bednarz brings us a NetworkWorld story about the development of a robot through an open source project. The objective of the project is to "take robotics from research into homes." Quoting: "One of its immediate goals is to build 10 robots and make them available to university researchers as a common platform that can be tinkered with and improved. Willow Garage will also supply 'an open-source code base integrated from the best open-source robotics software available,' President and CEO Steve Cousins said. In Cousins' video presentation, the first version of the robot could be seen vacuuming, picking up toys off the floor of a living room, taking dishes out of a dishwasher, and most importantly of all, using a bottle opener to crack open a cold, refreshing brew."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pesco, Cory, Mark and I were in a synchronous space-time continuum yesterday at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. This doesn't happen very often! Intergalactic travel is expensive, now that spaceship nanofuel prices are up.

Dave Bullock was there, shooting portraits for Wired, and he shot this image, above. You can view the rest of his extensive photo gallery for Wired right here.

A group calling itself the Interactive Media Entertainment & Gaming Association has failed in its attempt to get a judge to throw out Congress' law designed to ban online gambling. While the judge did note that the group has standing to bring this suit (which was an open question), she did not find their case compelling at all. She basically said that Congress passed the law legally and it wasn't a violation of the Constitution. The group is planning to appeal, but it still seems like a more likely path towards getting such a law overturned is to convince Congress that it made a mistake.

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The next installment in the free "SF in SF" reading series in San Francisco is on March 16, where Jeffrey Ford and Tim Pratt will take the spotlight, emceed as always by Terry Bisson. These are great, collegial, intimate events, an opportunity to hear great writers say smart things about literature, science, and science fiction.

SUNDAY, MARCH 16

Lounge and cash bar open at 5:30PM
6:00 PM readings

Each author will read a selection from their work followed by Q&A from the audience, moderated by author Terry Bisson. Authors will schmooze and sign books afterwards in the lounge. Books will be available for sale Seating is limited, so first come, first seated.

The Variety Preview Room
The Hobart Building, 1st Floor
582 Market St. @ Montgomery, by Montgomery St. MUNI/BART
Entrance to the Hobart Bldg. is between Citibank and Quiznos

Link

A whistle-blower reports that an unnamed wireless carrier has provided a government facility in Quantico, VA, with unfiltered access to its core network. The whistle-blower says this gives the government direct access to private information such as text messaging and call records. He doesn't name either the company or the government agency involved. But a 2006 lawsuit featuring similar allegations named Verizon Wireless as the culprit. And Threat Level says that Quantico, VA, just happens to be "the center of the FBI's electronic surveillance operations." When asked about this, a Verizon Wireless spokesman wrote "What you're talking about sounds as if it would be classified and involving national security, so I wouldn't be able to find out the facts."

The idea that ordinary domestic surveillance activities are a matter of national security, and therefore immune from public scrutiny, is both wrong-headed and malicious. I guess the idea is that we don't want to tip off the terrorists about our surveillance programs. And obviously, information about specific targets needs to be kept secret. But the terrorists have to already know that most communications channels can be intercepted. Moreover, it's just not reasonable to expect that the broad details of our government's domestic surveillance activities will remain a secret indefinitely. Despite the secrecy, we're gradually learning about the scope of these programs. If terrorists didn't know their calls were being tapped five years ago, they certainly do now.

The problem is that because details about these programs (and information about abuses) dribble out slowly over several years, Congress never has the opportunity to conduct meaningful oversight of them. For example, this week we also found out that abuse of national security letters, which was previously only reported to have occurred from 2003 to 2005, continued into 2006. Of course, the administration says they've fixed the problem and that no more NSL abuses will occur. But that's what they always say when privacy abuses are uncovered, yet new examples keep popping up. The only way the abuses will stop is if Congress rejects the idea that domestic surveillance is immune from judicial and Congressional surveillance. The Bush administration needs to disclose the exact scope of its domestic surveillance activities so that Congress can have an open, public debate about the proper scope of government spying powers.

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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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Rep. Berman (D-CA) has removed the controversial section 104 from his PRO-IP Act. That section would have multiplied the already excessive statutory damages for infringement in the case of compilations, making the damages for infringing upon the copyrights of a single average CD rise into the millions of dollars. This change came after proponents of the amendment were unable to cite even one case where the statutory damages recovered were insufficient. But don't let the article fool you into thinking that the PRO-IP Act is no longer controversial now that this one section is gone, the act still creates copyright cops who are authorized to seize people's computers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Larry David: "Does anyone want this nut answering the phone?" 

New Republic says Michigan will announce its caucus in the next few days. 

Hillary Clinton: "Look, I have said that Senator McCain will bring a lifetime of experience to the campaign, I will bring a lifetime of experience and Senator Obama will bring a speech that he gave in 2002. I think that is a significant difference."

It's been pointed out elsewhere that you say stuff like that if you want the VP nomination, the Republican VP nomination.

In other words she's as much a Democrat as Joe Lieberman is.

What we saw today was the spark. The explosion will continue for twenty years. We will all feel the warmth.

What we saw today was the beginning of two-decades of mobile domination by Apple. What Microsoft and Windows was to the desktop, Apple and Touch will be to mobile.

And while mobile platforms have been around for a while, they never really gained passionate traction. Palm sorta had it for a while. Windows Mobile has been getting better. RIM is the current choice for business email on the go.

But just like there were a lot of players in the portable music space, there were no clear leaders. Until Apple came to town.

The same thing is happening today in the mobile space. Palm, Windows Mobile, Blackberry. They’ve been players, but no one has broken out big. No one has managed to grab both the business and consumer markets like Windows did on the desktop. Until Apple came to town. At least that’s my prediction.

Apple has the superior product, the big momentum, the cool, the lust, the business hooks, the consumer hooks, the customer experience, the interface, the design (interface and industrial), the smooth development environment, the vision.

And, maybe the secret key to it all, they have the commercial platform that makes it possible for a developer to actually sell, distribute, and update their software with the flip of a switch. And don’t forget the customer experience revolution — buying and it-just-works installation of iPhone software will be as one-click easy as buying music from the iTunes store. It’s all wrapped into one beautiful package. A package that only Apple can deliver.

This is brand new big shit. It all started today.

Last year, the House of Representatives introduced a bi-partisan "Pro IP" bill that had a ton of horrible parts to it that many realized was actually very anti-IP. One of the problems with the bill was that it attempted to raise the fines for copyright infringement even higher than the already ridiculous fines. However, with the RIAA unable to give a good reason why fines should be higher, it looks like Congress has agreed to remove that one section of the bill to get it approved by the IP subcommittee.

This makes an absolutely awful and dangerous bill marginally better, but still extremely problematic. It still involves the creation of a new federal bureaucracy designed to focus solely on trying to track down and stop "pirates." Even the Justice Department is against this part of the bill -- though, perhaps only because it wants to retain the job of going after copyright infringers. Also, just because the higher fines have been removed, supporters of the bill make it clear they may not be gone for good, and could very well be added back in later in the process. What isn't explained is why Congress needs to get involved at all. The industry has long been exposed as exaggerating the extent of this problem, and as we see day after day after day, new business models keep showing up that suggest this issue is merely a business model problem, not a legal issue -- and certainly not a legal issue that requires a brand new federal bureaucracy charged with protecting a single industry's business model.

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Riding with Robots writes "It turns out that one of the Ringed Planet's moons has rings of its own. The robotic spacecraft Cassini at Saturn has discovered that the icy moon Rhea is orbited by an extensive debris field and at least one ring, the first such system found. 'Many years ago we thought Saturn was the only planet with rings,' said one mission scientist. 'Now we may have a moon of Saturn that is a miniature version of its even more elaborately decorated parent.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wired has a write-up of PhotoShelter, a site that helps "protect" photographers from the scourge of their work being too easy to find. They cite Lane Hartwell, the photographer who got bent out of shape when one of her photographs appeared briefly in a popular viral video, as an example of the kind of photographer who would benefit from the site. I can understand why she'd be unhappy that she didn't get credit for the use of her photo, but I don't see how switching to PhotoShelter would have improved the situation. Most of the money in photography is going to be from commercial clients. Companies tend to be pretty good about paying for photographs (and other content) because they've got deeper pockets and less plausible fair use claims. On the other hand, non-commercial uses of photos aren't going to be very lucrative; most individuals and smaller non-profits will use a lower-quality free image rather than pay to license a professional photograph. Certainly the creator of a viral video isn't going to pay royalties on a product he's planning to give away for free. So the smart way to handle things is to treat non-commercial uses of your photographs as promotional opportunities, seeking credit rather than compensation. That should build your reputation as a photographer and hopefully get more commercial clients interested in your work. PhotoShelter appears to be a solid site for professional photographers looking to catalog and market their photographs. But the fact that the site makes it more difficult for people to find and use a photographer's work isn't something photographers should be cheering about.

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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kwietman writes "The FBI admitted that in 2006, for the fourth straight year, they improperly accessed phone and internet records of U.S. citizens. Director Robert Mueller testified that the abuses occurred prior to sweeping reforms enacted in 2007, and actually blamed the breaches in part on the telecommunications companies, who submitted more information than was requested. In another unsurprising development, the FBI also underreported the number of security letters - used to authorize wiretaps and to subpoena internet and telecom records - by over 4,600. The use of these letters to identify potential terrorists has, according to the government audit, increased dramatically since the implementation of the Patriot Act. Over 1,000 of these security letters were found to be improper in 2005, and similar numbers were expected for 2006 and 2007."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Techdirt's Mike Masnick is writing a series of short articles on topics around intellectual property. His latest focuses on the term itself, exploring the nomenclature people have proposed to describe matter that is neither intellectual nor property. The whole series (starting here) is well worth a read.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The entertainment industry really has a way about convincing judges and politicians that something really awful is going on with bittorrent search engines -- despite the fact that they have yet to present any evidence that any of them are illegal. Since they're search engines, they are not hosting any infringing content, and there are plenty of legitimate uses of these systems, as can be seen by the fact that Trent Reznor just used various torrent sites to help promote his latest album (which appears to be doing quite well). If there are problems with particular content, the answer isn't to blame the site, but to go after those responsible for offering up the infringing content itself. Yet, through various scare tactics, the entertainment industry convinces judges and politicians that it's the search engines' fault. The latest is in Israel, where the IFPI has convinced a judge to order the country's largest ISPs to block a torrent site named Httpshare. This doesn't appear to fit with the laws in Israel at all, which has some wondering why the judge would make such an order. Of course, the end result will likely backfire on the IFPI. Remember, it was just a few weeks ago that a Danish court similarly ordered ISPs to block Pirate Bay. The end result was just to generate a lot more attention for Pirate Bay increasing traffic greatly from Denmark. The same thing is likely to now happen in Israel with Httpshare, a site I'd never heard about. There will be rather easy workarounds for users who want to get there, and thanks to the IFPI putting it in the headlines, chances are many more people will go check it out.

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Stony Stevenson writes "Pirated microchips based on stolen blueprints could soon be a thing of the past thanks to computer engineers at Rice University and the University of Michigan. The engineers have devised a way to head off this costly infringement by giving each chip its own unique lock and key. The patent holder would hold the keys, and the chip would securely communicate with the patent holder to unlock itself. The chip could operate only after being unlocked. The Ending Piracy of Integrated Circuits (Epic) technique relies on established cryptography methods, and introduces subtle changes into the chip design process without affecting performance or power consumption. With Epic protection enabled, each integrated circuit would be manufactured with a few extra switches that behave like a combination lock."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.