For a while now, we've been pointing out that the captive audience is dead, and anyone who bases their business model on intrusive or annoying advertising to a captive audience is likely to be in trouble. However, Jeremy Wagstaff is pointing out one other unintended consequence of all of this: which is that companies are increasingly searching for that elusive captive audience. He notes that he used to be able to spend time on the bus just looking out the window and contemplating, but now there are strategically placed video screens that make contemplation difficult. These sorts of things are showing up everywhere. I find it increasingly rare to step into an elevator these days that doesn't have a video screen with some sort of advertising on it. Hell, even urinals aren't safe any more. Basically, companies are looking anywhere possible where they might be able to find a captive audience and are shoving some kind of advertising in the way, and that means fewer spaces where people can just be alone with their thoughts. Of course, in the end, this will simply contribute to ad blindness, making all of these efforts a waste of money.

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Roy Doty has been illustrating books and magazines since the 1940s. I first came across his work around 1970 when I acquired an old stack of Popular Science magazines from the 1950s. He did (and still does) a regular comic strip called "Wordless Workshop," which showed you how to make something cool without using any words to describe how. That's difficult to pull off, but Doty's clear and precise drawing style was (and is) up to the task.

When we started MAKE in 2004, I was overjoyed to learn that Doty was still illustrating. I wrote him and asked if he'd like to illustrate our puzzle page. When he said yes, it was a dream come true.

To celebrate Leap Year, Doty sent out this delightful card of a Rube Goldberg-style machine designed to get you out of bed. Doty sends out a card for nearly every season and holiday. I think it's because he finds a lot of joy in life.

An anonymous reader writes "Popular Mechanics has been getting some great access inside the labs at MIT all week, and they've gotten some interesting looks at developing technologies. Robot-assisted rehab with gaming-style controllers comes out of the biomechanics lab, blind and crash-proof UAV testing with F/X cameras is being done at the aerospace controls lab, and work on electric scooters with super-cheap assembly is proceeding at the Media Lab. Perhaps most exciting is a fight for funding while the holy grail of clean fusion power in reach at the plasma center. The article on fusion predicts, "We'd see economically feasible fusion power by 2035, at the earliest, and increasingly efficient commercial reactors somewhere in the middle of the century."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It would appear that the saga of MercExchange and its patents is finally over, as eBay has agreed to buy the questionable patents from the company effectively ending the longstanding lawsuit. The saga began quite a few years ago, when the patent office granted a patent on the concept of online auctions (no, seriously, don't laugh... it happened) along with some other related patents for things like the concept of offering a "buy now at a set price" feature on an auction. Not surprisingly, the guy eventually got around to suing eBay over the patent. Luckily, a court tossed out the online auction claims as being too vague, but did proceed with a patent infringement case over eBay's "Buy It Now" feature -- eventually awarding the guy $30 million, even though the patent office was beginning to question the validity of MercExchange's patents (yes, well after they had granted them).

The case ended up getting plenty of national attention, but not for the main part of the case. Instead, one of the legal questions raised by the case -- whether or not a judge should issue an automatic injunction preventing the use of patented technology when someone is found guilty of infringing -- made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where a judge found (reasonably so) that automatic injunctions don't make sense, and courts should look at a variety of factors in determining if an injunction is necessary. This was an important finding, and it meant that the judge back at the actual case didn't force eBay to stop using its "Buy It Now" feature. However, eBay did still lose the case and was told to pay the $30 million. eBay was in the process of appealing the ruling, but by buying the patents, it's now over. While no amount is given, you'd have to guess that they paid somewhere near $30 million as the ruling required, perhaps a little less as incentive to avoid having to pay lawyers' fees during an appeal. While it still seems silly that eBay had to pay many millions of dollars for daring to let people buy a product at a set price, at least the Supreme Court did get a chance to set a precedent using a part of this case. Of course, now we need to hope that eBay doesn't turn around and sue others for violating the same questionable patents.

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spikedLemur writes "Vladimir Vukicevic of the Firefox team stumbled upon some questionable practices from Apple while trying to improve the performance of Firefox. Apparently, Apple is using some undocumented APIs that give Safari a significant performance advantage over other browsers. Of course, "undocumented" means that non-Apple developers have to try and reverse-engineer these interfaces to get the same level of performance. You really have to wonder what Apple is thinking, considering the kind of retaliation Microsoft has gotten for similar practices.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The TED Prize event is streaming live now. I watched it last year and it was very moving. I imagine it will be again this year.

About the 2008 TEDPrize

The TED Prize was created as a way of taking the inspiration, ideas and resources generated at TED and using them to make a difference. Winners receive a prize of $100,000 each, and more importantly, a wish. A wish to change the world.

During today's session, webcast live from Monterey, California, the 2008 TEDPrize winners will unveil their wishes for the first time. Prize winners Neil Turok, Dave Eggars and Karen Armstong will be joined by singer-songwriter Vusi Mahlasela.

Link

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "It seems that SCO is never without a trick up its sleeve. In the new '$100 million' reorganization plan, $5 million of which is cash and $95 million credit, one of the creditors is protesting because SCO is hiding the Definitive Documents until there's no time to object. In their own words, 'The debtors are proposing to file the Disclosure Statement 33 days before the hearing, in compliance with the requirement that it be filed at least 25 days before the hearing (F. R. Bankr. P. 3017). However, it is clear that this Disclosure Statement will be inadequate for evaluating the Plan, because it will not include any of the Definitive Documents. The Debtors are proposing to file the Definitive Documents separately, and to do so a mere five business days before the hearing, which is zero days before objections are due.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you're not an OS X application developer, you can be forgiven for missing last week's debut of MGTwitterEngine. It is, admittedly, a bit arcane: a software component designed for use by developers that allows them to more easily interface with a proprietary messaging network. I wouldn't hold my breath for an Xbox version if I were you. But the software -- and the enthusiastic response it received -- are still worth noting as evidence of notification frameworks' potential for growth.

Many Mac users are familiar with Growl, the ambient notification system that tastefully alerts them of new emails, appointments, completed downloads or any of a huge variety of other system events. There are libraries that make it easy for developers to make their applications display messages through Growl, and many have. But while an ambient notification on your screen is great, an ambient notification that gets routed to whatever display you find most useful is better. So MGTwitterEngine makes it easy for developers to get their apps talking to Twitter (not that it was very hard to begin with -- Twitter's API is quite easy to use). If the idea catches on, soon you'll be able to get a Tweet when your DVD rip completes or as confirmation when your nightly backup succeeds. I wrote about "push" notification technology's resurgence a little while ago; when I did, these were some of the kinds of applications that I had in mind.

Of course, I don't mean to simply boost Twitter. As others have pointed out in comments to previous posts, the service can be spotty, and these days it's far from unique. Twitter owes its current success to its pedigree, its developer-friendly API and its SMS capabilities; for those reasons it seems likely to be the first to gain significant traction in the application notification space. But it would be a shame if a proprietary solution wins the day. For that reason it's worth keeping an eye on the occasional discussions hosted by Dave Winer about building a noncommercial, federated Twitter alternative (likely on top of XMPP).

Will those musings go anywhere? I have to admit that I have no idea — I'm skeptical, but wary of betting against such an endeavor after witnessing OpenID's come-from-behind success. Either way, it seems certain that soon more websites, applications and services are going to be sending me notifications through Twitter or something like it -- perhaps even allowing some of the musings of my colleagues in the Techdirt Insight Community, on how Twitter can be useful for companies to start to come true.

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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(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA) Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, is a global leadership and public policy professor at Harvard. She's talking about American responses to mass atrocities and genocide.

Rwandan genocide in 1990s: 700,000 people died. The 1994, the NYT reported between 200k and 300k people had already been killed. Patricia Schroeder, US Rep from Colorado, told the paper that hundreds of US citizens were calling about ape and gorilla deaths in Rwanda, but nobody was calling about the people who were dying. "There wasn't an endangered people's movement."

Today, universities and high schools have started an endangered people's movement. Anti-genocide groups. These student driven groups have launched divestment campaigns, launched a 1-800-Genocide number. Type in your zip code and it will refer you to your representative. Genocide grades for members of congress. This movement has put bottom up pressure on Bush leadership to take action Rwanda, and it's working.

An anonymous reader brings us an Ars Technica report about a proposed bill in Tennessee which would require state-funded universities to enforce anti-piracy standards. The universities would be forced to "track down and stop infringing activity" or risk losing their funding. The U.S. Congress requested last year that certain universities do this voluntarily. Quoting: "Efforts taken by universities thus far to deter and prevent piracy have had mixed results. The University of Utah, for instance, claims that it has reduced MPAA and RIAA complaints by 90 percent and saved $1.2 million in bandwidth costs by instituting anti-piracy filtering mechanisms. However, the school revealed that their filtering system hasn't been able to stop encrypted P2P traffic and noted that students will find ways to circumvent any system. The end result, some say, will be a costly arms race as students perpetually work to circumvent anti-piracy systems put in place by universities."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In December, I wrote about Pangea Day, a "global film event showcasing short films from around the world," on May 10. Just now, TED released the trailer on YouTube.

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA) Presenter: Irwin Redlener, MD.

Irwin Redlener, MD is president of the Children's Health Fund spoke about how much loose nuclear material there is in the world, and how easy it is to make a suitcase nuke. Nuclear terrorism is probable, but survivable, he says. I missed most of his talk while typing up the last one (I'm sure Ethan Zuckerman will have a nice report on the talk). Here's a slide Redlener prepared on how to survive a nuclear attack.

(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA)

Presenter: Professor Philip Zimbardo, creator of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment in the 1971 which put students into a prison setting, randomly chosen to be either guards or prisoners. He is the author of Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

Zimbardo is a very lively and engaging 75-year-old with a devilish van dyke beard.

For decades, he has been studying what makes people go wrong. Raised in South Bronx, he saw his friends live Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde lives. He learned that "the line between good and evil is movable and permeable." In other words, we all have the capacity to be good or evil. The human mind has an infinite capacity to make any of us kind or cruel, caring or indifferent.

God's favorite angel was Lucifer. God created Hell as a place to store evil. His favorite angel became the devil. What Zimbardo calls the "Lucifer Effect" focuses on why people can become evil (defined as the exercise of power to intentionally hurt people).

Abu Ghraib photos shocked Zimbardo but didn't surprise him. "I saw those same parallels when I was the prison supervisor at Stanford Prison Experiment."

Abu Ghraib soldiers were good but the barrels were bad and that made bad apples. He showed the shocking photos by US MP Guards from Tier 1-A Night Shift at Abu Ghraib. When Rumsfeld came to investigate, he said "who is responsible?" That's the wrong question to ask. "What is responsible?" What turns good soldiers into bad? What is the bad barrel? The power is in the system, it creates the situation that makes people evil.

Leadership failures caused the Abu Ghraib atrocities. It was going on for three months before it was stopped. They authorities didn't find out on purpose.

Zimbardo's fellow researcher, Stanley Milgram, wondered, "Could the Holocaust happen here?" Suppose Hitler asked you to electrocute a stranger. He tested 1,000 people who answered an ad that said "we want to test and improve people's memory."

The volunteers (called "teachers") saw a person wired to a machine that shocked them. The volunteer was told to turn the dial to 15 volts and press a button to shock the person (learner) when they got an answer wrong. (The learner was an actor unbeknownst to the volunteer, and the machine did not deliver a shock.)

As the experiment went on, the researcher told the volunteer to crank up the voltage, all the way to 375 volts, which had a warning on the dial that it was extremely dangerous. The learners would scream, cry, beg for life, appear dead or unconcious, etc. The researcher told the students to turn the dial to 450 volts, which was labeled "XXX."

Before the experiment, Migram and others thought up to 1% of the volunteers would turn the dial up to the danger point and ignore the learners' cries for mercy. But actually, 2/3 of the volunteers turned the voltage to the maximum, just because the authority figure told them it was OK. (Thank goodness for the 1/3 who refused to blindly obey authority.)

The Stanford Prison Experiment showed the same thing: 75 male students volunteered and were randomly assigned as prisoners or guards. Police came to the homes of the volunteer prisoners, cuffed and "arrested" them, and brought them to basement of the police station, and put them in cells. Almost immediately, guards began treating the prisoners very cruelly. Students had mental breakdowns. "Guards forced them to simulate sodomy."

Here's a trailer to a documentary about the experiment: Quiet Rage.

What can be done about this? Zimbardo offers heroism as the "antidote to evil." Teach kids to be ready to act heroically when the see evil. We need to give them real role models. Comic book superheroes are bad models, because they have super powers. A hero is the soldier who reported the Abu Ghraib abuses. People wanted to kill him. They threatened to kill his wife and mother, too. He had to go in hiding. Teach kids hero courses, teach them hero skills, make them heroes-in-waiting.

Declan McCullagh reports at News.com that....

Apple has confirmed a security glitch that, in many situations, will let someone with physical access to a Macintosh computer gain access to the password of the active user account.

The vulnerability arises out of a programming error that stores the account password in the computer's memory long after it's needed, meaning it can be retrieved and used to log into the computer and impersonate the user.

"This is a real problem and it needs to be fixed," said Jacob Appelbaum, a San Francisco-area programmer who discovered the vulnerability and reported it to Apple. He said he disagreed with the company's response: "They won't put it in the latest security update or release a security update just for this issue."

Appelbaum is one of the team of researchers who published a "cold boot" paper last week describing unrelated vulnerabilities in encrypted filesystems, including Apple's FileVault, Windows Vista's BitLocker, and a number of open-source ones.

Link. Image: "Rebooting the target MacBook in a studio at CNET on Second Street in San Francisco. From left to right: Paul, Schoen, Appelbaum, and [Declan McCullagh].

Update: All of the technical details are here on bugtraq.

Earlier today, Xeni posted about the Billboard Liberation Front's improvement of an AT&T billboard last night in San Francisco. The BLF has just provided me with this link to video evidence of the shenanigans that occurred on a busy, well-lit thoroughfare in the heart of the Mission District. Footage by renegade videographer Iov de Beholther. Link

The "Wikileaks" shutdown situation continues. The Associated Press covered the story late yesterday, noting how Julius Baer's lawyers were apparently unfamiliar with the concept of the Streisand Effect, and how the attempt to get Wikileaks taken offline would only get it -- and the content the company was trying to hide -- a lot more attention. Today, Julius Baer has finally made a statement on the matter, claiming a variety of contradictory things. It says that it didn't want the entire site taken offline, but hasn't asked the court to reverse its order shutting down the site. As Slashdot points out, the bank also seems to be claiming that the controversial documents in question need to be taken offline both because they're forged and also because they reveal confidential info. While it is possible that a forged document would also have some legitimate confidential info, it does seem like a strange defense to bring up both of these things. At the very least, it certainly seems like the bank keeps digging itself a deeper and deeper hole. If it really was afraid that having this content out there would make things worse in its ongoing legal battles, things seem a lot worse now as many more people are aware of the documents.

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