AT&T; is said to be developing a system to spot and block illicitly copied content sent over its broadband network. The NYT's Saul Hansell grilled Verizon EVP Tom Tauke on whether Verizon was planning to provide similar aid to Hollywood. The one-word summary? No. Snip:

He said the company’s view combines a concern for the privacy of its customers with self interest. It may be costly for it to get into the business of policing the traffic on its network. Indeed, phone companies have largely spent a century trying not to be liable for what people say over their lines.

“We generally are reluctant to get into the business of examining content that flows across our networks and taking some action as a result of that content,” he said.

Mr. Tauke offered at least three objections to the concept: 1) The slippery slope. Once you start going down the path of looking at the information going down the network, there are many that want you to play the role of policeman. Stop illegal gambling offshore. Stop pornography. Stop a whole array of other kinds of activities that some may think inappropriate.

2) It opens up potential liability for failing to block copyrighted work. When you look back at the history of copyright legislation, there has been an effort by Hollywood to pin the liability for copyright violations on the network that transmits the material. It is no secret they think we have deeper pockets than others and we are easy-to-find targets.

3) Privacy. Anything we do has to balance the need of copyright protection with the desire of customers for privacy.

Link to entry on NYT "Bits" blog.

Previously:

Talking About AT&T;'s Internet Filtering on AT&T;'s The Hugh Thompson Show

AT&T; to Filter Internet Traffic; Comcast Investigated by FCC for Filtering Internet Traffic

AT&T; mulls copyright censorship at the network level

Four undersea communications network cables have been cut this past week -- they're part of the network that handles most of the world's voice and internet traffic. WTF's going on?

Most telecommunications experts and cable operators say that sabotage seems unlikely, but no one knows what damaged the cables or whether the incidents were related.

One theory - that a wayward ship traveling off course because of bad weather was responsible for cutting the first two cables last week - was dismissed by the Egyptian government over the weekend.

No ships passed the area in the Mediterranean where the cables were located, the country's Ministry of Communications said Sunday.

Link.

UPDATE: The majority of BB readers who've commented on the story say, in summary, "my money's on monsters."

Victor Piñeiro says: "Just wanted to share my first feature documentary trailer with you, Second Skin. Its all about virtual worlds and the gamers who 'live' in them." Link

The Blow N Glo Special, built and driven by Maddog, is a nice-looking car built to compete in the San Fernando Valley Illegal Soap Box Federation races. The February issue of Hot Rod has an article about the S.F.V.I.S.B.F.

"I've been doing dumb and dangerous stuff for years," Paul de Valera, 36, said with a strange sort of exasperated enthusiasm during a conversation a few days earlier at his one-man Atomic Cycles bicycleshop in Van Nuys. Paul and his friend Tick One (it's a name he chose) are the S.F.V.I.S.B.F.'s co-instigators and currently act as the group's half-serious organizers and fun-first spiritual advisors. "It's stupidity," Paul added, "and it infects all of us."

This isn't soap box racing the way it's practiced at the All-American Soap Box Derby -- where squeaky-clean preteens line up in cars built by their fathers and a gaggle of aerospace engineers to race down a sanitized hill in proscribed, arrow-straight lanes. In the S.F.V.I.S.B.F., adults in makeshift gravity-powered jalopies clandestinely sneak out early on the second Sunday of each month from March through December to meet and then barrel through unsuspecting suburban neighborhoods or over dirt fire roads with plenty of collisions, corners, and comeuppances.

Link

Roger says: "Here's a review of an extremely weird vintage bicycle safety film from 1962 in which a group of kids show us the dangers of disobeying bicycle safety rules - all while wearing some of the creepiest monkey masks you'll ever see."

The typeface used in the title is excellent.

Link | Link to YouTube video

Are you ready for Maker Faire Bay Area 2008? The call for makers is open now!

Come to the Los Angeles tryouts on February 9, 2008, from noon to 4pm at Machine Project, 1200 D North Alvarado Street, Los Angeles, CA 90026. Please download this application form, fill it out, and bring it with you.

San Francisco tryouts are on February 17.

(If you don't want to come to tryouts, you can also apply online.)

Link to Maker Faire teaser movie

Instructables announced the winner of its Universal Laser Cutter Contest: Graffiti Research Lab (GRL) created a HOWTO on recreating the famed "Bullet Time" sequence from the Matrix. They devised the technique with director Dan the Man for a music video by underground rappers Styles P, AZ, and Large Professor. For their hard work on the Instructable, titled "How To Enter The Ghetto Matrix (DIY Bullet Time)", GRL takes home a $15000 laser cutter for their new workshop. I was a judge of the contest and the finalists absolutely blew me away, from a giant fresnel lens deathray to an autonomous foosball table to a build-it-yourself mongolian yurt.
Link

Previously on BB:
• Graffiti Research Labs high-power projection system Link
• GRL's LED Throwies Link
• GRL's video of Maker Faire Link

These anti-itch pyjamas look like they would have been issued to passengers on the commercial space ship in Kubrick's 2001.

The nightwear, which is produced from a fabric called Dermasilk, can also help reduce the itching endured by sufferers of skin disorders such as eczema and dermatitis.

The pyjamas have been developed for Travelodge, the hotel chain, which carried out a survey to discover what kept people awake.

Link (Via Spluch)

John Schwartz reports in today's New York Times about the global community of "satellite spotter" hobbyists who track the heavenly motions of satellites -- some of which are secret government projects -- and share what they find online:

Thousands of people form the spotter community. Many look for historical relics of the early space age, working from publicly available orbital information. Others watch for phenomena like the distinctive flare of sunlight glinting off bright solar panels of some telephone satellites. Still others are drawn to the secretive world of spy satellites, with about a dozen hobbyists who do most of the observing, Mr. Molczan said.

In the case of the mysterious satellite that is about to plunge back to earth, Mr. Molczan had an early sense of which one it was, identifying it as USA-193, which gave out shortly after reaching space in December 2006. It is said to have been built by the Lockheed Martin Corporation and operated by the secretive National Reconnaissance Office.

One of those satellites may be visible to folks in New York City on Friday. Link to the full story, and here's a related item on the NYT "Lede" blog. Image: UK-based satellite spotter John Locker, photo by Jonathan Player for The New York Times.

Topless robot has an amusing set of side-by-side photos of Star Wars Toys and the celebrities who look like them. Link

Gina Piccalo wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times Magazine about ayahuasca ceremonies in Southern California. People pay $200 to have ayahuasqueros come to their house and guide them through the psychedelic ritual.

(Photo by "Ayahuasca in San Francisco" released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)

For them, the vision-inducing elixir made from Amazonian jungle vines and leaves opens doors to parallel realities where mystical creatures reign. Because ayahuasca must be exactingly prepared and administered to achieve the desired benefits, a cadre of itinerant shamans such as Truenos has emerged, roaming the U.S. to host marathon candlelight ceremonies in yoga studios, private homes and remote open spaces, and charging as much as $200 a person for each session.

The concoction itself is said to taste so vile that most people fight their gag reflex to swallow it. Devotees liken the flavor to forest rot and bile, dirty socks and raw sewage. Vomiting is so common that indigenous shamans often refer to the ceremony as la purga, or the purge. And ayahuasca can severely test the commitment of its followers: The potion often reveals its celebrated wisdoms only after repeat encounters. The payoff, adherents say, can be life-altering. Debilitating illnesses such as chronic depression or addiction may disappear after just one session, some say. Others say they shed their egos for a night, finally seeing their lives with a startling clarity.

With that kind of reputation, ayahuasca has predictably intrigued celebrities known for charting the supra-conscious: Oliver Stone, Sting and Tori Amos have sampled it and openly discussed their experiences. “It’s quite an ordeal,” Sting told Rolling Stone in 1998. Amos talked on BBC Radio 4 in 2005 about how she envisioned having a love affair with the devil during one ayahuasca encounter.

In Peru, ayahuasca ceremonies are so common that the nation’s tourism bureau tracks the number of visitors seeking the sacred brew. But no one needs to travel to Peru to experience ayahuasca in 2008. A community, shepherded by ayahuasca shamans, has begun to emerge in the United States. It initially established itself in New Mexico. And now—in an act of psychedelic entrepreneurship and under the aegis of his spiritual and religious society, Aurora Bahá—Truenos is bringing the ayahuasca ceremony to Southern California.

Link

Republican State Representative John Read of Gautier, Mississipi has proposed a law to prohibit restaurants from serving obese people. He says he doesn't expect the law to pass, but wrote the bill to make a statement. From the Associated Press:

"I was trying to shed a little light on the number one problem in Mississippi," said Republican Rep. John Read of Gautier, who acknowledges that at 5-foot-11 and 230 pounds, he'd probably have a tough time under his own bill...

The state House Public Health Committee chairman, Democrat Steve Holland of Plantersville, said he is going to "shred" the bill.

"It is too oppressive for government to require a restaurant owner to police another human being from their own indiscretions," Holland said Monday.

Link (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

Tim Biskup is reissuing his first ever vinyl figure, the Pollard, but this time it's cast in shiny chrome. Fancy! The Chrome Pollard is a limited edition of 40 and comes in a wooden box with a signed and numbered serigraphed lid. It'll be available on Friday, 2/8, at noon, for 300 smackers.
Link

Previously on BBtv:
• David meets artist Tim Biskup (video) Link
• Boing Boing hoodie by GAMA-GO with Tim Biskup art Link

Last week, Thane Heins of Ottawa took his perpetual motion device (the Perepiteia) to Boston to show it to Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Markus Zahn at MIT's Laboratory for Electromagentic and Electonic Systems.

Zahn says the device's performance was "unexpected and new."

It's now Jan. 28 – D Day. Heins has modified his test so the effects observed are difficult to deny. He holds a permanent magnet a few centimetres away from the driveshaft of an electric motor, and the magnetic field it creates causes the motor to accelerate. It went well.

Contacted by phone a few hours after the test, Zahn is genuinely stumped -- and surprised. He said the magnet shouldn't cause acceleration. "It's an unusual phenomena I wouldn't have predicted in advance. But I saw it. It's real. Now I'm just trying to figure it out."

There's no talk of perpetual motion. No whisper of broken scientific laws or free energy. Zahn would never go there -– at least not yet. But he does see the potential for making electric motors more efficient, and this itself is no small feat.

"To my mind this is unexpected and new, and it's worth exploring all the possible advantages once you're convinced it's a real effect," he added. "There are an infinite number of induction machines in people's homes and everywhere around the world. If you could make them more efficient, cumulatively, it could make a big difference."

Link | Videos of the Perepitea

UK artist Jodie Carey creates dark, sweet sculptures that, she says, "offer beauty but at the same time confront us with the ugliness of life." Above left, "Untitled Monument," a cake of bones sculpted from plaster, steel, wire, and sugarpaste icing. Above right, "Femur," a bone and flower plaque entirely made from icing. Link (via Morbid Anatomy)

In December, graffiti writers AUGER and REVOK modified a billboard advertising the wonderful Takashi Murakami exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Two days later, the billboard was removed. The LA Weekly now reports that Murakami himself saw online photos of the graffitied billboard and thought it to be "so wonderful, he had to have it for his collection," according to his representatives. So apparently he had it taken down and shipped to his studio in Japan. Link to LA Weekly, Link to LA MOCA's Murakami page

The United States National Library of Medicine has a fantastic online exhibit about the history of conjoined twins, beginning in medieval times. Titled "From 'Monsters' to Modern Medical Miracles," the site explores the science and culture of "Siamese" twins. Seem here is a plate from a 1499 book by Jacob Locher, Carmen heroicum de partu monstrifero, "one of the earliest printed illustrations of a set of conjoined twins and the earliest printed work devoted entirely to the subject." From the site section titled "Age of Superstition":

From medieval times through the Enlightenment conjoined twins were viewed as monsters. Their existence simultaneously horrified and amazed the common person. The established medical explanation of the day, from Hippocrates, reasoned that a conjoined twin was simply the result of there being too much seed available at conception for just one child, but not enough for two distinct beings. Even so, popular theories fueled the public's fear and wonder by suggesting that conjoined twins were the result of impure conception or the witnessing of some evil or traumatic event during pregnancy.

Books depicting all sorts of monsters, both real and imagined, were extremely popular among the literate during this period. The authors often copied extensively from each other, bringing long told tales with new illustrations to another generation of the fascinated.

Link

An original musical production about social networking and your personal privacy, by Austrian art-pranksters monochrom, with Jonathan Mann aka GameJew. Performed at the Austrian Big Brother Awards, where online rights advocates honor "government agencies, private companies and individuals who have excelled in the violation of our privacy."

Link to Boing Boing tv post with video and discussion.

Sean Bonner points us to these Pastafarian videos, which seem awfully reminiscent of some recently leaked creepy videos from another cult.

"I won't hesitate to put my noodle in someone else, because I put it ruthlessly in myself."

Anonymous Message to Pastafarianism:

Secret Pastafarian Video Exposed:

Both were created by Ed Adkins.

I'm still on paternity leave, but a couple of matters have come up that are too important to wait (important enough to blog while my daughter naps on my chest!). Here's one from the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' workshop, on whose Board I sit (I'm also a graduate and a former instructor):

Applications are now being accepted for the 2008 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop at U.C. San Diego. Established in 1968 by Robin Scott Wilson, Kate Wilhelm, and Damon Knight, Clarion is the oldest workshop of its kind and is widely recognized as a premier proving and training ground for aspiring writers of fantasy and science fiction. The 2008 workshop will take p lace from June 29 to August 9 on the UCSD campus. This year's faculty features Kelly Link, James Patrick Kelly, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Neil Gaiman, Nalo Hopkinson, and Geoff Ryman. Scholarship aid is available. Deadline for applications is March 1. For further details, please see our website.

I'm still on paternity leave, but a couple of matters have come up that are too important to wait (important enough to blog while my daughter naps on my chest!). Here's one from Michael Geist:

The fight over the Canadian DMCA is heating up as the Industry Minister Jim Prentice prepares to introduce one-sided, dangerous copyright legislation despite thousands of letters and protests against the bill. Nearly 40,000 people have joined the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group to fight the bill, but lobby groups and the U.S. government are responding with misleading opinion pieces and behind the scenes lobbying.

Copyfighting law prof Michael Geist takes apart a Microsoft editorial that claims that the Canada has no copyright law even after it received the largest award for copyright infringement in Canadian history. Meanwhile, the Canadian Recording Industry Association has been caught lobbying the Canada's Ambassador to the United States in an effort to convince the U.S. government to increase the pressure for a Canadian DMCA. If that weren't bad enough, Prentice is about to overrule the Canadian Foreign Minister who wants to have a debate on the WIPO copyright treaties before the Canadian DMCA is introduced just like the Conservative government promised in the last election.

Ready to fight back for your digital rights before it's too late? Check out the list of Copyright MPs who are particularly vulnerable on copyright, join the Facebook group, attend a talk this week in Calgary with Prentice, and write to your Member of Parliament and Industry Minister Prentice.

A Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747-400 will become the first commercial aircraft to fly on biofuel, later this month, in an historic flight from London to Amsterdam.

Although no passengers will be on board, the contents of the plane's gas tank will have everyone in the airline industry watching. (...) Airline industry officials, environmentalists and energy companies all have a huge interest in the future of air travel as it pertains to fuel consumption, carbon emissions and global warming.

From the business perspective, the airlines are under great financial pressure because of soaring fuel costs; the price of crude oil is consistently flirting with $100 per barrel. On the environmental side of things, aircraft represent up to 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions produced by the U.S. transportation sector, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Additionally, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, greenhouse gas emissions from domestic aircraft are expected to increase 60 percent by 2025. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that increases in air transportation over the next 50 years will result in a threefold increase in aircraft CO{-2} emissions and a 13 percent increase in ozone.

Link

honda
nathan sawaya
henry lim
eric harshbarger
album covers
theorists
nyc
guitars
phone
galvanic skin response detector
dice generator
lego's run
white stripes

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

Howard Rheingold points us to an event taking place this weekend in Los Angeles, "24/7: A DIY Video Summit." He explains:

The event is an effort to bring together the various academic, technology, and creative communities that have a stake in the evolution of the amateur and DIY video space. Specifically, the effort is to get the grassroots and public interest perspective into play in the definition of the future of the Internet video space. Our speakers include Joi Ito, Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, John Seely Brown, me, and Yochai Benkler. In fact, I will moderate a panel on Saturday with all those others. I think it's the first time we've all been on a stage together, and I want to make it a very action-oriented call to arms rather than yet another panel discussion.

This event is the first of its kind in that it brings together curators and representatives from key DIY video communities - live action remix, anime music videos, videoblogging, machinima, youth media, activist media, political remix, video blogging, and independent arts video. Although these communities often have their own dedicated events, there are rarely conversations that bring together these different groups, much less one that also includes conversations with industry executives from the tech world, academics, and policy makers. The event will have screenings of DIY videos, an academic track, and hands on workshops.

Link. Even if you can't attend in person, they'll no doubt produce many interesting ideas to be shared online. (Special thanks, Mimi Ito!)

Link, shot by Sean Bonner. I post this not to express a political position -- rather, because it's an interesting example of brevity and simplicity in design.

Flickr user dansays acquired an unopened Apple IIc on eBay and in true Macfan style, posted his unboxing photos online. From his Flickr set:

It's never been opened. Ever. It hasn't seen the light of day since before it was shipped on May 5th, 1988.

I wrestled with whether I should open the box, or store it and let it accrue collector's value. In the end, I decided that the reason for my purchase wasn't financial. My very first computer was an Apple //c, and I can't see wanting to part with this computer, ever.

Link (via Andre Torrez's notes)

On February 4, 2008 my neighbor had his giant eucalyptus tree chopped down because it was diseased. This is a one-minute time lapse movie of the 4-hour event.

(The song is Eee-Ooo by Lady Bombon Vs. Gigaboy.)

Link to video

Air & Space Magazine takes a look back at small, inexpensive personal jets that were commercial failures. According to the article, the cost of fuel kept them out of the sky. Seen here is the SIPA200 Minijet:

First flown in France in 1952, the two-seat Minijet was designed around the world’s first practical small turbojet engine, the 330-pound-thrust Turbomeca Palas. With a gross weight of 1,675 pounds, the Minijet was seriously underpowered on takeoff, but could still manage a top speed of 250 mph. The thirst of the little Palas engine, however, limited the airplane’s range to 350 miles. Of the seven Minijets built, only two are still flying, one of them in the United States.

Link

In the early 1900s, Baptist pastor Clarence Larkin (1850-1924) created large wall charts to help teach the Bible. He called these charts "Prophetic Truth." The topics range from "The Seven Thousand Years of Human History" to "The Failure of Man" to "The (Spiritual) Underworld," seen above. Link (Thanks, Mike Love!)