Feds busted a hydroponic marijuana garden in Miami's Mall of the Americas. Nobody has been arrested yet. There were 200 plants in the nursery. From the Associated Press:

The grow operation was found deep in a storeroom at the mall. Authorities say the growers used the mall's electricity to power their equipment, adding the flimsy wiring could have caused a fire.

Marijuana garden at mall (Miami Herald)

Pre-Photkina 2008: Canon has launched the SELPHY ES3 and SELPHY ES30 compact photo printers, that are minor upgrades to the SELPHY ES2 and SELPHY ES20 respectively. With a more compact design and larger LCD screens of 3.5” in ES3 and 3.0” in ES30, the printers offer Gold and Silver Easy Photo Packs for enhanced printing. The ES3 also comes with 1GB of built-in memory.

Pre-Photokina 2008: Next up from Canon today is this trio of entry-level compact digital cameras. The PowerShot A1000 IS and PowerShot A2000 IS replace the PowerShot A580 and PowerShot A720 IS respectively. Smaller in size than previous A series cameras, the new models have a 10.0MP sensor, advanced noise reduction, faster buffering speeds, Face Detection and Image Stabilization. These are joined by a 'ladies-exclusive' PowerShot E1, available in white, blue and pink. This curvaceous 10MP digital compact camera has 17 shooting modes, 2.5” LCD, Face Detection, Motion Detection and Long Play mode for videos.. All cameras offer beginners the option of switching to an Easy Mode enabling them to have a simplified menu, both for shooting and viewing.

Pre-Photokina 2008: Canon has launched the super-zoom PowerShot SX110 IS, which replaces the SX100 IS. With an increased resolution and a more compact build than its predecessor, the 9MP SX110 IS offers a 3.0” LCD, 10x optical zoom, Image Stabilization, Face Detection, Motion Detection and a new Easy Mode.

Pre-Photokina 2008: Canon today has also introduced the EF-S 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 IS Zoom lens. With an equivalent focal length of 29-320mm, the lens offers 11x zoom range. It also features a 16 element, 12 group construction including UD and aspherical lens elements and a 4-stop optical Image Stabilizer.

Pre-Photokina2008: No surprises to hear that Canon has launched the much anticipated EOS 50D, an upgraded version of EOS 40D. On the surface it looks almost similar to its predecessor. However, there are quite a few significant improvements; fifteen megapixel CMOS sensor, faster DIGIC 4 processor, 3.0" VGA LCD monitor with Live View mode offering 3 AF modes, ISO sensitivity expandable to 12800 and an HDMI connection for high Quality Image viewing. It also includes a new Quick Control screen which shows the most commonly used settings and Creative Auto mode for automatic focus and exposure. We're expecting to be able to bring you a full in-hands preview later today.

Physicser writes "Want to read every single technical detail of the design and construction of the Large Hadron Collider and its six detectors? The whole shebang — seven reports totaling 1600 pages, 115 MB, with contributions from 8000 scientists and engineers — has been published electronically by the Journal of Instrumentation, free to read without a subscription."

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The Associated Press has a short blurb about how haptics company and aggressive patent holder Immersion has settled its lawsuit with Internet Services LLC. Oddly, the AP report leaves out the details of the case -- which were pretty interesting -- preferring to make it sound like a generic patent lawsuit. The case, which we wrote about a few months back, involved questions over whether or not Immersion owed Internet Services money from Immersion's patent settlement with Sony.

You see, Immersion licenses "haptics" technology, which may be better known as "force feedback" technology -- the stuff that makes your video game controller vibrate when you drive your virtual car off the track in that racing game, for example. Immersion realized that such force feedback technology would also have a market in the porn world -- but apparently didn't want to sully its own name by associating with that world. So, instead, it licensed the right to enforce its patents in the "cybersex" and "teledildonics" to Internet Services. Then Immersion still gets the money but doesn't have to be seen as shaking down porn purveyors. The problem, though, was that Internet Services believed that the Sony PlayStation could be used for "cybersex" purposes as well as for straight gaming -- and thus, it felt cut out of Immersion's settlement with Sony.

And, from there, the fight was on -- and it got even more interesting earlier this year when the famed patent lawyer that Internet Services had hired to represent it against Immersion tried to quit -- and Internet Services went to court to require him to stay on the case. There's no word on the details of the settlement, but it's rather surprising that the AP would take this case and leave out most of the more interesting details.

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I walked through a door I shouldn't have and all of a sudden I'm walking around among all these famous politiicans and news people. Only got a good picture of John Kerry, and a movie of Sean Hannity and a movie of John Kerry.

I also uploaded a movie of the convention floor in motion.

DigitAl56K writes "Large companies still can't seem to get the basics of privacy and security on the Web pulled together. Today I went to enter a competition from Duracell to win a Nintendo Wii by filling out an online form. It requires entering your full name, address, and date of birth, and then proceeds to submit it via an unencrypted HTTP POST. The ultimate irony is the message at the bottom of the page that reads: 'Trust is a cornerstone of our corporate mission, and the success of our business depends on it. P&G is committed to maintaining your trust by protecting personal information we collect.' Which websites have you found to be lacking in their basic privacy practices?"

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Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we saw a splendid test card sweater, heard a Telephone Concerto, read about the summer's best smartphones, and Uuurwowrorwrwrirgigi barubububrbooobrrrrrrrr. John looked toward the expected iPod revamp coming this fall, found a surprisingly pleasant solar laptop bag, and discovered a gadget that reminded him of his 26-volume opus juvenilia, The Adventures of Fart Man. More edifying is his current tale of life aboard the miniature remote control Star Trek Enterprise. Rob heard a sinister chorus of tortured Furbies; discovered a tasteful joypad; praised the internet's mockup culture; and linked to a gallery of communist tech wonders from the fabled east. (Adds commenter Otter: "While we were drawing the Jetsons, they were building the Jetsons.") There was Cloud, Heathrow Airport's incredible flip dot animated sculpture; a cellphone embedded in the road surface somewhere in Italy; and a robot fight to the finish line. Finally, the unicorn chase—to the death.

Ben Adida calls out Apple for the poor security of its MobileMe web applications and AppleInsider for its misguided defense of Apple's design. Most users know that a special "lock" icon in the corner of their browser is a signal that the contents of the current website is encrypted in transit, protecting it from third-party eavesdropping. Evidently, users of MobileMe have been alarmed that MobileMe applications don't take advantage of this feature, even when sensitive information is being transmitted. Appleinsider says this is no big deal because Apple uses "authenticated handling of JSON data exchanges" to ensure security, and as a result SSL is unnecessary. Moreover, "if Apple applied SSL encryption in the browser, it would only slow down every data exchange without really improving security, and instead only provide pundits with a false sense of security that distracts from real security threats."

As Adida points out, this is way off base. A malicious individual may discover a security hole in the unencrypted part of the site that Apple's engineers didn't think of. Encrypting the entire session, rather than just the parts that Apple thinks are security-sensitive, provides an important extra layer of protection. There's also a more fundamental problem with AppleInsider's argument: without SSL, the user has no real assurances that he's talking to Apple, rather than a third party executing a man-in-the-middle attack (perhaps using a poisoned DNS cache). SSL requires servers to present a certificate signed by a recognized certificate authority in order to prove that it's the website it claims to be. That makes it difficult for a third party to masquerade as a legitimate SSL-encrypted website.

The scheme works because the authentication algorithm is baked into the browser and can't be changed by the website being visited. In contrast, if the authentication is performed by JavaScript code that was supplied by the server you're trying to authenticate, the "authentication" process is completely useless. A man-in-the-middle attacker can simply substitute his own bogus authentication script for the real one, and no one will notice the difference. So even if you have complete faith in Apple's ability to write secure authentication algorithms, you can't trust a non-SSL website purporting to be from Apple because there's no way to be sure it's actually an Apple server.

Training ordinary users to follow good security practices is notoriously difficult. Widespread user understanding and acceptance of the "lock" icon in their browsers is arguably the most significant improvement in web security since the web was created. It's extremely counterproductive to undermine use confidence in SSL by telling users to put their faith in Apple's magical homebrew crypto algorithms instead.

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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You may have heard about the recent controversy at the Leipzig Games Conference over a modification of Space Invaders in which the invaders are slowly demolishing the World Trade Center. The creator intended it as an artistic expression, but has since removed the game, saying, "it was never created to merely provoke controversy for controversy's sake." Kotaku took this occasion to ask whether "statements" can and should be made via video games, and how it affects the ongoing question of whether video games should be considered art. "The entire issue begs comparisons to Danny Ledonne's Super Colombine Massacre RPG!, an unsettling and involved title that tasks players on the most basic level with acting out the 1999 Littleton, Colorado school shooting in the role of killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Ledonne told the Washington Post that his intention with the title was never to glorify the tragedy, but to 'confront their actions and the consequences those actions had.' Like Stanley's Invaders!, Ledonne and his title stopped short of providing a direct interpretation - neither artist has been especially specific about 'what it means,' or in instructing players on how they should interpret their work or what 'message' should be taken away."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm sitting in the nosebleeds at Pepsi waiting for Jimmy Carter to speak, and then FriendFeed releases its new beta. Good timing! Gives me something to do while the speakers go on and on and...

Not sure what to do with the sub-lists feature, that's going to take some processing, but...

I found one hidden feature that's definitely worth calling out.

I can read someone else's feed and see what they see. That will, as Bret Taylor says, give us an easy way to show people what FF looks like to us. I'm sure itll be confusing to a lot of people, FF is a rich and complex product even though it has a very simple set of rules. Any way of discovering what its like in all its richness is worth it.

One of the issues that comes up when we discuss the economics of infinite goods is people too often falsely define the product that's being sold as the market, rather than the benefit. As we mentioned the other day, that's why the builders of horse carriages reacted the wrong way to the automobile. If they had realized they were in the transportation business, the automobile would have been as an opportunity to provide a better transportation experience. One of the side effects of properly recognizing the benefit is that it often shifts around the business model of the market you're in. The money may end up coming from somewhere entirely differently than before. The music industry is discovering this today (painfully). The money isn't in the product itself (music) but in the scarcities made valuable by the product (concerts, access to the artists, creating new works, etc.).

So, for folks struggling with these issues, one of the most important things to do after figuring out what your real market is, is to then figure out where all the scarcities are that are made more valuable by freeing up the infinite goods. The trick is to then position yourself to capture money in that market. But where this gets really tricky is those products may be surprising or appear to be in a totally different space (e.g., concerts rather than selling plastic discs) and that can be scary for those who are used to the old model.

I've had a few folks submit the GameIndustry.biz interview with Todd Hollenshead, the CEO of id Games, where he talks about the "hidden benefit" of piracy... but for computer makers, not video game producers. He's correct, other than the fact that it's not that hidden. There's a very real and admitted benefit to computer manufacturers -- but that doesn't mean that there also isn't a benefit for the video game makers themselves. Basically, when you look at the video game market, one of the big scarcities that benefits from free games is the computer makers.

But rather than somehow blaming them for not fighting piracy hard enough, why not take advantage of that? Get PC makers to finance new games, pointing out that if they give out the games for free it will help drive more people to buy the next generation of high powered PCs that are needed to run the games. In that way, everyone can benefit. The PC makers (or maybe even Intel or someone) can pay for the game, and then use that to turn in more sales of high powered computers. The video game developers get paid, the computer makers get a great tool to sell more new PCs and users get a free game with their PC. Everyone comes out better off and there's no "problem" of piracy.

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bucketoftruth writes "If you browse to the Democratic Convention website and attempt to check out any of their upcoming streams, you bump into the following limitation: 'We're sorry, but the Democratic Convention video web site isn't compatible with your operating system and/or browser. Please try again on a computer with the following Compatible operating systems: Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, or a Mac with Tiger (OS 10.4) or Leopard (OS 10.5). Compatible browsers: Internet Explorer (version 6 or later), Firefox (version 2), or, if you are on a Mac, Safari (version 3.1) also works.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today on TokyoMango, I wrote about ping pong-playing fashionista Naomi Yotsumoto; pondered the question of whether soy sauce would taste good with yogurt; rocked out to a catchy 90s song with a crazy music video, and showed a sneak preview of Tôkyô!, the new triptych movie directed in part by Michel Gondry.

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

The next 37signals Live will be tomorrow, August 26th at 11am central time.

The first two Live shows were general Q&As. This time we’re going to narrow down the focus to chapter 13 of Getting Real: Promotion. Generating buzz, getting press, promotion without a budget, launch, etc.

Come armed with questions and we’ll fire back answers. We’ll see you tomorrow at 37signals Live!