SpuriousLogic brings us this excerpt from a BBC report: "Prof. Heeks said very accurate figures for the size of the gold farming sector were hard to come by, but his work suggested that in 2008 it employs 400,000 people who earn an average of $145 (£77) per month creating a global market worth about $500m. ...Already, he said, gold farming was comparable in size to India's outsourcing industry. 'The Indian software employment figure probably crossed the 400,000 mark in 2004 and is now closer to 900,000,' said Prof Heeks. 'Nonetheless, the two are still comparable in employment size, yet not at all in terms of profile.' Prof Heeks suspects gold-farming might be an early example of the 'virtual offshoring' likely to become more prevalent as people spend more time working and playing in cyberspace. " We discussed the life of a gold farmer last year.

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I had a somewhat surreal experience a month ago. Out of the blue I received an email from someone from Rolling Stone magazine, saying that they wanted to know if I wanted to write a letter to the editor about an article in the upcoming issue -- and if I was interested they would ship me a copy of the magazine overnight. There were a bunch of things about this that didn't make any sense. First, they solicit letters to the editor?!? I had no idea. Second, they would overnight me a copy of the physical magazine? Just send me a digital copy. Finally, if I have something to say, I'm much more likely to just say it here than compose a "letter to the editor." The whole thing was so confusing that I emailed back to make sure that they were serious, and to ask if they always solicit letters to the editor. I didn't hear back for a bit, but a week later, a woman emailed back and said that they sometimes solicit letters from people to go along with the general letters they just get (she also pointed me to a URL since the article had been published in the interim, and there was no longer any need to overnight the magazine).

However, since then I've been thinking about what an out-of-date concept the whole "letter to the editor" is, so it comes as little surprise that Vice magazine skipped the Letters to the Editor this month, instead posting a whining rant online about how they don't get real letters any more:

You know what? No letters page this month. You know why? Because we aren't receiving enough real letters. We mainly get emails now, and people don't think when they write emails. They just pump them out, which makes them hard to reply to. We sat here and looked at like 50 emails we've gotten in the last couple days and it was really depressing. It's like trying to come back to a burp or a fart. What can you say? "Nice fart"? "Subpar belch, but try again"?

And we used to get great letters. They would arrive in decorated envelopes along with goofy little tokens, tchotchkes, gizmos, and gifts inside -- even cheap stuff like newspaper clippings or a photo or a drawing was nice. Now we just get retarded fucking emails...

I guess if that were the situation, I could see going out and soliciting better Letters to the Editor as well, but the fact is the whole Letters to the Editor concept seems pretty antiquated at this point. It was based on the premise that the magazine publishers and editors were the gatekeepers of the content, and if you didn't like it, you could potentially get your say in -- but only if they chose your comment out of a pile of others, and then it would likely be edited down anyway. It wasn't a conversation. It wasn't participation. It was letting the riff raff have their carefully moderated say as filler.

Of course, this sort of thinking can still be found in certain media industry folks who still pine for those "good old days" when people didn't really talk back. Witness a recent column in Toronto's Globe and Mail where the author trots out the tired complaints about bloggers that went out of style in 2004. It's the usual stuff about how most blogging is crappy, and how dare the riff raff think that they have a voice:

And now there is blogging, and comments. Readers may take 30 seconds to post a comment on a story or blog item that a writer dashed off in a minute. On The Globe website, our slogan is "Join the Conversation," but in the blogosphere, what follows isn't usually a conversation but a brief, ungrammatical shouting match. You can have more pensive chats in a bar fight.

And journalism wasn't meant to be a conversation, anyway. It was maybe a monologue, at its most democratic a carefully constructed dialogue. If readers didn't like or agree with the monologues in paper A, they bought paper B. What was most important about their opinions was that they thought enough to spend the coin.

There's also some nonsense about how people only have a finite number of things to say, and therefore you should save it for important publications like a magazine or a newspaper. In other words, please shut up and let us go back to telling you what's important. And then these old school media types wonder why we don't want to participate under their rules?

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I'll be heading to Tokyo this November for latest installment of the Web Directions conference series, along with Eric Meyer, Andy Budd, Jeremy Keith and Jeffrey Veen. The site for the show has just launched, featuring super mega turbo lifestream speaker pages. #

Electronic Frontier Foundation designer Hugh D'Andrade sez, "I did a 'live-painting' last Friday at a gallery -- a mural-sized cartoon depicting the goings-on inside the "secret room" at AT&T's Folsom Street facility. My EFF co-workers created a time-lapse video with an awesome ska soundtrack!" The Secret Room: EFF Designer's Cartoon on Illegal Spying (Thanks, Hugh!)

In noting that the Entertainment Software Association (the ESA) had hired the RIAA's VP in charge of its litigation strategy, we wondered if the ESA was going to ramp up lawsuits against customers. After all, over in the UK, there's been news about law firms suing hundreds for file sharing games. But, in the comments, someone pointed to an interview with the boss of EA Sports, Peter Moore, saying that he doesn't think it's a good idea to follow the RIAA's litigious path:

"I'm not a huge fan of trying to punish your consumer... I think there are better solutions than chasing people for money. I'm not sure what they are, other than to build game experiences that make it more difficult for there to be any value in pirating games."

Of course, he also does make some other comments that suggest he very much views it as an "us vs. them" sort of thing, rather than looking for potential win-win solutions:

"We absolutely should crack down on piracy. People put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into their content and deserve to get paid for it. It's absolutely wrong, it is stealing."

That's a bit of a mixed message, but at least it sounds as though EA is not anxious to sue its customers -- and, of course, EA is a major member of ESA, so hopefully it can help keep ESA away from going down this path as well. The next step would be starting to figure out ways to set up better business models that use so-called "piracy" to the company's advantage. Those will come eventually. In the meantime, though, how sad is it when it's newsworthy that an entertainment industry exec says he doesn't think suing customers is a good idea?

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monkeymonkey writes "Mozilla has integrated tracing optimization into SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript interpreter in Firefox. This improvement has boosted JavaScript performance by a factor of 20 to 40 in certain contexts. Ars Technica interviewed Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich (the original creator of JavaScript) and Mozilla's vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver. They say that tracing optimization will 'take JavaScript performance into the next tier' and 'get people thinking about JavaScript as a more general-purpose language.' The eventual goal is to make JavaScript run as fast as C code. Ars reports: 'Mozilla is leveraging an impressive new optimization technique to bring a big performance boost to the Firefox JavaScript engine. ...They aim to improve execution speed so that it is comparable to that of native code. This will redefine the boundaries of client-side performance and enable the development of a whole new generation of more computationally-intensive web applications.' Mozilla has also published a video that demonstrates the performance difference." An anonymous reader contributes links the blogs of Eich and Shaver, where they have some further benchmarks.

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It still amazes us that people still fall for so-called Nigerian advance-fee 419 scam emails. I'd actually noticed that I'd stopped getting such emails offering me millions for helping smuggle gold out of the country, but in the last week there's been a new bunch of them -- and apparently people still fall for them. According to a Nigerian diplomat in Australia, he's just as amazed, and thus thinks the victims are equally to blame and deserve jailtime. He claims that the government "frowns" on these scams, and spends plenty of time trying to track down the scammers -- but we've been reporting on Nigerian gov't claims for years and years and they never seem to get very far in stopping the scammers. But, still, he claims that the victims are equally at fault.

While it's true that most of these scams prey on people's greed (they're basically roping people into "stealing" money), it's a bit extreme to claim they should be thrown in jail for being conned. If you read a book like Drake's Fortune, which describes a similar scam nearly a century ago that was incredibly effective, you realize how easily people are fooled into these things. And we've even seen cases where victims still believe the scammers after they've lost everything and the whole scam has been explained to them. That's how thoroughly convincing these scams can be.

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Burglary suspect James Prevatt III, hunkered down for three days in a Maryland motel with his girlfriend, has threatened to shoot a robot that has kindly been bringing them burgers, pizza, soda, and cigarettes. The above headline screenshot is from CNN. Man threatens robot (CNN)

We wrote about the woman who was fined $30,000 for file sharing a pinball video game earlier this week, noting that the press seemed to be taking the word of the law firm that sued her, Davenport Lyons, as if it were fact. That seemed problematic -- and we should have realized that it was even more problematic than initially noted. TorrentFreak has turned up the fact that this was a default judgment against the woman, meaning that she didn't even show up in court to defend herself. Effectively, the court more or less had to decide this way. Davenport Lyons, of course, implied that she had fought the case and lost -- and thus, everyone else would be better off just paying based on the pre-settlement letters that the firm seems to send out in bulk. But that's not necessarily true. There's no indication how a court would rule if an actual defense were put forth.

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MojoKid writes "Intel's next-generation CPU microarchitecture, which was recently given the official processor family name of 'Core i7,' was one of the big topics of discussion at IDF. Intel claims that Nehalem represents its biggest platform architecture change to date. This might be true, but it is not a from-the-ground-up, completely new architecture either. Intel representatives disclosed that Nehalem 'shares a significant portion of the P6 gene pool,' does not include many new instructions, and has approximately the same length pipeline as Penryn. Nehalem is built upon Penryn, but with significant architectural changes (full webcast) to improve performance and power efficiency. Nehalem also brings Hyper-Threading back to Intel processors, and while Hyper-Threading has been criticized in the past as being energy inefficient, Intel claims their current iteration of Hyper-Threading on Nehalem is much better in that regard." Update: 8/23 00:35 by SS: Reader Spatial points out Anandtech's analysis of Nehalem.

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palegray.net writes "The National Center for State Courts, a nonprofit organization, has sent file-sharing propaganda to thousands of students. The supposedly 'educational' materials, presented in the form of a comic strip, are intended to frighten students with gross exaggerations of the legal consequences of sharing music online (lose your scholarship to college, go to jail for two years, and more). From the article: '"The Case of Internet Piracy," however, reads like the Recording Industry Association of America's public relations playbook: Download some songs, go to jail and lose your scholarship. Along the way, musicians will file onto the bread lines. "The purpose is basically to educate kids — middle school and high school-aged about how the justice system operates and about what really goes on in the courtroom as opposed to what you see on television," said Lorri Montgomery, the center's communications director.' I'm not encouraging anyone to break any laws, but this is ridiculous. What's truly discouraging is the fact that several judges appear to be in full support of this sort of 'education.' The propaganda material is available in PDF form, and it lists the judges and others involved in its creation. Wired's post has a summary of the story (which is good, since the story is awful), and Techdirt notes a couple of the legal inaccuracies.

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We already covered the judge's ruling about how copyright holders need to consider fair use before sending a DMCA takedown notice, but there's another part of Universal's position in this case that has been widely ignored (even by the judge in the case), but which Ethan Ackerman wisely calls attention to: Universal claims that the takedown letter doesn't violate the DMCA because it wasn't actually a DMCA takedown. Instead, they said it was just a friendly "request."

This may seem like a silly assertion or, at best, a minor side point, but it could become quite important. The DMCA has some very specific conditions that those sending takedowns need to meet -- but there's nothing really stopping anyone from sending a request that isn't specifically a DMCA takedown notice. For copyright holders, this would remove some of the power of the takedown notice, as it wouldn't require the service provider to react, like a DMCA notice does. However, if rulings like this one stand, adding some amount of liability to copyright holders sending DMCA takedown notices, some may actually find it safer to send non-DMCA takedowns on the assumption (probably correct) that most service providers will treat them exactly the same as a DMCA takedown. In other words, would copyright holders "opt-out" of the DMCA terms in order to avoid that liability? It will be worth watching.

Of course, in this case, the court just assumed that even if it didn't hit all the criteria, it was for all intents and purposes a DMCA takedown letter. But that won't always be the situation in future cases -- especially if copyright holders become even more explicit that the letters aren't DMCA takedowns, but some other type of takedown request. And, of course, this could expand as well -- where a total non-copyright holder could send such "requests" for takedowns, and they conceivably might not be violating the DMCA's provision against false takedowns, because they won't even fall under the DMCA. One way or the other, you can bet lawyers are going to be busy.

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An anonymous reader writes "Intel gave the press a sneak preview of its 3rd generation Classmate PC at IDF. It looks like this guy managed to kidnap the only working sample for a while and write up a full report. It looks like a major departure from the original, with a rotating touch screen and Atom processor. There's no official word on pricing yet, but no doubt the OLPC guys will try to rain on Intel's parade."

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Starting in a few hours is Outside Lands, a massive three-day music festival in San Francisco featuring a pretty insane line-up of great artists like Radiohead, Beck, Tom Petty, Devendra Banhart, M. Ward, Wilco, and dozens of others. (Boing Boing TV is on the scene so stay tuned!) Also debuting at Outside Lands is CrowdFire, a central social media hub for people at the concert and beyond to upload relevant photos, videos, blog posts, and audio and share it with everyone else. I'm proud to say that CrowdFire was created by BB's band manager John Battelle and his team at Federated Media! The way I see it, CrowdFire aims to create a cultural commons that bridges the real and virtual world, and the artists and audience. In the end, it should result in a living collective memory surrounding the event. Congrats John and FM! Participate at Crowdfire

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Attorney General Michael Mukasey has agreed to allow Congressional hearings, but not to delay, the implementation of new FBI regulations that would allow them to spy on American citizens who are not suspected of any crime. As an editorial in the New York Times points out, this is a power that has a history of abuse. In times past, it was used to wiretap Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and to spy on other civil rights and anti-war protesters." As Dekortage points out, "Several senators have formally complained that citizens could be investigated 'without any basis for suspicion,' which the Justice Department denies."

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So, in case you haven't been paying attention, the text of the 4th Amendment of the US Constitution reads:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Pretty straightforward and reasonable, right? Except we've seen an awful lot of erosion of that recently, what with Congress's decision to allow warrantless wiretaps and the Department of Homeland Security insisting that probable cause isn't needed to search your laptops at the border. Well, if it's not needed at the border, why is it needed at all?

At least that seems to be the theory being pushed by the Attorney General, who is asking Congress to approve a plan that would let the FBI begin an investigation and surveillance on someone without probable cause -- actually "without any reasonable basis" at all. That would seem to be in direct violation of the 4th Amendment, but apparently, ignoring the 4th Amendment is all the rage in Washington DC these days.

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