Jim Hanas (who can also be blamed for the Boring Boring parody site lo those several years ago) has written a story for RADAR about Josh "Pseudo.com" Harris, and his new project, Operator 11. Jim 'splains:

I spent all fall tracking Josh, detailing his past exploits and watching as he worked on engineering his comeback. (Which doesn't look like it's going so great at the moment.) The real bonus, however, is that Ondi Timoner (who directed DiG!) has allowed us to post a 12 minute concept trailer for We Live in Public, the unfinished documentary about Harris that she's been working on since 2000. It has lots of great footage from Pseudo and of the Silicon Alley scene.

Link to story, and here's that trailer: Link.

Photographer Dave Bullock attended The Homeland Security Stakeholders Conference for Wired News, and shot photos of the security tech products on display. "From throwable video cameras to shotgun-wielding robots, these are the gadgets that help you sleep at night, unless you have something to hide..." Link to photo gallery.

Snip from a NYT article about Ramak Fazel, an Iranian-American artist whose art-quest to visit the capitols of every US state turned into a very different experience:

His mission was to photograph each of the nation’s 50 state capitol buildings and dispatch a postcard from each city, using postage stamps from a childhood collection. Each postcard would be mailed to the next state on his journey, where he would pick it up, continuing until he had gone full circle back to Indiana. But there was a problem. On a flight from Sacramento, Calif., to Honolulu, Mr. Fazel described his project to a fellow passenger. He later discovered that she had reported him as suspicious — perhaps to the pilot or the Transportation Security Administration — and taken a picture of him as he slept. Maybe it was because he was vaguely foreign looking, he reasoned, and his photographic endeavor seemed menacing in a post-9/11 landscape. He also had a three-day growth of beard, he recalled. And, although Mr. Fazel grew up mostly in the United States and is an American citizen, there was his Iranian name. In his view that woman’s report began a chain reaction, turning him into a person of interest for officials from local law enforcement agencies on up to the F.B.I. On a stop in Annapolis, Md., for example, he was interrogated about his activities and read his Miranda rights. Today, he said, his name lingers on what he thinks of simply as the “the list.” (He doesn’t know where it originated or who controls it.) He believes it has prevented him from receiving a visa to India and caused him be questioned at the border of Poland, both of which he had visited in the past. He said he has been interrogated the last four times he has entered the United States.

Link (thanks, Susannah Breslin)

A recent study reports that while most teenagers describe their online experiences on YouTube as a "treat," most classify their online news experiences as stressful or a "reminder of the world's dangers." Furthermore, most of the teenagers in the study do not actively keep up with the news. Rarely, if ever, do they go directly to the news websites, but rather end up there from portals and news aggregators, and only then if something catches their eye. The report recommends that news organizations help allay teen angst by making their sites better springboards for conversations and being more focused on solutions and problem-solvers. That said, is this really a problem with online news? Perhaps the way traditional news organizations approach the news is actually the problem. How many teenagers regularly watch the evening news? Perhaps news organizations should study why The Daily Show and Digg are so popular, since both present news in a more relevant, palatable, and oftentimes, more humorous fashion. Maybe it's not the online-ness of the news that is the cause of their waning popularity, but rather, the fact that they are at risk of becoming irrelevant to a new generation of news consumers.

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Pre-PMA 2008: Olympus today announced the latest additions to its FE-range of compact digital cameras. All sporting 8 megapixel sensors, the new cameras differ in zoom range, with the FE-310 and FE-340 packing 5x 36-180 equiv. optics and the FE-350 Wide extending the wide end and reigning in the tele for a useful 28-112. All will be available from February.

Pre-PMA 2008: Olympus today announced the latest additions to its FE-range of compact digital cameras. All sporting 8 megapixel sensors, the new cameras differ in zoom range, with the FE-310 and FE-340 packing 5x 36-180 equiv. optics and the FE-350 Wide extending the wide end and reigning in the tele for a useful 28-112. All will be available from February.

Pre-PMA 2008: Looking at Olympus diminuitive Stylus (mju) range, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the 5x zoom range currently employed was the biggest which would fit. However, Olympus has other plans and has shoehorned a whopping 7x 37-260 mm equivalent optic onto the front plate of the 10.1 megapixel Stylus 1010 and 1020. Also announced was the Stylus 840 with 8.0 MP and a 36-180 mm range. Catch all three on the shelves from February.

Pre-PMA 2008: Olympus has today announced its 20x zoom SP-570 UZ as a replacement for the SP-560 UZ and by doing so reconquered the sole number one spot in the race for the longest superzoom lens on a compact camera. The lens has 'grown' at both ends and is now covering the astounding range of 26-520mm (35mm equivalent). Inevitably there has also been an increase in resolution, from 8 to 10M

Today on Boing Boing tv, two pieces of nature-themed video art. First, an excerpt from WILDERNESS TROUBLE, produced by Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir of the ecology, art, and technology collective EcoArtTech:

[This work was] inspired by William Cronon's article, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," which argues that the concept of wilderness is a historical and cultural construct and relying on it as the basis of environmental ethics fails to imagine new, healthy, and sustainable relationships between humans and the environments they actually inhabit.

Next, CRAB FU, an animated short by I-Wei Huang (crabfu.com). No crustaceans were harmed in the creation of this BBtv episode.

Link to video, Discuss on tv.boingboing.net.

Editor's note: This BBtv episode is sponsored by Dell's regeneration.org project -- but purely by coincidence, a Dell PDA appears in the opening sequence of "Wilderness Trouble." This is not product placement or advertorial. EcoArtTech produced this film in 2007, and the air date of this excerpt was not planned to coincide with the sponsorship campaign.

Feint writes "I'm working on an business platform for inter-company collaboration based on an open source software stack. As part of that platform I would like to integrate some sort of digital rights management for the documents in the system. The vast majority of articles about DRM are focused how good or evil it is to apply DRM to digital music or video. I haven't seen many articles address open source solutions for protecting business data like CAD / MS Office / PDF / etc. documents, which is a real need in business today. Can the Slashdot readership suggest some open source DRM offerings other than the Sun DReaM initiative, which hasn't had a release since Jan. 2007?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boing Boing Gadgets editor Joel Johnson chats about chiptunes with a number of artists who performed at the most recent installment of the 8-bit music event Blipfest: Paza Rahm (pazarahm.com, from Sweden), Rugar (rugarandi.com, Sweden), Sabrepulse (myspace.com/sabrepulse, Scotland) and Akira, aka 8GB (myspace.com/8gb, Argentina).

Link to BBtv post with video, Discuss. Related BBtv episodes and vlog posts:

Dave Hill + Blip Fest + 8-bit Combat

Vlog: Joel Johnson - Blipfest / Candy Expo

hedley writes "A prior article on the damage Java does to CS education was discussed here recently. There was substantial feedback and the mailbox of one of the authors, Prof Dewar, also has been filled with mainly positive responses. In this followup to the article, Prof. Dewar clarifies his position on Java. In his view the core of the problem is universities 'dumbing down programs, hoping to make them more accessible and popular. Aspects of curriculum that are too demanding, or perceived as tedious, are downplayed in favor of simplified material that attracts a larger enrollment.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few weeks ago, we pointed to an article claiming that modern technology was making it harder to write interesting "thriller" or "mystery" movie plots, since it was (according to the author) tougher to come up with plausible storylines that wouldn't be ruined by a character holding a mobile phone. That seemed like a bit of a stretch, but now we have the flipside to that, which is that authors of mystery stories claim that the web has been tremendously useful in helping them come up with important details to make their plots and stories more realistic. They track crime reports, learn new jargon, look up maps of locations, understand weapons and generally get the extra info they need to make the story feel more realistic. So, perhaps story writing hasn't been killed off by technology after all.

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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Ars Technica has up a nice article on why security consultant Ed Giorgio's statement that 'privacy and security are a zero-sum game' is wrong. The author reasons that, due to Metcalfe's law, the more valuable a government network is to the good guys, the more valuable it is to the bad guys. Given the trend in government to gather all of its eggs into one database, unless more attention is paid to privacy, we'll end up with neither security nor privacy. In other words, privacy and security are a positive-sum game with precarious trade-offs — you can trade a lot of privacy away for absolutely no gain in security, but you don't have to."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boing Boing Gadgets editor Joel Johnson visits the 8-bit music event Blipfest, then wreaks havoc at a Candy Expo. Link to video, and Discuss how awesome Joel Johnson is at tv.boingboing.net.

The Arabic Daily Asharq Al-Awsat reports that a team of French researchers are hoping to create an "Electronic Mufti" -- an artificial intelligence capable of processing the opinions of historical clerics and generating a fatwa, or religious edict, that answers novel problems as the human template would have. The goal is supposedly to generate "more accurate" opinions, not subject to... human... error.

This has the whiff of a prank about it, but if it's for real, it seems to raise intriguing theological no less than technological questions. Islam tends to frown on pictorial representations of Allah's handiwork, and in particular -- as the Danish Cartoon Fiasco reminded us -- of the Prophet Muhammad, a likely candidate for simulation. Would a simulacrum of the Prophet's thought processes run afoul of the prohibition on representation? One member of the French team, Dr. Anas Fawzi, assures us that Islamic scholars have declared that his project is not "haram," or unlawful. But something tells me controversy is inevitable. Either way, I find I can't help but think of the confessional CyberJesus from the George Lucas classic THX 1138.

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

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Old-school bOING bOING pal Jim Leftwich writes, "Today on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, nothing can really describe Dr. King's life and work better than his own words. Here's a SeeqPod playlist of a number of his speeches and sermons, gathered from across the net." Thanks for this amazing link of links, Jim.
Link

A columnist for Wired has an interesting look at how telecommunications are actually making it more interesting to reside in populated areas instead of allowing the complete disregard for distance. "Technology makes it more fun and more profitable to live and work close to the people who matter most to your life and work. Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, an expert on city economies, argues that communications technology and face-to-face interactions are complements like salt and pepper, rather than substitutes like butter and margarine. Paradoxically, your cell phone, email, and Facebook networks are making it more attractive to meet people in the flesh."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.