These two sharp-looking HP laptops, reskinned by Paul Frank Industries (left) and Shepard Fairey (right), are currently up for auction on eBay. Sponsored by HP and PC Magazine, the proceeds of the "Computerlicious Design Experience" auction, which includes work by a handful of hipster artists/designers, benefits The National Cristina Foundation, a tech non-profit that deploys donated computers to charities, schools, and public agencies. The Paul Frank model is an HP Pavilion HDX Entertainment Series NB. The Shepard Fairey design is on an HP Pavilion tx1000z CTO NB. Link

sciencehabit writes "New calculations suggest that black holes are not a one-way street. Anything that falls into them may eventually come out. The findings lend important support to quantum gravity, but fly in the face of Einsteinian relativity. They also support Stephen Hawking's reluctant admission that information couldn't be destroyed by black holes. Penn State researcher Ahbay Ashtekar was quoted saying, 'Once we realized that the notion of space-time as a continuum is only an approximation of reality, it became clear to us that singularities are merely artifacts of our insistence that space-time should be described as a continuum.' Let the physics infighting begin."

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Discarted sez,

One June 1, photographers throughout Los Angeles will gather at the Hollywood and Highland Metro Station to peacefully protest against the unnecessary treatment they have received from security guards (particularly the white shirts), LAPD, and LASD while photographing in public places, and on the Metro.

Make signs, T-shirts, and be sure to bring your cameras (still and video). Sign ideas as well as other ideas should be posted here. We need things that will make us stand out as a cohesive group.

Start Time: 11:00am, June 1
Location: Hollywood and Highland, 6801 Hollywood Los Angeles, CA 90028

At about 1:30pm we will board the Metro and travel to Union Station

Start Time: 2:00pm
Location: 800 N Alameda St Los Angeles, CA 90012
Contact: info@discarted.com

Link, Link to Flickr group

See also: Taking pictures on LA's Red Line violates the "9/11 Law"

(Image: Photographing the photographer, a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike photo from Naixn's Flickr stream)

The latest in a long line of patent lawsuits in every patent hoarders favorite district of East Texas involves the game controllers used by Nintendo. A company holds a patent on a 3D controller and sued Nintendo (and Microsoft) for supposedly violating the patent. Not surprisingly, the jury found in favor of the patent holder. Juries quite often side with the patent holder, no matter how questionable the patent may be. In this case, there would seem to be a ton of prior art raising validity questions. The patent itself was filed in November of 2000, at which point there were already numerous game controllers that seem to meet most of the criteria outlined in the claims. Whatever minor differences there may have been between what was on the market and what's in the claims should be seen as an obvious iteration of game controllers. As for Microsoft's involvement, it paid up to settle last month, once again showing how it's often cheaper to just pay up rather than to fight questionable patents. And, that, of course, is why we will keep seeing more and more questionable patents being filed. It's just so lucrative.

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France's Cartonnistes sculpt beautiful, whimsical full-size furniture from old cardboard -- and offer workshops on making your own pieces. Link (via Cribcandy)

Sharon's Tiny Buildings blog features many delightful tiny buildings made from card, packaging, and odds and sods. This is my kind of model village.

The third 'chapel' happens to be an attempt to replicate the actual building, in a vineyard, where the reception was held. It is a beautiful old stone farm building, with a loft space for parties and weddings and such.

This invitation was handmade by the couple, with loads of patience, creativity, and joy, it seems. They used small strips of colorful illustrations from magazines and other sources to create obi-wrapped bundles of paper. The colors they selected evoked the Tuscany-like place they had their ceremony; and were a great contrast with the naive austerity of the printed invitation.

Link (via Cribcandy)

If you're pissed off that BT and other ISPs are using software like Phorm to track your browsing habits, you could try out AntiPhormLite, an app that generates a never-ending string of spyware radar-chaff, running a second browser that continuously, plausibly browses the web, screwing up your profile and confounding the snoops. They've posted the full source for audit as well.

AntiPhormLite runs independently and silently in the background of your PC. It connects to the web and intelligently simulates natural surfing behavior across thousands of customizable topics. This creates a background noise of false information disguising and inverting your own interests. We believe our technology is indistinguishable from that of a typical user engaging the internet. To support this claim we have introduced a preview mode that works with any of your preferred browsers, and together with a detailed reporting system and a host of custom options each AntiPhormLite will appear unique.

We encourage you to use AntiPhormLite. It's free. Share it with everyone you know. If enough of us use AntiPhorm, profiling and data mining could become a profit loss industry. This beta release will continue to be developed with your input, ideas and support, so please get involved. We value your feedback. For detailed information on the software visit our software and faq pages.

Link

Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice keeps on hammering away at his plan to bring US-style copyright legislation based on the disastrous Digital Millennium Copyright Act to Canada, without any consultation with the public or industry. Thankfully, we have Members of Parliament like the NDP's Charlie Angus, who stood up in Question Period and put it to Prentice: when are you going to give us public consultations on your plants to rewrite Canada's copyright laws?

Prentice's response? A stupid, unfunny joke. Link (Thanks, Charlie!)

AfriGadget is a website dedicated to showcasing African ingenuity. A team of bloggers and readers contribute pictures, videos and stories from across the continent. Inspiring stuff.

This guy made a crude helicopter with scrap aluminum and parts from a Honda Civic, an old Toyota and from the remains of a crashed Boeing 747.

Here’s a guy who made a paraglider out of plastic bags and scrap wire.

A home made welding machine from Nairobi. Kids forced to make their own toys show off their ingenuity. In Kenya they’ve developed bio gas generator that turns methane from a manure pit into cooking gas. And this guy turns mortar shells into coffee makers.

And this one will blow you away: A homemade windmill from very spare parts. Includes a video of the creator at the TED conference.

So much from so little. Impressive.

Multiple readers have written to let us know that an experiment at the upcoming Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference will use RFID to track the movements of at least 1,500 registrants for the duration of the conference. Those movements will be transmitted onto screens which "show in real-time where people go, with whom they associate, for how long and how often." The system will also be used for games which involve manipulation of the available data. Meanwhile, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a method for testing large quantities of RFID tags, which may serve to greatly speed distribution.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last month, we pointed out that the market for stolen credit card data was so saturated that prices were falling. Of course, that just inspired scammers to go looking for other types of data that was a bit harder to find: VoIP accounts. According to the BBC, scammers selling VoIP account info are now able to get higher prices than those selling credit card data. Of course, it's not at all clear how widespread this really is. The info seems to be coming from a company trying to sell a solution to deal with this -- which already makes it somewhat suspect. Also, you have to wonder how valuable VoIP account data really can be compared to credit card numbers which have much wider applicability. Either way, it will be interesting to see how the market deals with the "glut" of credit card data out there, and where else data scammers turn.

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From Current TV: "Brooklyn's Etsy's Lab art collective hosts a monthly event where people come to play and show off their handmade music instruments." Link

Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we helped Carnegie Mellon University make AI smarter by playing casual games; saw Intel announce and unannounce an Atom-based iphone; confused Shoryuken for Schubert; and found that MSI's Wind subnotebook is as good as the Eee PC. Joel soared on wings of jet-powered song (wearing a Jawbone II); John televised the wireless jump rope revolution; Rob wrote font haiku and checked out a Midi controller based on lasers and surface tension; and CBS bought CNET for nearly $1.8bn. Mostly, however, we explored the history of video games that help you get your exercise. Get your dance on!

Radley Balko says: Given that you've linked to coverage of Cory [Maye]'s case in the past, I thought you might be interested in a new documentary on his case put together by Reason and Drew Carey. I guess I'm a bit biased, but I think this is a really compelling piece of work.

At 11p.m on December 26, 2001 police in Prentiss, Mississippi raided the residence of Cory Maye, a 21-year-old father who was at home with his 18-month-old daughter Ta'Corriana.

The cops were looking for drugs and smashed through the back door. In the ensuing chaos, Maye hunkered down with his daughter in a bedroom and when the police broke down that door, he fired three bullets, one of which killed Officer Ron Jones. Maye testified in court that the police did not identify themselves until after they had entered his residence; indeed, he testified that they did not identify themselves until after he had fired his shots. Once they did, he said he put his weapon on the floor, slid it toward police, and surrendered.

The police, who refused to talk with reason.tv, tell a different story. They claim that they identified themselves multiple times before entering Maye's house and bedroom, and that there was no way Maye couldn't have known who they were. A jury rejected Maye's case that he was acting in self-defense and he was sentenced to death for the murder of Office Ron Jones.

"Mississippi Drug War Blues" is a story about the intersection of race (Maye is black and Jones was white); the war on drugs; the disturbing increase in the militarization of police tactics; and systemic flaws in the criminal justice and expert-testimony systems. It is a tragedy in which one man is dead and another may spend his life in prison.

Link

Apro+im points out a NYTimes report which states that Microsoft and the OLPC project have officially agreed to put Windows XP on the XO laptop. While Microsoft has been working toward this for some time, analysts began to think a deal was more likely after Walter Bender resigned from the project and was replaced by Charles Kane. Former OLPC security developer Ivan Krstic had a lot to say about Windows on the XO as well. From the Times: "Windows will add a bit to the price of the machines, about $3, the licensing fee Microsoft charges to some developing nations under a program called Unlimited Potential. For those nations that want dual-boot models, running both Windows and Linux, the extra hardware required will add another $7 or so to the cost of the machines, Mr. Negroponte said. The project's agreement with Microsoft involves no payment by the software giant, and Microsoft will not join One Laptop Per Child's board. 'We've stayed very pure,' Mr. Negroponte said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm currently attending a workshop on "The Future of News" at Princeton's Center for IT Policy. One of the most interesting things about the conference is that it has proven to be a kind of "meeting of the minds" between the "old media" (the Wall Street Journal and the San Diego Union-Tribune are represented) and practitioners of Internet journalism. One of the frequent complaints we've heard from some of the newspaper folks is that they're losing business to aggregators like Google News. On the surface, this doesn't seem to make sense, because as we've pointed out before, aggregators drive traffic to news sites, and it's silly for an ad-driven website to complain about another site sending them traffic.

Yet complain they do. And indeed, the complaint seems so common that there has to be something behind it. It has become clear that incumbent media outlets hate aggregators because aggregators increase competition. Incumbent media outlets -- especially local newspapers -- grew accustomed to a cozy relationship with their readers in which their readers had few alternatives for their daily news. That meant they could maintain high circulation (and advertising rates) without worrying too much about the quality of their product. When newspapers migrated to the web, they expected to maintain this captive audience.

What aggregators do is make it a lot easier for readers to find new news sources. That's good for an up-and-coming site with a lot of great content, because aggregators enlarge the potential audience for the content. But it's not good for a mediocre site with a large readership based largely on inertia. The easier it is for readers to find news sources of news, the faster mediocre news sites will bleed readers. We tend to think of competition in terms of price, but competition is important even when a business is already giving its product away for free. More competition forces sites to create more and better content, have fewer and less intrusive ads, and offer content in formats that are convenient and appealing. The increased competition enabled by aggregators may be bad for some websites, but it's unambiguously good for consumers. Google News isn't a competitor to newspapers. Rather, Google News forces newspapers to compete with each other. And when newspapers compete, readers win.

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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GameSpot is reporting that details for Guitar Hero 4 have been released. The biggest news seems to be that the new release will be adding drums and vocals a la Rock Band. The new drums are to offer three pressure-sensitive pads (which can tell if you are just tapping or really wailing), two elevated cymbals, and a pedal. "The details in Game Informer also clear up the mystery surrounding the 'innovation' which Activision promised was coming to the Guitar Hero series in a recent earnings report conference call. The article outlines the game's studio mode, which will give users a variety of ways to create their own songs. Players will be able to jam along with one of the game's existing tracks, record songs as they're played, or meticulously detail note charts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.