Howard Rheingold points us to an event taking place this weekend in Los Angeles, "24/7: A DIY Video Summit." He explains:

The event is an effort to bring together the various academic, technology, and creative communities that have a stake in the evolution of the amateur and DIY video space. Specifically, the effort is to get the grassroots and public interest perspective into play in the definition of the future of the Internet video space. Our speakers include Joi Ito, Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, John Seely Brown, me, and Yochai Benkler. In fact, I will moderate a panel on Saturday with all those others. I think it's the first time we've all been on a stage together, and I want to make it a very action-oriented call to arms rather than yet another panel discussion.

This event is the first of its kind in that it brings together curators and representatives from key DIY video communities - live action remix, anime music videos, videoblogging, machinima, youth media, activist media, political remix, video blogging, and independent arts video. Although these communities often have their own dedicated events, there are rarely conversations that bring together these different groups, much less one that also includes conversations with industry executives from the tech world, academics, and policy makers. The event will have screenings of DIY videos, an academic track, and hands on workshops.

Link. Even if you can't attend in person, they'll no doubt produce many interesting ideas to be shared online. (Special thanks, Mimi Ito!)

The Secret to Raising Smart Kids writes "A new study by Dafna Lemish from the Department of Communication at Tel Aviv University has found that there is an enormous gap between what parents think their children are doing online and what is really happening. 'The data tell us that parents don't know what their kids are doing,' says Lemish. The study found that 30% of children between the ages of 9 and 18 delete the search history from their browsers in an attempt to protect their privacy from their parents, that 73% of the children reported giving out personal information online while the parents of the same children believed that only 4% of their children did so, and that 36% of the children admitted to meeting with a stranger they had met online while fewer than 9% of the parents knew that their children had been engaging in such risky behavior. Lemish advises that parents should give their children the tools to be literate Internet users and most importantly, to talk to their children. 'The child needs similar tools that teach them to be [wary] of dangers in the park, the mall or wherever. The same rules in the real world apply online as well.'"

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It's always interesting to see stories worrying about high growth markets maturing. When a market is growing rapidly, there are always those who believe they'll grow forever. But markets mature and run out of growth potential. The telco industry is now coming to terms with that, as 80% of Americans have mobile phones, and 79% of homes with computers have broadband access. At that point, it's no surprise that telcos might not have the same growth opportunities as before, and might start scrambling to try to find new avenues for growth. That's why you see both Verizon and AT&T pushing into the television market, while poking around in some other areas as well. It's also why Sprint needs to kiss and make up with Clearwire, and get a nationwide WiMax system up and running. Also, start expecting to see attempts to create more innovative uses of the telecom systems already in place, such as non-phone equipment making use of mobile networks (the Kindle was just the beginning). Either way, the scramble is now on for telcos who are used to growing at a certain pace to start aggressively seeking new avenues for growth. While that's happening, don't be surprised to see more aggressive attempts to poach customers from each other as well. That's going to be good for customers, as it's likely to force the various telcos to become more open as a way of attracting more customers by doing more than just dropping prices. No matter what happens, the telco industry recognizes that it needs to change and change quickly if it wants to keep up some form of growth.

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Link, shot by Sean Bonner. I post this not to express a political position -- rather, because it's an interesting example of brevity and simplicity in design.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Lest there be anyone left who believes the RIAA's propaganda that its litigation campaign is intended to benefit the 'creators' of the music, Hollywood Reporter reports that the RIAA is asking the Copyright Royalty Board to lower songwriter royalties on song file downloads, from the present rate of 9 cents per song — about 13% of the wholesale price — down to 8% of wholesale. Meanwhile, the big digital music companies, such as Apple, want the royalty rate lowered even more, to something like 4% of wholesale. So any representations by any of these companies that they are concerned for the 'creators' of the music must henceforth be taken with a boxcar-load of salt."

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We just found out that the White House has chosen not to staff the official "Privacy Board" that is supposed to make sure gov't surveillance doesn't infringe on American citizens' privacy. That came right after National Intelligence Director, Mike McConnell, announced that he's hoping to get the rights to monitor all internet traffic. Since news tends to come in threes (well, so says the urban legend) now comes the news that the FBI is looking to put together a huge biometric database containing info on fingerprints, palm prints, iris recognition mug shots and scars of anyone they can gather this info on. This seems like a typical reaction from a gov't agency, and with the announcement comes all the typical political doubletalk about how this is for safety, claiming that the database is "important to protect the borders to keep the terrorists out, protect our citizens, our neighbors, our children so they can have good jobs, and have a safe country to live in."

However, as has been made clear countless times, these types of databases always get abused. Much more importantly, as Tim pointed out recently, violating peoples' privacy doesn't provide more security. In fact, it often does the opposite. It makes it easier for important data to get lost in the pile, and it also means that that data is now that much less secure. The database itself suddenly becomes a huge target. So, in an effort to make the country "more secure," an effort like this can actually do the opposite.

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An anonymous reader writes "As the battle rages over a Canadian DMCA, Microsoft Canada has published an op-ed in a political newspaper that Michael Geist describes as astonishingly misleading and factually incorrect. Microsoft tries to argue that Canadian copyright law provides no legal protections, even after it received one of the largest copyright damage awards in Canadian history just one year ago."

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The two companies announced today that NVIDIA will acquire PhysX maker AGEIA; terms were not disclosed. The Daily Tech is one of the few covering the news to go much beyond the press release, mentioning that AMD considered buying AGEIA last November but passed, and that the combination positions NVIDIA to compete with Intel on a second front, beyond the GPU — as Intel purchased AGEIA competitor Havok last September. While NVIDIA talked about supporting the PhysX engine on their GPUs, it's not clear whether AGEIA's hardware-based physics accelerator will play any part in that. AMD declared GPU physics dead last year, but NVIDIA at least presumably begs to differ. The coverage over at PC Perspectives goes into more depth on what the acquisition portends for the future of physics, on the GPU or elsewhere.

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Since it was formed in 2004, on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has been blasted by civil libertarians as a tool of the administration, more interested in whitewashing War on Terror–related privacy violations than serving as a genuine check on government intrusion. One of the board's five members even resigned in protest, citing among other things "the vast array of alphabet soup agencies and bureaucracies in the national security apparatus" that sought "to control and modify the Board's public utterances." So last year, Congress sought to give the board greater autonomy by moving it out from under the aegis of the White House and reconstituting itself as an independent boad within the executive branch. The response of the White House, Wired reports, has been to drag its feet in appointing a new board -- meaning there is no one on the board as of January 30th -- prompting bipartisan criticism from top members of the Senate's Homeland Security Committee.

The board's second annual report (pdf), released late last month, does not exactly inspire confidence in its assiduousness as a privacy watchdog -- even when staffed. After touting its excellent working relationship with the White House, it moves to a "nothing to see here" review of the post-9/11 use of the material witness statute (MWS) as a detention tool. Aside from one "terrible mistake," the report asserts the board "was not made aware of specific problems with the use of the MWS in the anti-terrorism context" and cites a claim by the Justice Department that "on only nine occasions since the attacks of September 11, 2001 has the MWS been used in terrorist-related investigations." That is hard to square with the findings of a joint report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, which found some 70 instances of 9/11-related detention, though the discrepancy may be explained by the frequent use of immigration violations as a pretext for detentions that were actually related to terror investigations. The board's analysis of the Protect America Act, passed last August, similarly reads like a compilation of White House talking points.

This should not be all that surprising given the composition of the old board, which consisted of such Republican stalwarts as President Bush's former solicitor general, Ted Olson. With debate over reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act raging in the Senate, the White House appears less than eager to have a less-friendly set of eyes reviewing its surveillance policies.

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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Apple has an uncanny ability to infuse their products with that nebulous sense of futurism. When I first held the iPhone, the one word that immediately came to mind was just that: This is the future. It’s that unadorned look, the nobody-else-is-doing-just-this feeling.

When my MacBook Air arrived this morning, I felt exactly the same thing. Even the packaging feels future. It’s so tiny. It doesn’t look like any other packaging out there. The box opens as a board game and it’s really solid and sturdy.

The machine itself is without a doubt the prettiest laptop I’ve ever seen. The proportions feel so right. Impossibly thin, lighter than the ~3 pounds would lead you to believe. And yet it’s a full-blown computer with no sacrifices in the interaction. The keyboard is a slight bit more klackity-click than the new stand-alones, but still awesome. The screen is very bright and instantly at full strength (go LEDs).

People have been wondering how this is going to play out in the market. It doesn’t have enough features, the specs are too low, it’s too expensive, it’s not this, it’s not that. Bah. This is the RAZR of laptops. Lots of people won’t care about the compromises once they get a chance to taste the future up close and personal.

Anyway, enough pouring my heart out in love for Apple’s industrial design and ability to capture that feeling of future so perfectly. I’ll try to live with the machine over a week and report back with findings.

So far it’s very positive, though. The machine feels more than plenty fast. It runs the tests for Highrise about 25-30% slower than my MacBook Pro (2.4Ghz). Which is just about exactly what you would guess from a machine with 1.8Ghz. In normal operations (web/mail/textmate/iphoto), I can’t feel any difference at all yet.

Tech.Luver sends in word of Yahoo's decision to exit the subscription music business. Yahoo's current subscribers — the company doesn't disclose how many it has — will be switched over to Real's Rhapsody service, and Yahoo will promote Real on its site. Yahoo had priced its subscription service significantly below Real's: $5.99 a month (if users pay a year in advance), vs. Rhapsody memberships at $12.99 a month and up. The Mercury News wonders how the Yahoo-Real deal would fare if Microsoft takes over — not well, the betting goes.

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Flickr user dansays acquired an unopened Apple IIc on eBay and in true Macfan style, posted his unboxing photos online. From his Flickr set:

It's never been opened. Ever. It hasn't seen the light of day since before it was shipped on May 5th, 1988.

I wrestled with whether I should open the box, or store it and let it accrue collector's value. In the end, I decided that the reason for my purchase wasn't financial. My very first computer was an Apple //c, and I can't see wanting to part with this computer, ever.

Link (via Andre Torrez's notes)

Now you know.

Voters don’t choose the 842 unpledged “super-delegates” who comprise nearly 40 percent of the number of delegates needed to clinch the Democratic nomination.

Even though it’s likely that the Super-delegates will ultimately support the nominee the public chose during the primary and caucus process, the whole Super-delegate thing seems a bit undemocratic, doesn’t it?

My fellow Arsian Nate Anderson blasts the Bush administration for its laissez faire attitude toward the development of broadband infrastructure. He laments the fact that the administration lacks a "vision" or "national target" for broadband deployment. DSL Reports chimes in, noting that Japan claims to have deployed 100 Mbps fiber to eighty five percent of its homes. But Matt Sherman points out that while "we," meaning the government, may not have a single, unified broadband strategy, "we" the broader marketplace have several broadband strategies being developed in parallel. As he says, Verizon's strategy is fiber-to-the-home, AT&T's strategy is fiber-to-the-node, Sprint's strategy is WiMax, etc. Which of these will prove the most effective? I have no idea. But it's also not clear to me how greater federal government involvement in these deployments would speed them up. Matt also notes the peculiarity of using advertised broadband speeds as a measure of broadband quality. He's got a graph showing that, by at least some measures, North America leads the world in the deployed speed of actual measured broadband connections. Comparing advertised speeds can be problematic, especially since some countries have low usage caps that make the high advertised speeds and low advertised prices extremely misleading. There are certainly plenty of problems with the broadband marketplace, not least the limited amount of competition in many markets. But calling for a "comprehensive national broadband strategy" doesn't make a lot of sense. We need to find ways to increase competition and remove obstacles to the deployment of more capacity, but we don't need a national strategy for the broadband industry any more than we need a national strategy for the production of tennis shoes.

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

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Misanthrope writes to tell us that Swiss scientists are claiming that with proper treatment HIV patients can be made non-infectious. "The statement's headline statement says that 'after review of the medical literature and extensive discussion,' the Swiss Federal Commission for HIV / AIDS resolves that, 'An HIV-infected person on antiretroviral therapy with completely suppressed viraemia ("effective ART") is not sexually infectious, i.e. cannot transmit HIV through sexual contact.'"

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The Polling Place Photo Project is a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that encourages voters to capture, post and share photographs of this year’s primaries, caucuses and general election. It was originally a joint effort of AIGA and Design Observer, but now it lives at The New York Times.

On February 4, 2008 my neighbor had his giant eucalyptus tree chopped down because it was diseased. This is a one-minute time lapse movie of the 4-hour event.

(The song is Eee-Ooo by Lady Bombon Vs. Gigaboy.)

Link to video

The Association for Computing Machinery has announced the 2008 Turing Award Winners. Edmund M. Clarke, Allen Emerson, and Joseph Sifakis received the award for their work on an automated method for finding design errors in computer hardware and software. "Model Checking is a type of "formal verification" that analyzes the logic underlying a design, much as a mathematician uses a proof to determine that a theorem is correct. Far from hit or miss, Model Checking considers every possible state of a hardware or softwa