John Buckman from Magnatune clues us that the trailer for Iron Sky is available. We've been following the production for some time, as these are the same guys who brought us Star Wreck, the most successful feature-length Internet-distributed film of all time. That film was made by 3,000 people, has been downloaded 8 million times, is under a Creative Commons by-nd-nc license, and made good money both through DVD sales and through an eventual deal with Universal. Iron Sky is being made using Wreck-a-Movie — a collaborative film-making web site (also Creative Commons based) that grew out of the Star Wreck experience."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By popular request, my ode to Gary, Indiana -- the town that is turning the world upside down tonight.

A bunch of the worst kept secrets in the wireless broadband world have finally come together. No one ever really believed that Sprint and Clearwire would fully break off their WiMax agreement. It simply made too much sense for them to get back together. At the same time, everyone also knew that Comcast and Time Warner were talking to Sprint to help fund WiMax in order to get a wireless pipe with which to compete with the telcos. And... oh yeah, given how much money Intel had pumped into WiMax to make everyone think it just had to be the next generation wireless system, there was no way it was going to let Sprint and Clearwire's WiMax plans collapse. Finally, toss in the fact that Google was known to be interested in Sprint's WiMax plans, and it's not hard to figure out what is actually happening...

Yes, indeed, Intel, Google, Comcast and Time Warner are teaming up to pump $3.2 billion into a joint venture that would merge Sprint and Clearwire's WiMax operations under the Clearwire brand name. This is certainly no surprise given all the earlier stories, but given how many problems have surrounded WiMax as well as earlier attempts for the cable companies to offer wireless services, don't expect this new venture to go smoothly right from the beginning. That doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do. Most of the companies involved didn't really have much of a choice but to do this. Of course, in all this mess, Sprint and Clearwire squandered a portion of the lead they held over AT&T and Verizon. While it will still take a while for AT&T and Verizon to get LTE plans into motion, all this futzing by Sprint and Clearwire took away some of the huge lead it should have had.

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During a break in the festivities at this weekend's massive MakerFaire in San Mateo, Boing Boing pal Aaron Muszalski was kind enough to model the stylish Boing Boing tshirt designed by Coop before my phonecam, to remind you that a modest quantity of these tshirts are still available for purchase on ye olde internets. They're still $22.95-$23.95, and they still glow in the dark, and they're still really cool.

mytrip recommends a News.com account of a panel discussion in which the Washington Post's online executive editor Jim Brady argued against anonymity on his site. He's welcome to try to carve out a space for civilized discourse, but it seems that he can't help alienating the Net-savvy whenever he opens his mouth to speak of it. "...he would like to see a technology that could identify people who violate site standards — and if need be — automatically kick them off for good... Brady also lamented that closing user accounts doesn't keep bad eggs off a site. They just come back and create new ones... Brady believes that in the next five years people will be required to identify themselves in some way at many sites. 'I don't know whether we do it with a credit card number, a driver's license or passport...'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stephanie Holinka of Sandia National Laboratories tells Boing Boing,

We are sad to report the death of former Sandia Labs Director Morgan Sparks. He's best known as the Bell Labs researcher who invented the first practical transistor. His work made possible so many other inventions. Without transistors, one cannot begin to imagine personal computers, cell phones, DVD players and the many other electronic devices we rely on daily. His contributions are pretty humbling to mere English majors like me.

Link to a news story about his passing; here's a profile on PBS.org for the "Transistorized!" documentary.

Just a few weeks ago, Comcast announced a plan to offer up a P2P Bill of Rights as a way to get federal regulators off its back. Of course, as we pointed out at the time, the company never really explained why such a Bill of Rights was actually needed. Instead, it just seemed like something of a PR stunt to show the FCC that it was doing something. Having received the necessary press coverage, Comcast has now abandoned the plan, but says instead that it will join the Distributed Computing Industry Association, which is a newly formed group designed to create best practices around this area. This certainly makes a lot more sense than developing a separate and totally unnecessary "Bill of Rights" on its own, but the DCIA has its own problems. For example, the group says that it wants consumer interest groups to play a role in the group, but not until later. If consumer rights are so important, why not include them from the beginning?

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gundar99 writes "Rock Port Missouri, population 1,300, is the first 100% wind powered city in the US. Loess Hill Wind Farm, with four 1.25-MW wind turbines, is estimated to generate 16 gigawatt hours (16 million kilowatt hours) of electricity annually. 13 gigawatts hours of electricity have historically been consumed annually by the residents and businesses of this town."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Park Inn Hotel (and attached City National Bank building) in Mason City Iowa is the last remaining Frank Lloyd Wright-designed hotel in the world. It’s in desperate need of financial support to save the building.

On March 12, Wright on the Park (WOTP) received a Vision Iowa grant of $7,500,000 from the Iowa Department of Economic Development for the continuation of the rehabilitation of both building segments. Along with the Vision Iowa grant, the sale of Historic Preservation Tax Credits is expected to yield another 67% of the total funding. For the first time, Mason City residents watching the Park Inn’s gradual deterioration since a modern, 250-room hotel was built here in 1922, can believe the project is do-able.

The Vision Iowa grant is double-edged: while providing a great financial boost, it carries a 180-day deadline. Counting from the day after the grant announcement (March 12), a match of $4,300,000 must be raised for this grant. This will be a daunting task for a town of 28,000, without outside help. For $2,000,000 of this match, WOTP must seek help from the wider Frank Lloyd Wright Community. Contributions can be made to Wright on the Park, Inc. by credit card through the WOTP web site: www.wrightonthepark.org, or by mail to P.O. Box 792, Mason City, Iowa 50402-0792.

If you’re a lover of architecture, and you want to see the last remaining Frank Lloyd Wright-designed hotel in the world survive to see another day, pitch in what you can. You can read more about the project on the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy site.

Gotta admit Twitter has interesting bugs! A few minutes ago, while tracking election returns (Obama wins NC yesss!) all of a sudden the Twitter UI changed to Japanese.

Then we started getting ads.

Here's one with a Toyota ad.

So much for not having a business model!

PS: All my Flickr contacts are uploading pictures of Twitter ads. Let's all use this tag: TwitterAds.

Back in 2003, VeriSign kicked off quite a bit of controversy with its "SiteFinder" plans. SiteFinder would see that you were trying to go to a non-existent domain name, and rather than send you the proper error message, would send a bunch of ads instead. VeriSign, of course, claimed that this would be useful, as some of the ads might point you to where you really wanted to go. The problem, of course, was that it broke how the internet was supposed to work -- and certain applications relied on the fact that the internet would work the way it was originally designed. VeriSign eventually pulled the service, though others have reimplemented it, mostly at the ISP level rather than the DNS level. However, now, as Slashdot points out, it appears that VeriSign owns a patent on the concept. The patent was granted a few months ago, and VeriSign has control over it thanks to an acquisition. The real question, though, is why is this patentable? The reason it hadn't been done before wasn't because it was some great invention that needed the extra incentives of a patent -- it was because most people thought it was a bad idea.

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Presto Vivace sends news of a server found by security firm Finjin that contained a 1.4-GB cache of stolen data, accumulated over a period of less than a month from compromised PCs around the world. The "crimeserver," as Finjin dubs it, "provided command and control functions for malware attacks in addition to being a drop site for data harvested from compromised computers... The stolen data consisted of 5,388 unique log files including 1,037 from Turkey, 621 from Germany, 571 from the United States, 322 from France, 308 from India and 232 from Britain." Oddly enough, the data was stored in the open, with not even basic auth to protect it. Finjin notes in their press release that this huge trove of data gathered over a short period of time indicates that the crimeware problem is far larger than most observers have been assuming.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week I saw the headlines mentioning that Italy had revealed taxpayer info, and naively assumed that it was yet another story of yet another accidental data leak by a government agency. After all, we've seen so many. However, thanks to reader Luca Mirabelli for pushing me to take a second look at the story. It turns out that rather than an accidental release, it was very much on purpose. Vincenzo Visco, a deputy economy minister, decided to publish the details of everyone's tax returns on a publicly available website, including details such as what they earned, taxes paid and date of birth. He claimed that he did this as a "simple matter of transparency and democracy." The data was quickly pulled down due to (reasonable) fears that the release violated Italian privacy laws. According to Luca, Visco also claimed: "In the USA, tax filings are already public, check any American TV-movie and you'll see" though I can't find that statement in any English translation.

While many people do seem angry at Visco, he is correct on one point: he was actually following the law. There's an Italian law from 1973, requiring that tax documents be available to the public. It's just that, historically, that has meant having to trek to the tax office to get access to the documents. We've seen similar complaints about other "public" info that is now much more widely available, such as court documents. It seems the real problem here is that law -- which makes everyone's tax returns public. Though, Visco certainly should have realized what a questionable move this would be, and focused on amending the law, rather than going ahead with just making everyone's tax returns available online.

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QtPi writes "Trolltech has announced the availability of Qt 4.4, the cross-platform software development framework. Ars Technica has an in-depth look at the release, which include an integrated WebKit-based HTML rendering engine, the new Phonon multimedia framework, support for Windows CE, and significant improvements to the QGraphicsView system. 'Qt 4.4 brings a lot of rich new capabilities to the toolkit that are sure to please open source and commercial software developers. It sounds like Trolltech already has some nice plans for Qt 4.5, and we will hopefully get to hear more about the long-term roadmap after Nokia completes its acquisition.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

krow writes "I am very happy to be announcing that MySQL will be forgoing close sourcing portions of the MySQL Server. Kaj has the official statement in his blog. No portion of the server will be closed source including backup, encryption, or any storage engines we ship. To quote Kaj 'The encryption and compression backup features will be open source.' This is a change from what was previously posted here on Slashdot. I've posted some additional thoughts on my own blog concerning how we keep open source from becoming crippleware. Word has it that we will also have a panel at this year's OSCON discussing this topic. Contrary to the previous Slashdot discussion, this shows Sun's continued commitment to Open Source."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chris Tackett of Treehugger.com says: "I recall you doing this post on Isabella Rossellini's bug porn. The videos [called "Green Porno"] are now viewable, so we did a post about that." Link

Read this post from John Borthwick, my partner in Switch-A-Bit.

http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2008/05/06/future-of-news/

Breaking news covered by a loosely coupled ad hoc group of Twitterlings.

Update: Reuters was watching too.

We've written before about the ongoing fight over the legal status of end-user license agreements. Many software companies have tried to claim that breaking an EULA is copyright infringement, which often carries harsher penalties and stronger remedies than mere breaches of contract. The courts have generally resisted these arguments, holding that a copyright holder cannot expand the scope of copyright simply by attaching a "license" to its products. The Electronic Frontier Foundation points to the latest skirmish in this debate: Blizzard has taken the position that using a piece of software called Glider to cheat in World of Warcraft is not only contrary to the game's license agreement but is copyright infringement as well. Indeed, on Blizzard's theory, any violation of the license agreement would constitute copyright infringement.

Public Knowledge has submitted a brief in the case pointing out the real problems the courts would cause if they accepted Blizzard's argument. For example, among the terms of the World of Warcraft license are rules about what you can name your in-game characters. Blizzard's theory would mean that if you choose a name that violates those rules (such as naming your character after a "popular culture figure, celebrity, or media personality"), you would not only get kicked out of the game, but you would be liable for copyright infringement too! This is plainly not how copyright is supposed to work, and PK rightly urges the court to reject Blizzard's over-reaching argum