Mudpuppy's Magnetic Monster figures tin is a great gift for the monster-loving kid in your life -- it's a set of lovely illustrated magnetic monster body-parts to mix and match into your own gruesome creations. Comes with four reversible backgrounds for enacting monstrous dramas of your choosing -- and the tin is just the right size to stick the backgrounds on and build monsters upon -- great for car trips and the like. I found mine at the wonderful, friendly kid store Hello Sunshine in Toronto, but they don't seem to have it in their webstore, so here's a US retailer that'll sell you one over the web, for those of you not local to the shop. Link

earthforce_1 writes "The vested interests of restrictive copyright are stacking the deck in Canada. The Public Policy Forum Symposium on intellectual property reform has bowed to pressure from certain interests and dis-invited noted copyright scholar Howard Knopf. The forum's stated mandate is '...to strive for excellence in government — to serve as a neutral, independent forum for open dialogue on public policy, and to encourage reform in public sector management.' For some reason, the US Ambassador to Canada and the former head of the Canadian Motion Picture Industry Association have been invited — apparently they are perceived to have a more neutral view of what Canadian copyright laws should be? More information at Howard Knopf's blog."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Howard Rheingold's vlog today features a rare gem of cyberculture history...

Nearly twenty years ago, people who had met online began to meet in person at the WELL office in Sausalito. These interviews from a WELL party, circa 1989, include me, Stewart Brand, Flash Gordon, M.D., Hank Roberts, Janey Fritsche, the late Tina Loney (the woman with the bird) and the late Bob Bickford. Party material courtesy of and copyright by InCA productions.

Link. The video is lacking only one thing: IDs for the people on the screen, as they talk. Anyone want to take a stab at that in the comments here?

timholman writes "After a series of burglaries and auto break-ins in my neighborhood, I'm thinking about adding some video security cameras to my home. To me, the object isn't just deterrence — if someone tries to break into my house or my car (parked on the street in front of my house), I'd like to provide a high-quality image of the perpetrator to the police. Inexpensive video surveillance systems, with their atrocious image quality, are nearly useless. The problem is being able to get good image quality at an affordable price. After some research, I've decided that using network cameras to FTP images to a central server over a HomePlug network is the best solution. However, good megapixel network cameras (e.g. Stardot or Axis cameras) can easily cost more than $1,000 each. Has any of you dealt with a similar situation? Is there any way to get reasonable quality (preferably open source) daytime and nighttime video surveillance equipment for home use without paying an arm and a leg? Is it better to go with a couple of expensive cameras, or a multitude of inexpensive cameras? Is paying two to three thousand dollars simply unavoidable if I want to monitor my front and back yards?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Newscloud brings us news of a startup called E-Fuel promising to ship a home-brew ethanol plant, the size of a washer-dryer, for under $10,000 by the end of this year. We've had plenty of discussions about $1/gal. fuel — these guys want to let you make it at home. The company says it plans to develop a NAFTA-enabled distribution network for inedible sugar from Mexico at 1/8th the cost of trade-protected sugar, to use as raw material for making ethanol. A renewable energy expert from UC Berkeley is quoted: "There's a lot of hurdles you have to overcome. It's entirely possible that they've done it, but skepticism is a virtue."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TeknoFin notes a piece in the NYTimes on the fight RIM finds itself in as the smartphone market shifts to a consumer focus, impelled by the iPhone. For the last 10 years RIM has dominated a smartphone market consisting mainly of email-obsessed corporate professionals. Analysts wonder if RIM can hold on to their lead as their strengths — such as cozy relations with cell carriers worldwide — are diluted by new entrants Apple and Google, who are "vocally trying to dislodge the carriers from the nexus of the North American wireless market." One of RIM's strengths in the corporate market has been their security. Yet Apple executives have said that one-third of Fortune 500 companies were interested in giving iPhones — with all their known and potential security holes — to their employees.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mariam writes "Free software developers from the non-profit NeoSmart Technologies have published a report detailing their experience with coding around Windows Vista's UAC limitations, including the steps they took to make their software perform system actions without requiring admin approval or UAC elevation. Their conclusion? That Windows Vista's improved security model is nothing more than a series of obstacles that in reality only make it more difficult for honest ISVs to publish working code and not actually providing any true protection from malware authors. Quoting from the post: 'Perhaps most importantly though, is the fact that Windows Vista's newly-implemented security limitations are artificial at best, easy to code around, and only there to give the impression of security. Any program that UAC blocks from starting up "for good security reasons" can be coded to work around these limitations with (relative) ease. The "architectural redesign" of Vista's security framework isn't so much a rebuilt system as much as it is a makeover, intended to give the false impression of a more secure OS.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ian Lamont writes "For years, I've been frustrated by Blogger's relatively limited functionality and other problems. For instance, we've heard about Blogger's security flaws since the beginning of this decade. Blogger's latest problem, which lets bots bypass CAPTCHAs in order to set up spam blogs, is not just a sign of Google's disregard for security — it's symptomatic of Google's neglect of its Blogger service. For instance, Blogger is just now rolling out a feature that lets writers publish in the future, years after similar functionality was released in Wordpress and Moveable Type. Is Blogger destined to be a sideshow as long as Google keeps acquiring and building more high-profile services, such as Google Maps and YouTube?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From time to time people have asked me to start an Amazon wishlist. I don't know why I never did it, but last week I was undecided whether I should or shouldn't buy an EyeFi card for my new camera, and thought -- this is exactly the kind of thing that should be on a wishlist. If I get one, I'll review it, but it's not one of those things I'm so sure I'll use that I want to plunk down the money for it.



So that was the moment. I started a wishlist. It's linked to in the right margin of Scripting News. If you ever feel like giving me a gift, now you know how to do it. I'll try to keep it stocked with relatively inexpensive things I'd like to try out, or things I need that (again) don't cost too much. Maybe from time to time I'll put a whopper in there, but I don't want to be greedy. Let's see how it works.

Clay Shirky has been giving talks on his book Here Comes Everybody — his "masterpiece," per Cory Doctorow — and BoingBoing picks up one of them, from the Web 2.0 conference. Shirky has come up with a quantification of the attention that TV has been absorbing for more than half a century. Shirky defines as a unit of attention "the Wikipedia": 100 million person-hours of thought. As a society we have been burning 2,000 Wikipedias per year watching mostly sitcoms. We're stopping now. Here's a video of another information-dense Shirky talk, this one at Harvard.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On a lighter note...

Everyone loves lists that rank people based on popularity and how much UGC the U generates. And of course everyone loves Twitter. So here's the perfect meaningless distraction for a Sunday afternoon with nothing better going on, a ranking of my contacts on Twitter in order of the amount of spew they create! Toxic spew, or green spew, it doesn't matter -- it's quantity over quality, the triumph of Web 1.95.

http://twitter.scripting.com/spewage.html

Of course Scoble tops the list. I'll let you figure out what that means. I chuckled when I saw Guy Kawasaki coming in at #4. I guess his semi-spam pays off (if this means anything, which it doesn't -- see the disclaimer).

If you have any questions or comments post them here.

SkiifGeek writes "Race to Zero, a sideline competition being set up at this year's DefCon, already has some Antivirus vendors steaming over the objectives of the contest. They are upset because it is essentially a polymorphism exercise. Entrants are given a set of malware samples which they must then modify to pass through a battery of antivirus scanners without detection while still carrying a viable payload. Even if competitors ignore the published vulnerabilities and weaknesses affecting antivirus vendors, the competition should turn up some interesting results. It may provide technical insight and concepts for further research as similar competitions have done in the past."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At best the MSM got the Wright story wrong, at best it was a mistake.

But if it were a mistake, there would have been some mea culpas today, after seeing the Wright interview, someone would have said they got it wrong, maybe even apologized for contributing to the vilification of Rev Wright.

But the mea culpas didn't come. They rationalize it, generally, by saying it wasn't a real interview. At least they didn't completely ignore it, but they came close.

I was reminded of the aftermath of the execution in Texas. Because she was a woman, and religious, repentent and reformed, she didn't seem to be a threat to society. She went on Larry King to plead for her life. Tucker made the perfect spokesmodel for advocates of the death penalty. She admitted to a horrible murder, but she was such an attractive murderer. It was a way to show support for the cause even when the subject was a compelling person, someone you might like to know. There was a huge national debate about it.

On February 3, 1998, she was executed. I wondered why it was so quiet. Why weren't the advocates of the death penalty who said they needed her death to feel closure weren't saying "See I told you so, I feel closure now, don't you?"

They didn't say that because they didn't feel it. Murder isn't an equation that can be balanced. You can't balance the taking of a life by taking a life. It just doesn't work that way.

I'll never understand why we enjoy a circus like the shaming of Rev Wright, a man who should be proud of his life, not ashamed. I feel empathy for the person in the middle of a threatening circle. I feel empathy for a murderer being put to death. I feel rage for the innocent people who are put to death by the state, in my name, in the name of justice.

I think there was silence about the death of Karla Faye because there was so much shame about it. The justice system needed her to shut up. Maybe that's the same reason the press has nothing to say now that Wright has spoken and shows they got the story horribly wrong. Maybe, to preserve their sense of integrity, they need him to shut up. And he's talking. That's a problem for them.

Since the press isn't going to cover this, it's up to the people to cover the press. Obama won't talk about it either (makes me wonder about Obama). I think the problem is bigger than getting Obama elected, we need to reform how ideas and information flows in our country.

fireheadca writes "Metallica, once strongly opposed to file-sharing, has hinted at going 'free' in the style of NIN and Radiohead. Having heard success stories about releasing music online, Metallica has decided it wants a piece of the action. Radiohead, as a pioneer of online 'pay what you want' music, has shown the world it is possible to profit by releasing music online, but would not post those profits. NIN, on the other hand, has reported at least $1.6 million in revenue. In hindsight, many people remember Metallica as the band that helped shutdown Napster. I purchased the NIN album, after many years of free downloads of the NIN collection, to help support the band. Would you buy a Metallica online album despite their former views?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bowman9991 writes "Remember the BBC's Blake's 7? Looks like the classic space adventure series is being reworked by Sky One. If they get it right (like the recent Battlestar Galactica revamp), this one has massive potential. 'As part of a drive to invest more in homegrown drama, Sky One has ordered scripts for two 60-minute pilot episodes. If successful, it will be expanded into a six-part series.' Created by Terry Nation, the man responsible for the Daleks in Doctor Who, Blake's 7 ran from 1978 to 1981 and had cult appeal. The effects were average, but the story and characters were compelling."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lucas123 writes "A District Court judge has ordered the Executive Office of the President to tell the court by May 5 whether any e-mail server backup tapes were kept for a period from March to October 2003 to cover controversial issues such as reasons for starting the war in Iraq, the release of a former CIA operative's name and the US Department of Justice's actions. The White House has been working for months trying to fend off a lawsuit filed last May in federal court in Washington by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics. The judge cited what he called an apparent contradiction by White House CIO Theresa Payton as to whether backup tapes had been preserved. He also recommended that White House employees be ordered to turn over any flash drives or other portable media that may contain e-mails. The White House missing email scandal has been developing for some time now."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Business Week magazine has gone medieval on the RIAA, recounting in grisly detail the cruel ordeal to which the RIAA has subjected a completely innocent defendant, Tanya Andersen of Oregon. Nobody can read the story and come to any other conclusion than that the RIAA and its lawyers are total jerks. Of course we've been reading about Atlantic v. Andersen on p2pnet.net and on my blog, and discussing it here, but there's something extra special about a mainstream publication like Business Week really letting them have it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.