We've just announced the first of two events in New York as part of the book tour for my young adult novel Little Brother: a charity fundraiser for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund at the nightclub Comix. The CBLDF is a fantastic organization who work tirelessly to defend comics professionals, distributors and retailers from laws that censor the content of comics (often in response to the decades-old moral panic that comics are warping the morals of our children). I'm an annual donor to CBLDF and it tickles me to be able to support them in other ways.

There's going to be one other New York event, a free reading at a midtown bookstore, that I'll be announcing in the next day or so. I hope I see you at one or both events!

On May 25 join Cory Doctorow to celebrate the premiere of LITTLE BROTHER, his New York Times Best Selling Young Adult Fiction debut! Cory will present an all-ages reading & Q&A to benefit the First Amendment legal work of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund!

Addressing internet and government security, censorship, and civil liberties in a post-9/11 atmosphere, LITTLE BROTHER tackles timely issues while telling a smart, funny, and jam-packed-with-pop culture story...

Proceeds from this event will benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. The CBLDF provides legal defense on behalf of artists, retailers, and librarians facing criminal and civil prosecution for First Amendment related actions. The Fund also fights unconstitutional legislation that threatens First Amendment rights. Most recently, the CBLDF won a three year legal battle in Georgia, where Gordon Lee, a retailer, faced up to two years in prison for allegedly distributing a comic book containing drawings of Picasso in the nude to a minor. All charges were dismissed, but only after more than three years and $100,000 of CBLDF resources were spent to prove Lee's innocence..

Link, Link to tour schedule

Finally broke down and listened to the latest Gillmor Gang on the michegas with Facebook and Google and Plaxo. These guys are fucking crazy. Steve Gillmor is still hung up on BigCo's as is Marc Canter. These guys are old enough to know better, and Marc I'm sure does. Arrington is a complete lawyer, using every trick lawyers use to piss people off and Scoble takes the bait hook line and sinker. There's no light in that show, just a lot of people elbowing each other and saying ouch.

About the substance of it all, see this recent blog post.

The answer is not the BigCo's -- they will have to catch up with what the market decides on. Some little guy will pop in at exactly the moment a sufficient number of users are ready to be free and it will look like they are visionaries when in fact they were at the right place at the right time. Little guys are always entering the market. Every day. It's like roulette. One of them will be the next big guy, but will get there by taking advantage of paralysis caused by the bigness of the current big guys.

But it's hardly the first time I've written about it.

Of all the people on the show Scoble is the most right, but of course no one listens to Scoble. Arrington was out of his mind with self-admiration before he won the Time 100, now he's completely lost it. But he actually made some good points, and I liked the way he called Canter on his bullshit, even though he was giving Scoble shit just for the sake of winding him up and getting him to spin around, which Scoble did, to an amazing extent. I thought there was a good chance he'd explode at one point. That's what I don't like about Arrington. Like most Republican lawyers he's just in it to make people look stupid, not trying to actually improve things. If you think Arrington doesn't deserve this, just listen to the podcast.

Congrats to Gillmor on the theater (pretty sure that's what he's in it for) and with the new TechCrunch label, he's being listened to more than ever. Let's just hope at some point these guys work a little harder to get to the bottom of it.

PS: For the 180th time, wouldn't it be great if Netflix let the users have their movie rating metadata for use in dating sites, for example. Why try to hit a home run when it would be just as good to get on base. Also don't forget Amazon is building up quite a profile on each of their millions of customers. Just a thought. It's a big world out there, don't just focus on three "players" -- the world is much bigger and more interesting.

When I get back to California I always queue up this Beach Boys song. Puts a smile on my face and gets me back in the spirit. It's a great song cause it's not just a great California song it also says how great the whole USA is. I love this country, north, south, east and west, but coming home is getting back to the great weather, clear sunshine, warm days and cool people with the attitude and politics I'm so comfortable with. Don't get me wrong, Boston and New York are great too, but home is in California.

Here are some pics and videos from the New York/Boston trip.

Didn't get a chance to talk with 1/2 the people I wanted to.

It was mostly a busdev trip. To start working face to face with the SwitchABit team. And to plot out the next projects after that.

On Thursday we announced what SwitchABit is -- a platform for wiring together the apps that are rising up, all with APIs that allow them to be combined in itneresting ways, by more technical users, so we all can learn, and do more cool stuff and then who knows what.

Question -- Did you switch over to the new flickr.twittergram.com? How's it working? Any feedback for the team? We're dying to know if it's working for you. Did you push any pics through the engine over the weekend? Did they get through quickly and accurately?

iTunes is now playing Hotel California. I've got it playing all California tunes. Hah. Wonder what's next.

Racketiciel writes "A French user asked for a refund after buying a ASUS computer that came with Windows XP and other software pre-installed. ASUS tried to apply a procedure which cost more money to the consumer that they will give back ... The court ruled in favor of the user, who received back 130 Euro (~200 $) for the software. Here is the ruling (PDF, French). In France, this is the fourth victory for refund seekers during the last two years, and many people are now filing for refunds (in French). Two French associations (AFUL and April) published a press release on this victory the same day a important hearing happened." The English-language press release linked above gives a pretty good idea of what happened here, for those unsuited to wading through French.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "This article suggests that Windows Solitaire may be the most-often played computer game. It's not so much an article about Solitaire, but rather an article about Windows and human nature and socialization. If you play FreeCell, there's a interesting paragraph about its inventor." Can Solitaire really eat up more hours than have been sacrificed to Tetris?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

thefickler writes "The Chinese Government has issued orders that all entertainment web sites and regular television programming be shut down completely for the next 3 days. Only web sites covering the recent tragic 7.8 magnitude earthquake and television stations broadcasting CCTV earthquake programming will be allowed to remain live." Can anyone with Web access in China confirm this report? From an AP story on the state of communications in the country right now, it appears at least that China is (despite ongoing monitoring) allowing freer than usual communications in the wake of the quake.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

cyclomedia writes "I'm looking to buy a subnotebook. For those who think that this form factor was created by the Asus EEE (as, seemingly, does Wikipedia) it might interest you that the current forerunner in my search is a 190MHz,64MB,640x480 256 colour beastie known as the Psion Netbook, circa 2001-ish. Basically, I have a desktop, a server and an Xbox and so truly only want it for surfing, email and the odd bit of SSHing home on weekends away. The aforementioned Psion is, however, of the StrongArm processor variety, which nudges it down on the desireability meter, but the fact that there exist Wi-Fi cards for its 16-bit PCMCIA slot does score it extra points. So, anyone here got any suggestions of what to look out for on ebay? So long as I can play Doom II on it too, that is." Any other suggestions for wireless capable subnotebooks with better battery life than things like the EEE or HP's 2133 Mininote?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

dcblogs writes "The Chinese outsourcing market, at $1.7 billion last year, is growing at 38% a year, according to research by the Everest Group. This is creating opportunities for Westerners who want to go to China, learn the language, and help these Chinese offshore companies reach overseas markets. There are job opportunities for people with management experience or who are young and willing to gamble. Here's the story of one 25-year-old who started learning Mandarin on his plane ride over to China, three years ago, and is now an international development manager for an IT offshoring firm."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

oschobero writes "According an article from the Times, customers in shopping centers are having their every move tracked. Using cellphone signals, the system can tell when people enter the center, how long they stay in a particular shop, and what route each customer takes. The system works by monitoring the signals produced by mobile handsets and then locating the phone by triangulation." The particular tracking device described by the article is made by an English company called Path Intelligence.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BenderFan writes "The first review of the next Futurama DVD, The Beast With a Billion Backs (out in the US on June 24), has appeared online. And the reviewer liked it — a lot." (I hope it's as good as Bender's Big Score.) Read on for reader submissions on two other upcoming movies. The Day The Earth Stood Still (with Keanu Reeves, but also John Cleese) is due out in December, and a movie version of Philip K. Dick's The Owl in Daylight is currently being drafted by Tony Grisoni; the interview linked below is appropriately surreal.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program student Drew Burrows, 28, engineered a "virtual girlfriend," and showed her off at a recent Tisch School of the Arts show:

It's simple to behold — a single mattress, tucked into a dark, curtained back room of the showcase space. On it: a lithe brunette. She's perfectly quiet, but once you sit or lie down, she responds to your every move. Lie on your back, she snuggles up right next to you in a log position. Curl up in the fetal position, she spoons. The only hitch: She's 2-D. "Yeah, you can't feel the girl. That's the thing," Burrows explained as he demonstrated his invention, an "infrared sensitive" light projection (meaning it reacts, and the projected woman moves, based on an infrared sensor) called INBED. "Still, it's so nice if you're tired and worn out to have someone to curl up with."

Link (thanks, Jessica Coen, image courtesy Drew Burrows)

A visualization of the purported marketshare of various online social networking services. It's super interesting, but incompletel: I wonder where the data on China is? (from Le Monde, via Azeem Azar on twitter, via Tim O'Reilly's blog, thanks Jolon Bankey!)

hover bacon
tux
bra
salt
mints
cups
coffee
vodka

previously on web zen:
bacon zen

Link, Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Snip from "Going Postal," a feature by Callie Enlow in the New York Review of Magazines, on how a recent US Postal mail rate hike reportedly pushed-for by Time Warner is killing tiny 'zine publishers. (Note to the digital chirren: 'zines are like blogs on paper. They're what old people used to read before god gave us LiveJournal. Boing Boing once was one.)

Ben Scott had better things to do than listen to a bunch of little magazines rant about their unreasonable postage bills. As the policy director of Free Press, a group that specialized in fighting media concentration, he and 10 co-workers in Washington were wrapped up in defending internet accessibility. But in late February 2007, Scott’s phone started buzzing with accusations from panicked publishers of small-circulation magazines. The United States Postal Service, they said, was hammering the last nail in the coffin of independent publishing.

Periodicals with circulations of fewer than 250,000 (some with much fewer—even in the hundreds) had just discovered that the rates they paid the USPS for postage were about to skyrocket, and they had only eight business days to dispute the proposed increase. While these independent publishers had expected the rates to rise, they believed it would be by about 12 percent, which had been the USPS’ own suggestion. However, during an arduous 10 months of hearings on postal rates in 2006, during which the small-magazine community was conspicuously absent, the stakes changed dramatically.

Instead of a simple markup, the entire rate system was overhauled, imposing a cost-based structure on a branch of government originally established to provide a public good, one that the Founding Fathers deemed vital to our democratic society. The Postal System was built on the premise of promoting the free flow of ideas by giving preferential treatment to their most common method of conveyance: the printed pages of periodicals.

Of particular concern to Free Press was the discovery that the biggest force behind the formula by which rates were to be increased was none other than Time Warner, the largest magazine publisher in the United States, which had been working overtime to influence the outcome of the hearings.

Link, illustration courtesy Time WarnerNYRM. (via Ned Sublette)

Greg Walton brings us a lengthy story from Rolling Stone which describes China's comprehensive surveillance project, dubbed Golden Shield. The 'Great Firewall of China,' which we've discussed in the past, is but one aspect of Golden Shield. It also includes national ID cards, CCTV networks, and face-recognition software. This investigation showcases just how massive an undertaking it truly is. When finished, it will dwarf London's surveillance system. Quoting: "Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range -- a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.) ... This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DarkSarin writes "Given that solutions like iChat can seamlessly video-conference for multiple parties on the Mac, and that others are semi-commercial, like Oovoo (which recently left beta and is no longer free for more than 3-way calls), what do you recommend in terms of a F/OSS solution to a need for moderate-sized video-conferencing? Ideally, it would be something which does not use a web-page and does not require hours of configuration. iChat is insanely easy to use. Mebeam.com is also quite simple to operate, but requires so much screen real estate that it can't easily be used in conjunction with any other software. Referring to other documents while in the middle of the conference is nice, but it's important to have the reactions of the other participants — and not everyone has multiple monitors. I am aware of projects like vmukti and services like ustream.tv, but I am thinking more in terms of a stand-alone application that is F/OSS (Ekiga/GnomeMeeting comes to mind, but it does not do multi-point video chat unless one also has access to an H.323 gateway, which is apparently non-trivial to implement). With the prevalence of broadband connections, I am surprised that a solid effort is missing for making easy, painless multi-point video-conferencing for more than 3 or 4 connections (which seems to be the most that a lot of 'free' solutions offer, or even the low-cost ones). So, my question is two-fold: First, why isn't there a better effort at medium to large video-conferencing that pretty much anyone can set up? Second, do you know of any F/OSS applications which work well and support a minimum of 6 to 8 connected parties?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I’ve been re-exposed to “industry” web design practices while staying with some friends in Germany who work at a large agency. In particular, I’ve seen that hierarchical navigation and site organization tactics are no distant memory. A lot of clients still come to the table with an org chart and ask their designer to implement the same structure on their website. The result is a website that reads like an office directory in the skyscraper lobby. Or the hierarchy approach can lead to terms that simply block customers from finding what they want. For example, my friend did some work for a shoe company who wished to hide six different kinds of shoes behind a gate called “Performance”. When my friend asked 40 uninvolved people in his office what the category “performance” meant to them, only 10 had even a vague idea. So hierarchies have their problems. What other organizing methods could we consider instead?

Instead of thinking in terms of hierarchy or up-front structure, I think it’s better to work with paths. A path is a line that goes from a starting point A to an accomplishment B. Each customer who comes to the site doesn’t care about the overall structure. They care about getting from A to B. That’s a path. Where are your golf shoes? That’s a path. Does my cell phone support international calling? That’s a path. Collect all the paths you can think of in a pile, pull out the 8 paths that 80% of your visitors come looking for, and that’s your home page. When paths overlap or the same customer needs them, weave them together. Add the occasional fork. DRY out paths with lots of overlapping information for efficiency. These operations feel concrete, and they connect directly with customer goals instead of organizational box drawings or hand-wavy concepts.

Lines are better than boxes for mapping the contours of your domain. So next time you work with a hierarchy-minded group, try to pull them out of the boxes and talk with them about individual starting points and goals for their customers.

Astronomers led by Simon Driver of Scotland's University of St. Andrews have discovered that interstellar dust shades us from as much as 50% of the light emitted by stars and galaxies. The scientists compared the number of galaxies we could see "edge-on" against the number which were "facing us," reasoning that dust would obscure more of the former, since we already receive less light from them. SPACE.com notes, "In fact, the researchers counted about 70 percent fewer edge-on galaxies than face-on galaxies." A NYTimes report provides some additional details: "Interstellar dust