Noel sez, "Jasper de Beijer creates amazing papercraft models then takes beautiful photographs of them. He is currently working on a Victorian themed series called 'The Riveted Kingdom', it's really stunning work. Link (Thanks, Noel!)

wraith808 points out a story about remarks made by the CEO of software and game development company Stardock about sales in the PC game industry. His suggestion to other developers is simple: ignore the software pirates. From Ars Technica: "'So here is the deal: When you develop for a market, you don't go by the user base. You go by the potential customer base. That's what most software companies do. They base what they want to create on the size of the market they're developing for,' Wardell writes on his blog. 'But not PC game developers.' Don't let people who aren't your audience control the titles you make, and ignore piracy. This is much like Trent Reznor's strategy, although the execution is different. Instead of worrying about pirates, just leave the content out in the open. The market Reznor plays to will still buy the music; he's simply stopped worrying about the pirates. He came to the same conclusion: they weren't customers, they might never be customers, so spending money to try to stop them serves no purpose."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've just been handed a production version of the new Canon EOS 450D / Rebel XSi and have done our best to bring you some sample images. The London weather has done us no favors but we thought you'd be eager to find out how its 12.2 megapixel images look so we persevered. A mixture of lenses and ISO settings were used to try to give an all-round impression of the camera's behavior and, as always, you can download the original files to scrutinize.

Facebook has unveiled a new set of privacy settings that have been getting some positive reviews in some quarters. While I'm always happy to see a company that's not afraid to experiment with new privacy protections, I think Facebook has some more work to do on this one.

One problem has been identified by Chris Soghoian: if you're in an academic network, you can theoretically limit access to your profile based on each viewer's academic status at your institution. So if you're an undergrad, you can set things up so that your friends can see those pictures of you doing body shots, but your professors and TAs can't. The problem is that apparently, peoples' status is self-reported, and can easily be changed. So a nosy grad student could temporarily switch his status to "undergrad" and to get access to an undergraduate's photos. This seems like a problem.

The more fundamental flaw, I think, is that there are now way too many options. The exact options I see on my Facebook account are different from the ones Chris sees, presumably because he's a student and I'm not. But on my version of the preferences, there are a dozen categories of information, each of which have 6 to 8 different options. For example, there are separate privacy settings for "profile," "basic info," and "personal info." Do you have any idea what is in each of those categories? I don't. And then you have to decide whether each category will be available to "Only Me," "Some Friends," "All Friends," and "Friends of Friends." And you have to decide which of your "networks" will be able to see that information. And you can provide a list of people to exclude.

This is a bewildering array of options, and it's likely to retard the usefulness of Facebook's privacy features. When it comes to user preferences, a handful of carefully chosen options is better than allowing users to adjust every conceivable setting. A well-designed user-interface should economize on the user's valuable time and attention by giving him a reasonable number of options that encompass the most likely use cases. If you give users a huge number of options, most of them will give up in frustration, leaving them in a much worse position, privacy-wise, than if you'd given them a smaller menu of easy-to-understand options to choose from.

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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NY Times: "During one of the most difficult periods in the presidency of Bill Clinton, he addressed a group of clerics at an annual prayer breakfast in September 1998 just as the Starr report outlining his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky was about to be published."

mytrip brings us a story from news.com about an FBI operation in which agents posted hyperlinks which advertised child pornography, recorded the IP addresses of people who clicked the links, and then tracked them down and raided their homes. The article contains a fairly detailed description of how the operation progressed, and it raises questions about the legality and reliability of getting people to click "unlawful" hyperlinks. Quoting: "With the logs revealing those allegedly incriminating IP addresses in hand, the FBI sent administrative subpoenas to the relevant Internet service provider to learn the identity of the person whose name was on the account--and then obtained search warrants for dawn raids. The search warrants authorized FBI agents to seize and remove any "computer-related" equipment, utility bills, telephone bills, any "addressed correspondence" sent through the U.S. mail, video gear, camera equipment, checkbooks, bank statements, and credit card statements. While it might seem that merely clicking on a link wouldn't be enough to justify a search warrant, courts have ruled otherwise. On March 6, U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt in Nevada agreed with a magistrate judge that the hyperlink-sting operation constituted sufficient probable cause to justify giving the FBI its search warrant."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

So the winners of the 700 MHz spectrum auction have been announced and to say that there were no surprises would be an understatement. It played out almost exactly as most observers predicted it would. Verizon Wireless ended up with the C-block (with Google only bidding right up to the cut-off amount to force Verizon to play by "open" rules) and AT&T added some spectrum as well, which it can add to the 700 MHz spectrum it picked up separately last year. The end result? Nothing too exciting for consumers. Whether or not Verizon Wireless's required "openness" makes a difference remains to be seen. What didn't happen was someone new entering the scene -- meaning that we're not going to see anything really new come out of all this spectrum.

In fact, perhaps the most bizarre bid of all was EchoStar spending $700 million on spectrum that can only be used for one-way communication. One-way communication is less and less useful these days. EchoStar has been making some interesting moves of late, but using this spectrum to build a mobile TV broadcast solution (which is what many expect) makes little sense. It will cost the company billions, and then they'll be limited to a one-way communication system just as people are recognizing that the real value is in multi-directional communications. It may give the company another option rather than relying on satellites (which are costly and troublesome at times), but the expense is way too high considering the limitations. So, even with EchoStar, we're talking about "more of the same." That's too bad, as there was a quiet hope that someone different would step in and do something really new and interesting with this valuable spectrum.

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If you're under a certain age, websites (at least under the law in many countries) cannot collect data on you -- or are required to get "consent" from an adult first. However, that's leading to a separate discussion about whether or not kids should have the right to take back that data once they come of age. A parent may agree to share certain data about a kid with a certain website, but once that kid is old enough, what if he wants to revoke that permission? It may sound like a simple thing, but once that data is out there, getting it back is nearly impossible. Yet, some politicians are trying to make that the law, even though it will be almost impossible to enforce in many cases.

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Riding with Robots writes "NASA reports that by using data from the Cassini probe's radar, scientists established the locations of 50 unique landmarks on the surface of Saturn's planet-size moon Titan. They then searched for these same lakes, canyons and mountains in the data after subsequent Titan flybys. They found that the features had shifted from their expected positions by up to 30 kilometers. NASA says a systematic displacement of surface features would be difficult to explain unless the moon's icy crust was decoupled from its core by an internal ocean, making it easier for the crust to move. If confirmed, this discovery would add to the growing list of moons in the solar system that are icy on the outside and warm and liquid inside, providing potential habitats. We've previously discussed Titan's hydrocarbon lakes and potential cryovolcano."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Threat Level reports that the head of California's DMV explained that just because his state filed for two-year extension to comply with the Department of Homeland Security's worse-than-useless yet mandatory Real ID program, that should not been seen as "a commitment to implement Real ID, rather it will allow us to fully evaluate the impact of the final regulations and precede with necessary policy deliberations prior to a final decision on compliance."

Even so, the filing of the application was enough to get Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff to pull out his special green crayon from a locked and booby-trapped desk drawer and use it to color California on his cute little map of states that won't have to suffer the special indignities he's designed for citizens of states that still believe in the idea of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

States have until March 31 to request a two-year extension, and DHS had said before Thursday it won't grant Real ID extensions to states who don't commit to implementing the rules in the future.

Californians that would meant enduring the same fate facing citizens of South Carolina, Maine, Montana and New Hampshire.

They would have needed to dig out their passport, if they had one, every time they boarded a plane, or go through an extra level of TSA screening at airport metal detectors. Los Angeles and San Francisco airports could have had security lines stretching to the Sierras.

Californians without passports would also have been barred from buying certain medicine, entering federal court buildings or getting help at the Social Security Administration, unless they have a passport.

Link

Larry Lessig has offcially launched Change Congress, his followup to Creative Commons -- a movement to end the corrupting influence of, well, influence on Congress:

... once this wiki-army has tracked the positions of all Members of Congress, we will display a map of reform, circa 2008: Each Congressional district will be colored in either (1) dark red, or dark blue, reflecting Republicans or Democrats who have taken a pledge, (2) light red or light blue, tracking Republicans and Democrats who have not taken our pledge, but who have signaled support for planks in the Change-Congress platform, or (3) for those not taking the pledge and not signaling support for a platform of reform, varying shades of sludge, representing the percentage of the Member's campaign contributions that come from PACs or lobbyists.

...

What this map will reveal, we believe, is something that not many now actually realize: That the support for fundamental reform is broad and deep. That recognition in turn will encourage more to see both the need for reform and the opportunity that this election gives us to achieve it. Apathy is driven by the feeling that nothing can be done. This Change Congress map will demonstrate that in fact, something substantial can be done. Now.

Link to Wired article, Link to Change Congress

Lamperd, a "firearm training system" company, has patented a bracelet that delivers debilitating shocks when remotely triggered. Their killer app for this is aviation safety: they're proposing that the TSA could force everyone who flies to wear one of these and then flight-attendants could zap us into a stupor if we turn out to be Al Quaeda.

A method of providing air travel security for passengers traveling via an aircraft comprises situating a remotely activatable electric shock device on each of the passengers in position to deliver a disabling electrical shock when activated; and arming the electric shock devices for subsequent selective activation by a selectively operable remote control disposed within the aircraft. The remotely activatable electric shock devices each have activation circuitry responsive to the activating signal transmitted from the selectively operable remote control means. The activated electric shock device is operable to deliver the disabling electrical shock to that passenger.

Best part? They're Canadian! Oh, my countrymen, you have a wicked sense of humo(u)r.

Link to patent, Link to Lamperd FTS site (via Schneier)

The latest issue of the online magazine IdeaFixa has a multi-page feature of Boing Boing favorite Kris Kuksi's highly detailed 3D art. Link

In this Flickr pool, you are invited to look at movie stills and try to be the first one to figure out what movies they're from. Most of them stumped me, even though I'm intrigued by the images. Link (Via Eye of the Goof)

Here is rare video footage of Allen Finsberg reading Howl.
Link (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)

Ian Lamont writes "The chair of Yale's CS department and Connecticut's former consumer protection commissioner are calling for the creation of a robust biometric authentication system on a national scale. They say the system would safeguard privacy and people's personal data far more effectively than paper-based IDs. They also reference the troubled Real ID program, saying that the debate has centered around forms of ID rather than the central issue of authentication. The authors further suggest that the debate has led to confusion between anonymity and privacy: 'Outside our homes, we have always lived in a public space where our open acts are no longer private. Anonymity has not changed that, but has provided an illusion of privacy and security. ... In public space, we engage in open acts where we have no expectation of privacy, as well as private acts that cannot take place within our homes and therefore require authenticating identity to carve a sphere of privacy.' The authors do not provide any suggestions for specific biometric technologies, nor do they discuss the role of the government in such a system. What do you think of a national or international biometrics-based authentication scheme? Is it feasible? How would it work? What safeguards need to be put in place?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.