but that's a technique that's only useful for a one-way communique, such as when flooding a target with junk packets in a denial of service attack. If you want a response you either need to reveal your identity or relay the traffic through a third party who can be counted on to keep everyone's identities secret.

This sort of relay system has been successfully employed by Relakks proxy service, as well as the Freenet and Tor projects, the latter two of which also add encryption to limit the relay nodes' complicity. But if Falkvinge is counting on the lack of prosecutions against these projects as evidence of the technique's legal unassailability, he's dreaming. Given that both Freenet and Tor are widely rumored to be havens for child pornographers — and the understandable (if occasionally misguided) zeal with which such crimes are prosecuted — it seems like only a matter of time before someone operating a Tor node is arrested for facilitating illegal activity (the infamous Tor embassy hack has already attracted law enforcement's attention, of course).

But Falkvinge's larger point seems sound: there's no indication that P2P can be stopped. But this isn't because of some just-around-the-corner bulletproof technology; it's simply a matter of filesharers' overwhelming numbers — numbers that, as Falkvinge implies, may be better measured by the rapidly-expanding count of P2P-capable network interfaces than by the number of humans operating them.

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

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Coldeagle sends us the news that the US Food and Drug Administration has declared that meat from cloned animals is safe to eat. The agency decided that no labeling is necessary for meat or milk from cloned cows, pigs, or goats or their offspring. (Ironically the FDA didn't include cloned sheep in the announcement, claiming a lack of data, though the very first cloned animal was a sheep named Dolly.) The article notes that a couple of major food suppliers have already decided not to use any products of cloning, and that the groups opposed to cloning in the food chain will now concentrate their efforts on convincing more suppliers to boycott the business of cloning. The FDA noted that their focus groups and other public input indicated that about 1/3 of US citizens do not want food from cloned animals under any circumstances; another 1/3 have no objections; and another 1/3 fall somewhere in between.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the problems we have in the various discussions about patent and copyright law is that people falsely assume that both systems are designed to give "credit" to the original creator and to somehow enforce "fairness" in making sure that original creator receives recognition. That has never been the case. Both are designed to create monopolies, to provide incentives to create. That has nothing to do with credit -- and, that's especially clear in patent situations where the actual people named on the patent are rarely parties to a case, as it's more often owned by a firm (such as the company the person worked for). Most companies require that their employees assign any patents to the company. So it seems fairly ridiculous to find out that a guy who doesn't actually own the patents he received is pissed off at Nintendo for using his idea in their Wii controllers. The guy worked for Midway Games, a popular videogame maker, who now owns the patents in question. It's difficult to see what his complaint is, since the patents are no longer his and Midway does not appear to have any problem with what Nintendo has done. In the video itself, a patent attorney suggests that the Wii seems to go well beyond the patents in question and it seems unlikely that Nintendo is infringing -- but since the few second demo looks similar, it makes for a nice news cast claiming someone "stole" an idea.

The likely situation is probably a lot less interesting. Lots of folks have been working on motion sensing videogame controllers for quite some time. This wasn't a new concept that sprung up overnight. There are also many different ways to create such a tool and just because the end results look similar, don't mean that a patent was infringed. However, an even bigger point is one that we've been trying to drive home for a while. The invention part is only one small part of the equation. Innovating and actually bringing the product to market is more important -- and that's what Nintendo did successfully. This guy worked for a gaming company and came up with a prototype six years ago and didn't do anything with it. While lots of folks were trying to come up with motion sensing gaming devices, Nintendo successfully brought one to market.

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Eleven days ago I wrote a blog post describing a call-in service that I'd like to use to create a podcast with my friend and fellow blogger Robert Scoble.

A new service (or one that I just became aware of) comes achingly close to doing what I want. Maybe it goes all the way there, but I've not seen how to do it.

First, here's how it works.

1. Call 646-495-9201 x 49763.

2. Talk.

3. Hangup.

There will be a new recording here.

http://drop.io/tradesecrets

Looks good!

But there are two problems.

1. The RSS feed doesn't have an enclosure, and even if you were willing to scrape the HTML there's no pointer to an MP3 file.

2. There's no pointer to an MP3 file on the landing page, although there appears to be one if you don't look at the HTML source. Tricky. It was enough to get Mike Arrington at Techcrunch to think it was there. I have a call into Mike to discuss.

A caveat, I am also in touch with the folks at BlogTalkRadio. I want this service, and we're close to having it now. drop.io doesn't go quite far enough, they clearly want to drive traffic to their site, and appear unwilling to let the MP3 out into the wild.

Interesting stuff!!

Update: I did a podcast with Robert and Patrick Scoble using drop.io. I was able to download the MP3, although it pretty well hidden, and upload it to my S3 account.

While most of the discussion following Steve Jobs Macworld keynote this morning was targeted on the Macbook Air superthin notebook (which does look pretty cool), some of the other announcements coming out of the keynote were potentially a lot more interesting. The first was Apple's Time Capsule offering, which seems to have gotten lost in the hype around the other announcements. Sticking a big (500GB or 1TB) hard drive on a wireless access point may not seem like a huge deal at first, but it is an indication of how increasingly everything that we do is networked. Being able to separate storage from your computer makes for some interesting possibilities. Combined with the Macbook Air solution to do CD installs (mount a different drive on the network, basically), and you begin to see how Apple is making it easier to separate out the components of what used to be considered a computer, and make them all accessible via the cloud. That doesn't mean that any individual solution will necessarily be successful, but it does indicate the direction things are heading in.

The other announcement that did get quite a bit of buzz was the very much expected announcement that Apple will begin renting films via iTunes. It appears the company has done a lot of smart moves here (many of which it probably learned after seeing what legions of earlier attempts in this space got wrong). It signed deals with all the major studios. It got agreements to allow online rentals soon after the DVD was released (1 month later, which is still too late). You can easily watch the movies via your TV if you have an Apple TV (perhaps a big if). You can transfer the movies to other (Apple) devices. They can start playing soon after you start downloading. They're offering high definition movies, which will certainly appeal to some people (and should be extra worrisome for the folks betting on the success of next generation DVD systems).

However, it's still based on a one-off rental model, with similar prices to what's been tried before. Time and time again, we've seen that models like that later get trumped by subscription services -- which is why it's not surprising to see Netflix beefing up its own service by making it an "all you can eat" plan combined with efforts to get those movies on to television sets. And, of course, a rental model is fundamentally based on DRM systems to make the movie go away at the end of a "rental" period. Rentals make sense for physical goods, when you are returning the good at the end so it can be rented out again, but they're an artificial construct in a world of digital goods. It may work initially, but it leaves Apple wide open to challenges from others down the road. On top of that, it shows Jobs' rather conflicted stance on DRM: he's against it for music, but for it when it comes to video. It's also a bit surprising that the major studios all bought into this, as they've seen how Apple's DRM system in the music world made it much more powerful, leading to the current backlash from the recording industry. So, it's a good start, but it falls back on the wrong business model for long term success.

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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property sends us news from F-Secure of what they claim is the first rogue cleaning tool for the Mac. MacSweeper is a Mac version of Cleanator, hosted from a colo somewhere in the Ukraine. The article points out that the company's About page is lifted verbatim from Symantec's site. With the Mac's market share closing in on double digits, perhaps it's not surprising to see the platform targeted with crapware as PCs have been for years. The F-Secure author adds as a footnote that a journalist said to him something you don't hear every day: "I visited the macsweeper.com website. I know I probably shouldn't have but I used a Windows PC so I knew I wouldn't get infected."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photos of a garbage truck UNICAT TerraCross converted into a nice living space. Looks well-fortified against a zombie attack, too.

This machine combines the rugged "go anywhere" off-road capabilities of the MAN 6x6 with the comforts of living at home. Safe 2 years of design, construction and testing. Built to the exacting standards of the world-class UNICAT engineering team, this "Home on Wheels" is ready for your immediate occupancy. You do not need to be a experienced expedition traveller.

Link (Thanks, Bill!)