lennier writes "How exactly did George Lucas develop the script for the first Star Wars? Why were the prequels so uneven when the originals were so good? Did he really have a masterplan for six, nine, or even twelve episodes, and why did the official Lucasfilm position keep changing? And just how big an influence were the films of Akira Kurosawa on the whole saga? Michael Kaminski's The Secret History of Star Wars, Third Edition is a free, thoroughly unauthorized, e-book that brings together a huge amount of literary detective work to sort fact from legend and reveal how the story really evolved. Download it or have your nerd credentials revoked."

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Last year, we pointed to some patent battles among security software companies, noting how the end result would undoubtedly be less secure computers. As these security firms argued over who thought up an idea "first" and who owed who what amounts of money, you can rest assured that those exploiting the security holes couldn't care any less about who came up with what exploit first. In the constant battle between security firms and malicious hackers, distracting the security firms and having resources devoted to arguing over patents (and paying each other royalties) seems designed to just make it that much easier for malicious hackers to stay that much further ahead, while making it more and more difficult for any security firm to actually provide anything close to comprehensive security. And, it's only going to get worse. Slashdot points us to an article about Microsoft's rather broad patent on proactive virus protection, despite the fact that others had proactive virus protection products on the market well before Microsoft filed for the patent. While Microsoft isn't yet doing anything with the patent, the fact that it got it now means that others have to be extra careful in tiptoeing around proactive virus protection -- and that's only going to make virus makers happy.

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A Japanese "pet architecture" book contains detailed papercraft architectural miniatures to cut out and assemble. These are gorgeous. Link

Los Angeles Magazine has a tell-all memoir penned by one of the "Jack Sparrows" that play Disneyland -- a steamy tale of resistance and women throwing themselves at you.

I'll be honest: I didn’t follow all the Disney rules. I played Jack like he was real, and if a woman flirted, I would flirt back. Women loved it. But there were also women who would have too many beers at California Adventure or smuggle in alcohol you could smell on their breath, women who were clearly sloshed.

Here’s a napkin someone wrote on for me: “I will give you a blow job on your break, so sexy! Kim—714-XXX-XXXX.” I would also get offers from women in my ear: “Anything you want, just find me.” I had a girl who had turned 18 the day before. She was with a high school group, and she wrote down her room number at the Downtown Disney hotel. I had a lady hump my leg one day in the park.

Link (Thanks, Tim!)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John has spotted this fabulous, $100K gold toothpick/earwax scraper, retreived from a Spanish galleon dating back to the late 16th Century. Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets --

Remixed into being by 19-year old Nick Bertke, who is based in Australia. Link to video on YT, found on Kottke, with this link to audio download. What a sweet little unicorn chaser of a video this is. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

sprkltgr writes "Our HR department is implementing new software. The HR Director has tasked me with sending our data out of our network to the consultant that's loading it in to the new package. Obviously this data includes items such as SSN, Name, Birth date, etc.Upon being told that I would not email this data to her, the consultant asked what my security requirements were for sending the data. What would be on your wishlist for the best way to send sensitive data to someone outside your firewall?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This should be the last post related to last week's "Future of News" workshop. One of the panelists at the workshop was Steve Borliss, who has a new piece up arguing that the Associated Press helped turn the news business into a cartel in the 20th century. He suggests that by limiting access to the AP network, incumbent papers could prevent potential rivals from competing effectively, because no local paper could hope to replicate the AP's national and international news-gathering resources. But now, as we noted last week, the Internet is upending this cozy relationship. For one thing, people can now easily get newspapers from multiple geographic areas, and they're beginning to notice that every newspaper seems to be running a lot of the same AP stories, forcing papers to develop more original content if they want to stand out from the crowd. But more importantly, the AP itself is becoming a competitor to the newspapers. For example, after newspapers complained about Google News sending them traffic, Google signed a deal with the AP allowing it to host AP articles directly, cutting the papers out of the transaction entirely. We wondered at the time if newspapers would be upset about the loss of traffic from Google News, and now this seems to be happening, with a group of Ohio papers forming their own Ohio-centric wire service in competition with the AP. As the Internet causes media outlets to increasingly compete with one another across geographic boundaries, expect to see a lot more cases like this, where former partners become competitors.

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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kolicha writes "After the failed yahoo bid Microsoft is going to try a new approach to gain market share on their rivals Google. Sponsored links will be pay per purchase rather than pay per click, and search users will be offered "cash back" on their purchases."

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The importance of a founder working at a company is a question that gets a lot of attention for various reasons. Most startup founders certainly want to stick around and see their "baby" through, obviously. However, once investors get involved, the role of founders gets trickier. Investors often ask the key question: "what happens if a key founder gets hit by a bus?" That's the point at which a founder needs to convince the investor that the structure of the company itself is so well established that it can live on without the founder. Of course, if they're too convincing, it can backfire when the investors look to replace the founder (as they very often do), noting that the founder made a convincing enough argument as to why they're not needed.

Of course, until now, all of the stories on this were anecdotal. But, Paul Kedrosky points us to new research that was done on what happens if a founder dies early on in the life of a company, in an attempt to determine just how important it is for founders to stick around. It may surprise many (as it surprised me) to discover that, apparently, there isn't much of an impact if the founder passes on. The only real impact is a brief hit to profitability -- but it doesn't seem to have much long term impact. In other words, it really does take a team of folks to successfully implement an idea and bring it to market. While that doesn't necessarily mean founders are "expendable," it does highlight the importance of a strong overall team, rather than reliance on a single "visionary" expected to guide all aspects of the company. It doesn't mean founders shouldn't watch out for speeding buses, however.

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The new book of Charles Burns art, Permagel, looks amazing. More samples here: Link

Lisa Katayama wrote a feature about Hiroyuki Nishimura, the charismatic anti-establishment leader of the Japanese web for in the June issue of Wired.

Nicodou has brought the 2channel style of community to Web video. The site lets users plaster their comments directly on top of any uploaded video. Posts are sometimes so numerous that they obscure the clips. "Even when the videos are boring, the viewers are getting together and entertaining each other," Nishimura says.

"Hiroyuki's figuring it out as he goes along, not really giving a shit, but he hit the nail on the head," says Joi Ito, a Tokyo-based venture capitalist and CEO of Creative Commons. "Japan is an unhappy culture. The people are lonely and depressed, and the Internet is a release valve."

To the online communities at 2channel and Nicodou, Nishimura is a folk hero and role model. (In Japan he's referred to solely by his first name, a privilege afforded only to top-tier pop stars and TV heartthrobs.) And in a nation that actually has a word for "death from overwork," Nishimura takes pains to point out that he hasn't had to exert himself much to achieve success and fame. He's just a slacker who showed a nation how to goof off. In his 2007 book Why 2channel Will Never Fail, he wrote: "If running the site required me to get up at 9 am every morning, wear a suit, and not have time to play videogames, I'd probably quit."

Link

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes in with the latest news on the fight with the State of Oregon's claim that Oregon's laws are copyrighted:

Last week, we posted a draft declaratory judgment action indicating our seriousness in getting to the bottom of the controversy over copyright on Oregon state law, and asked people on the net to comment. Today, we received a letter today from the Legislative Counsel of the State of Oregon. The letter says:

"The established policy of the committee - unchanged since 1953 - has been to copyright those portions of the Oregon Revised Statutes that are not the actual law itself. Your clients advocate a change in that copyright policy. The committee wishes to meet to consider its copyright policy in light of technological developments and the Internet. The Legislative Assembly is not currently in session, so getting immediate policy direction from the committee is not possible. The committee plans to meet on June 19, 2008, and would be interested in hearing testimony from you or your clients on the changes your clients seek in the copyright policy of the committee."

Link (Thanks, Carl!)

fast66 writes "Nextgov reports that a new court order allows the Department of the Interior to connect to the Internet, six years after the federal agency was ordered to disconnect. District Judge James Robertson said, "I find that the consent order is of no further use and must be vacated," Robertson wrote in his ruling. "The . . . disconnected offices and bureaus may be connected." He added that his ruling was based not on evidence but "on a legal conclusion that it is not my role to weigh IT security risks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apparently, last year's "cyber attacks" against Estonia have caused NATO to set up a "cyber warfare" center that will coordinate responses to online security threats. This is silly. The article says that the Estonian attacks succeeded in "knocking some financial systems in the country offline for several hours," but if you read press accounts of the attacks more closely, what you find is that the attacks mostly forced the websites of several financial institutions offline. I'm sure that was annoying for Estonians who couldn't check their bank balances, but there's a big difference between "annoyance" and "national security threat." Equally silly is the Air Force's proposal to develop a military botnet for launching distributed denial-of-service attacks against America's enemies. The Internet is not a military network; the military has maintained its own, separate, TCP/IP-based network for military operations since the 1970s. Most other countries have undoubtedly followed suit. Which means that "cyber warfare" can't accomplish much more than to knock out some websites in foreign countries. And while that's certainly going to be annoying for users of the affected websites, it's not a national security issue, and the world's militaries have far more urgent things to worry about.

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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For Those Who Tried To Rock is a brilliant new project to tell the "sonic history of the American pop band." The site's founders are seeking the stories and photos of every teen band who rocked their parents' garage fueled by big dreams and cheap beer. For now, the material they collect will end up on the Web site, preserved for posterity. Eventually, they hope to compile it into a book. In my opinion, their logo, above, nails the suburban American experience they're attempting to document. Link (Thanks, Birdman!)

mollyhackit writes "The Open Graphics Project, which we've been following since it first started looking for experts four years ago, has just announced that the OGD1 is available for preorder now. The design features 2 DVI, 256MB RAM, PCI-X, and a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA along with a nonvolatile FPGA for programming on boot. FPGAs are reprogrammable hardware which means the graphics card can be optimized for specific tasks and execute them faster than a general purpose CPU. The card could be programmed for certain codecs to speed up encoding or decoding. An open hardware design means potential for better driver support. Of course you could always use the FPGA for something else... say crypto cracking."

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