Art-prankster Johannes Grenzfurthner of monochrom storms the front doors of various multinational corporations to ask employees (and random folk on the street) if they're aware that these companies have "corporate anthems." Yes, theme songs, sometimes official, sometimes unofficial, always painfully cheesy.

KPMG boasts a particularly heinous ditty, and while renditions sometimes pop up on YouTube, none can be quite so rich as the one we paid an Argentinian street musician $20 to sing. "KPMG, we're strong as can be -- a dream of power and energy!" Bet you $20 the song sticks in your brain longer than you'd like.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

Link to previous Boing Boing tv episodes featuring Johannes and the monochrom crew.

MissingRainbow writes "To avoid paying taxes in India, Microsoft wanted a court to believe that it is selling its product and that there are no royalty payments involved. Their own EULA worked against them in this particular case however as it states, "the product is licensed, not sold". The court ruled against them."

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Back in November, a court blocked the Patent Office from phasing in new rules that would limit continuations on patents. The practice, which has been widely abused by some patent holders to expand the scope of an existing patent to cover newer technologies, has been a problem for quite some time. So, in an effort to shore things up, the USPTO decided on its own to limit how many continuations a patent holder could file on a single patent. The block in November was temporary, while the court reviewed the overall question of whether these new limits were legal -- and now the decision has been released saying that the USPTO has no right to make such changes. The decision actually does make sense. While excessive continuations can be a serious problem, the USPTO shouldn't be allowed to run off and make its own rules. The blanket limitation on continuations was (yet again) an attempt to deal with a symptom rather than take on the root causes of problems in the patent system. So, while it may have helped in the short term, it wouldn't have done much overall, and it's better not to have the USPTO randomly making up its own rules.

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BigBadBus writes "The BBC is reporting that NASA's twin spacecraft designed to obtain stereo images of the Sun have recorded a Solar Tsunami. The feature includes a fascinating movie of the images captured."

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∅yvind Kaldestad writes in to point us to a story he wrote for a Norwegian publication, that shows the ongoing trend of the entertainment industry pressuring ISPs in Europe to block file sharing or kick file sharers off their networks. However, in this case, it looks like the ISPs (smartly) are fighting back, and they've got the Norwegian Consumer Council (NCC) at their backs. A law firm representing entertainment industry interests sent letters to various Norwegian ISPs, demanding they send specific letters to those suspected of unauthorized file sharing. The letter requests a signature accepting responsibility for their file sharing activities and renouncing all future unauthorized file sharing. However, the ISPs quickly rejected such letters, and the NCC warned people not to sign such a letter, as it makes the consumer liable for activities they might not actually have committed, and also removes the due process they are entitled to. The NCC also notes that, despite the claims in the letters, the Norwegian ISPs are unlikely to be liable for the actions of its users under both Norwegian and international law. Once again, this seems to be part of a highly coordinated campaign by the entertainment industry (and the IFPI specifically) to get ISPs to be their policemen and to prop up their obsolete business model.

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Wade Roush writes "21, the top movie at the box office last weekend, has everyone talking about the real identities of the MIT blackjack team members fictionalized in the movie and in the 2002 book, Bringing Down the House, on which the film is based. Last week a number of stories pointed to former MIT student and Las Vegas resident John Chang as the model for the Micky Rosa character, the club mastermind played in the movie by Kevin Spacey. But Boston-area Internet entrepreneur and real estate developer Bill Kaplan is saying that if anyone is the basis for Micky Rosa, it's him. Turns out Kaplan now battles the "e-mail churn" problem as CEO of Newton, MA, startup FreshAddress, which helps companies correct the outdated e-mail addresses in their customer databases."

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We've been pointing out for a while that analysts who try to measure "the PDA market" are wasting everybody's time. The addition of personal organizer functionality to mobile phones (or we could just as easily say, the addition of wireless telephony features to PDAs) meant that phones and PDAs were now part of one big "mobile communications device" market. The next step in that trend, already underway, is the gradual merging of the smart phone and MP3 player markets. An analyst is predicting that half of all cell phones will double as MP3 players by 2011. The cell phone market is getting close to saturation in the developed world, which means that manufacturers have to keep adding new features in order to convince customers to upgrade. I really hope this doesn't mean we'll have to spend the next five years debunking silly stories about the decline of "the MP3 player market."

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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AbsoluteXyro writes "According to a Space.com article, NASA scientists have discovered the smallest known black hole to date. The object is known as 'XTE J1650-500'. Weighing in at a scant 3.8 solar masses and measuring only 15 miles across, this finding sheds new light on the lower limit of black hole sizes and the critical threshold at which a star will become a black hole upon it's death, rather than a neutron star. XTE J1650-500 beats out the previous record holder, GRO 1655-40, by about 2.5 solar masses."

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Lucas123 writes "Attorney General Michael Mukasey claims that terrorists sell pirated software as a way to finance their operations, without presenting a shred of evidence for his case. He's doing it to push through a controversial piece of intellectual property legislation that would increase IP penalties, increase police power, set up a new agency to investigate IP theft, and more. 'Criminal syndicates, and in some cases even terrorist groups, view IP crime as a lucrative business, and see it as a low-risk way to fund other activities,' Mukasey told a crowd at the Tech Museum of Innovation last week."

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MySQL's execs have always been outspoken critics of software patents. Back in 2004, we wrote about the company CEO's well-reasoned article about how software patents had become the nuclear stockpiling of the modern era. Companies were forced to patent everything just to have enough ammo to make sure others didn't sue them for patent infringement, and the end result was huge legal bills and wasted money that wasn't going towards innovation at all. Since then, the company has remained vehemently against software patents. However, now that Sun has purchased MySQL, the company is apparently being pushed to cut back on its anti-software patent stance. Someone who prefers to remain anonymous sent in some blog posts highlighting how Sun has removed MySQL's anti-software patent page. To be fair, among larger companies, Sun has certainly shown a much better understanding of how patents can be anti-innovation as well as how the patent system is often abused. But, at the same time, it also has a bunch of patents and has demonstrated in quite explicit fashion just how those patent nuclear wars work. So, of companies out there, Sun seems less bad concerning software patents than other firms. But it's still rather disappointing to see it erase MySQL's excellent public stance against software patents from the web -- even if it did make a silly April Fool's joke about open source software this week.

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9gezegen writes "An offer for free tickets to theme parks for service members turned out to be an email scam, a ploy that was in actuality a security exercise run by the Army. Involved servicemen and DoD civilians received an email, allegedly coming from the 'Army Family and Morale, Welfare and Recreation Command Office,' and directed them to a phishing site which asked for personal information. After rebuttal and warning by Army MWR, the website revealed that it was a security exercise after all. Army MWR later verified the exercise and announced they were not informed beforehand."

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We've complained plenty about elected officials who don't understand technology but have no problem regulating it -- but the problem extends way beyond elected officials. Tim Wu has a bunch of recommendations on how the next President can fix tech policy in the US and it pretty much all boils down to one thing: appoint people who actually understand technology. That means not appointing lobbyists and lawyers to the FCC and getting a real infrastructure expert to be a "broadband czar." These aren't bad ideas, but it's positively frightening that it even needs to be brought up at all. Have we really reached the point that almost everyone in charge of crafting tech-related policy doesn't have even the slightest tech background?

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What a beauty. Nature wins every design competition.

An anonymous reader writes "Is letting users manage their own PCs an IT time-saver or time bomb waiting to happen? 'In this Web 2.0 self-service approach, IT knights employees with the responsibility for their own PC's life cycle. That's right: Workers select, configure, manage, and ultimately support their own systems, choosing the hardware and software they need to best perform their jobs.'" Do any of you do something similar to this in your workplace? Anyone think this is a spectacularly bad idea?

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Preedit writes "Nick White, the in-house Microsoft blogger who wrote about all things Vista, has resigned. White is leaving Redmond to join the blog-centric marketing and public relations firm BuzzCorps. White did not provide a reason for his decision. InformationWeek, however, notes that his position could not have been easy. White's posts often elicited hundreds of responses from Vista users complaining about the OS's numerous glitches and quirks. The story further notes that White is the sort of young, blogosphere-savvy manager that Microsoft needs if it hopes to outrun Google, and his departure raises questions about the company's ability to retain Web 2.0 talent."

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It's been clear for quite some time that Radiohead more or less stumbled into its position as "embracing" new music distribution models. The band has admitted that the idea of doing a name your own price download offering was suggested by the band's manager just before they put the album online. They didn't really think it through, they just did it. And, since then, it's been clear that the band doesn't quite grasp the wider economics of what it's doing. It never made sense for the band to get rid of the download offering, but it did. And now, the band is getting some publicity for asking its fans to remix a new single from the band, apparently a song the band has struggled to complete for quite a while. However, the details are anything but fan friendly. Fans are asked to buy the five separate tracks (bass, voice, guitar, strings/effects and drums) and only once all five have been bought are they given access to a program to mix the tracks. And, as a bunch of readers have sent in, the terms are not particularly friendly -- basically saying that the fans have no rights whatsoever, Radiohead gets everything and no one should expect any prizes for participating. In other words, this is Radiohead getting fans to pay the band to do its work.

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