It looks like politicians worldwide have decided to step in to try to stop rude mobile phone behavior. Just after we pointed to US politicians looking to ban the (already banned) use of mobile phones on airplanes, the mayor of the Austrian city of Graz, has said that commuters must switch their mobile phones to silent mode on public transportation. From the sound of it, this isn't so much a law, as a voluntary suggestion. The mayor says that police won't be going after anyone who fails to follow the rule. It's a little unclear from the AP article whether or not this is only supposed to prevent phones from ringing or if it's also meant to keep people from talking on the phone as well. Either way, it's unlikely to work. As the article also notes, Sweden recently did away with special "cell phone free" zones on public transportation because "it didn't really work." Meanwhile, New York City had pushed for mobile phone etiquette laws years ago, but it's not clear if it's ever enforced.

This does raise some interesting questions. Clearly, plenty of people are quite annoyed by the way others use mobile phones in public. In fact, there was an amusing study a few years back that showed nearly everyone gets annoyed at others for rude phone behavior, but when asked about their own behavior insist that they are never a problem. However, it does seem that even when people recognize the rudeness of others on mobile phones, if they're told to stop using their own mobile phone, it sets off a bit of mobile rage from people who feel unfairly restricted. I used to think that rude behavior on mobile phones was mostly due to people who were mobile phone "newbies" and didn't quite realize that there were better ways to use the phone, but that doesn't seem to be the case either.

So, is there a solution? Do we need laws to stop people from "rude" mobile phone behavior? Would they even work? Would education about mobile phone etiquette work instead? Or, should we all just learn to deal with the fact that sometimes, when we go out, there will be mobile phones ringing and people talking on them? My guess is that that last scenario (i.e., we just get used to the way it is) is most likely.

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Last July, a research team from the University of Washington released an online tool to analyze whether web pages were being altered during the transit from web server to user. On Wednesday, the team released a paper at the Usenix conference analyzing the data collected from the tool. The found, unsurprisingly, that ISPs were indeed injecting ads into web pages viewed by a small number of users. The paper is available at the Usenix site. From PCWorld: "To get their data, the team wrote software that would test whether or not someone visiting a test page on the University of Washington's Web site was viewing HTML that had been altered in transit. In 16 instances ads were injected into the Web page by the visitor's Internet Service provider. The service providers named by the researchers are generally small ISPs such as RedMoon, Mesa Networks and MetroFi, but the paper also named one of the largest ISPs in the U.S., XO Communications, as an ad injector."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in February we wrote about a patent holding firm called Rembrandt (a nod, I'm sure, to the book "Rembrandts in the Attic," which many say kicked off this decade's patent problems) that was suing basically everyone in the TV business, claiming to hold patents on digital television. This was problematic for a few reasons. First, since the FCC is mandating that everyone switch to fully digital TV systems by next year, broadcasters have little choice but to offer digital TV. Second, Rembrandt bought the patent from AT&T who had already promised to license it under RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms which Rembrandt is ignoring. Since the FTC recently smacked down another patent holder for doing the same thing, an advocacy group is now appealing to the FTC to smack down Rembrandt as well, claiming that the company is "violating antitrust and fair competition laws by abusing the monopoly provided by its patent" in order to collect "a massive tax... on the transition to digital TV." Indeed.

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Alternative Details brings news that PayPal is developing a plan to stop users from accessing its financial services if they aren't using browsers with anti-phishing protection. PayPal is recommending the use of blacklists, anti-fraud warning pages, and EV SSL certificates. Browsers without anti-phishing features will be considered "unsafe." It seems likely Safari will be included in this category given PayPal's warning about the Apple browser last month. "'At PayPal, we are in the process of reimplementing controls which will first warn our customers when logging in to PayPal of those browsers that we consider unsafe. Later, we plan on blocking customers from accessing the site from the most unsafe--usually the oldest--browsers,' he declared. Barrett only mentioned old, out-of-support versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer among this group of 'unsafe browsers,' but it's clear his warning extends to Apple's Safari browser, which offers no anti-phishing protection and does not support the use of EV SSL certificates."

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A new exhaustive study called "Access Denied" tells the whole story of Internet censorship around the world:

Many countries around the world block or filter Internet content, denying access to information--often about politics, but also relating to sexuality, culture, or religion--that they deem too sensitive for ordinary citizens. Access Denied documents and analyzes Internet filtering practices in over three dozen countries, offering the first rigorously conducted study of this accelerating trend.

Link (Thanks, Seth!)

Bell Canada has formally announced that its commercial customers -- other ISPs -- will henceforth have all their traffic throttled and filtered by Bell, who will be degrading some connections based on the protocol they use.

Bell's bizarre argument for this? We're screwing our retail customers with throttling. If we let our wholesale customers offer a better connection to their retail customers, our customers will be upset that they're not getting as good a deal.

"Granting CHIP's request would actually have the perverse effect of providing an unreasonable preference to wholesale ISP customers and their end users who will be able to continue to use a disproportionate amount of available bandwidth during peak periods, creating an unreasonable disadvantage for Sympatico retail and business customers," Bell writes in its response.

Link (Thanks, Nibor!)

See also: Bell Canada caught throttling ISPs' net connections

The Disney Experience's papercraft replica of the dear departed Disney skybucket ride is fantastic -- so cool to have a replica of this notorious widowmaker from the Happiest Place(s) on Earth. Link (Thanks, Mike!)

There was plenty of people upset by Facebook's original "Beacon" advertising system, that automatically connected information on purchases to your "news feed" and broadcasted them to all your Facebook friends -- but now we'll find out if some of that activity was illegal. One of the initial participating companies was Blockbuster, who automatically fed information to Facebook about what movies you had rented. It turns out that there's a specific federal law against revealing info about movie rentals (who knew?). The Videotape Privacy Protection Act was apparently passed by Congress after Supreme Court Appointee Robert Bork's videotape rentals were revealed while he was being reviewed by Congress. While plenty of folks don't know about this law, you would think that it would be pretty near the top of the list of laws that a company like Blockbuster would be familiar with. Yet, it seems to not have occurred to anyone there that automatically feeding movie rental info to Facebook might violate that law. However, it appears someone else did recognize this and has now sued Blockbuster for violating the law. Not surprisingly, the plan is to turn this into a class action lawsuit. Thanks to the specifics of this particular law, it's unlikely that other Beacon participants violated this law, but it's only a matter of time until class action lawyers figure out some other law they probably violated.

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Bibek Paudel brings us a BBC report on the development and testing of an new ion engine by a security firm named Qinetiq. The engine will be used in an ESA spacecraft tasked with mapping the Earth's gravitational field from orbit. Only a handful of ion drives have been used for space missions before, some of which we have discussed. Quoting: "Cryogenic pumps can be heard in the background, whistling away like tiny steam engines. Using helium gas as a coolant, they can bring down the temperature in the vacuum chamber to an incredibly chilly 20 Kelvin (-253C). The pressure, meanwhile, can drop to a millionth of an atmosphere. Ion engines ... make use of the fact that a current flowing across a magnetic field creates an electric field directed sideways to the current. This is used to accelerate a beam of ions (charged atoms) of xenon away from the spacecraft, thereby providing thrust."

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I got a new camera, first one in 4 years.



Click here for a set of pics taken on a Berkeley neighborhood walk this afternoon.

A ten-minute quickie rant.

http://sundaygang.com/dave/cn08Apr17.mp3

Hey Barack Obama was really saying something important in the "bitter" quote and in last night's debate, and all the idiot pundits on TV are blowing by it.

Wizards of the Coast has announced plans for a brand-new system license for the fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons . As with the d20 STL for Third Edition, this is a royalty-free license that will allow third parties to publish products using the rules developed by WotC. The new system reference document will be made available early in June (just after the release of the new edition). That license only covers fantasy gaming, but a second license (the d20 GSL) will be released allowing for any type of gaming product to be developed. For analysis and follow-up on the announcement, the ENWorld boards have full details.

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Parts With Appeal (Section), 30" X 10.5", a lovely new Giclée print from Coop -- $100 each. Link.

It was Congress that first mandated that polling places needed to start using e-voting machines a few years back, which has led to the ridiculously long trail of stories concerning buggy machines with questionable results and no way to go back and check to see how accurate the results are. It appears that politicians have finally been realizing that the lack of a paper trail (even if just to confirm the results) is problematic. So they're pushing states to make sure they use e-voting machines that also include a paper trail. But, when it comes to paying to make those changes, the states are apparently on their own. Congress has rejected a plan to fund the states in making sure a paper backup was available. Why? Well, as Rep. Vernon Ehlers says: "I think there are other methods of achieving redundancy" though he conveniently leaves those out. He then notes: "hand counting is not as accurate as almost any machine counting that I have seen." It's true that hand counting has its problems too. No one denies that. But the point isn't that hand counting is perfect, but that there's a way to go back and compare the results to make sure they're correct and accurate. Without that in place, we're simply relying on the machines to work perfectly, and we know that doesn't work.

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A new member of this blog's extended universe introduces himself to the world today, over on Bing Bong Gidgets.

The name's Marvin, by the way. Marvin Battelle. I'm Boing Boing Gadgets' "band manager," whatever that is. And I am from the future.

I don't want to dwell too much on how I got here or why I came: the cautionary value of warning you evolutionary mollusks about mistaking a flux capacitor for a french tickler would be just shy of zilch. Needless to say, the slippery slope, one thing led to another and now I'm stuck here.

Without any of the valueless scraps of disease-soaked paper your rappers call "Benjamins" to my name, my first priority was clear: find someone to mooch from. Luckily, I had a prime candidate: my great-great-great-great-great-great23 uncle, John Battelle.

Link

An anonymous reader writes "The USENIX LEET workshop held earlier this week in San Francisco offered neat insights into the Storm botnet, including two papers showing the difficulty of accurately measuring the botnet's size, and one on the way it conducts its spamming campaigns (down to the template language used). There was a bunch of other cool work too, so check out the papers."

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