The Knipex Pliers Wrench is best described in the US as a smooth-faced channel lock plier/wrench. Or, as a pliers-handled crescent wrench. I have a set of 3 different sizes and have used them for a year. They allow one to rapidly, safely and strongly grip nuts or bolt heads for tightening or loosening.
Rapidly: an adjustable crescent wrench is not rapid. One must adjust the opening to the nut or bolt head, and between tightening turns, in removing and replacing the wrench, inevitably the wrench loosens a bit and must be retightened. An open-ended or box wrench or socket is the best tool to use, but then one must keep in hand a range of sizes for each size of nut/head. In contrast the Knipex pliers wrench loosens and tightens like a pair of pliers or channel lock wrench.
Safely: an adjustable crescent wrench tends to loosen, rounding off the corners of the nut or bolt head. Pliers or vice-grips are worse, putting teeth-marks on the nut or head. In contrast the Knipex pliers wrench has flat, smooth, and parallel heads ensuring no rounding or gouging of the nut/head.
Strongly: the lever arm of the Knipex ensures a strong grip on the nut/head. I've used them to squeeze small solid aluminum rivets in building an experimental airplane.
To summarize, the Knipex pliers wrench combines the best features of other tools, enabling one to grip and turn nuts and bolts with a single tool, and apply considerable squeezing pressure on objects without gouging or tooth marks.
Snip from Washington Post: "Ahmed began to meet in hotels in Northern Virginia with people he believed to be affiliated with a terrorist organization. He agreed to conduct video surveillance of the [Washington Metro] stations, suggested the best time to attack and the best place to place explosives to maximize casualties, the [federal] indictment alleges." Via the BB Submitterator, EvilMike asks, "Could this be something used as a future reason to restrict photography and videos of government property?" — Xeni • Comments: 10
Photograph: Ngwe Lwin via National Geographic. Killed for food, an R. strykeri monkey is displayed in Myanmar in early 2010.
The only scientifically observed specimen of a newly discovered monkey species in Myanmar (Burma) was killed by local hunters by the time researchers found it. Shortly thereafter, it was eaten.
This species of monkey in fact so snub-nosed that it is said to sneeze uncontrollably when it rains. But "Snubby" has far greater problems than the sniffles.
Local demand for monkey flesh as a food source is one of many reasons the species is endangered; habitat destruction by Chinese logging companies is a big threat, which in turn leads to more hunting: no forest means fewer barriers to tracking and killing these beautiful, vulnerable beasts.
Image: Underwater witch at Halloween, Rainbow Springs, FL, mid-1950s. Via Flickr Commons, from Florida State Archives.
I'm thinking of going as "Sexy SQL Database," or maybe stringing a bunch of hard drives and shredded FOIA documents on a blood-red ballgown and going as Wikileaks. How 'bout you? Your ideas for the BoingBoing-iest homemade costumes welcomed in the comments.
Via the BB Submitterator, reader Dan says, "Brock Davis is an artist for Wired, the New York Times, and other outlets, but here he created a funny Star Wars artifact. My favorite bit is that the invoice echoes period paperwork from the late '70s-early '80s when the Star Wars movies were released."
Andrea James is a Los Angeles-based writer and troublemaker.
Image: Click to embiggen.
1908 Sears mail-order house No. 115 for $725.
I used to write ads for Sears, and I always admired their influence in American DIY/maker culture. They had a huge influence on reducing local general stores' price-gouging practices, and they gave consumers access to goods that were hard to come by (they started when there were no cars and only 38 US states). Back when Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Montgomery Ward were battling it out over who would be the analog version of Amazon, Sears offered increasingly ambitious and specialized catalogs. One of their most ambitious projects was mail-order homes, inspired by success of The Aladdin Company. Last year, Cory blogged about Thomas Edison's similar prefab concrete home venture. But Sears Modern Homes had huge success with their wood-framed homes from 1908 through the Great Depression. Their cheapest model was $107 in 1908 (about $2,000 today). Unlike a lot of modern prefab, these were made to last; you can still find these homes here and there around the country.
Glenn Fleishman is a Seattle journalist who started one of the first Web-hosting companies in 1994, worked for Amazon in 96-97, and then decided he wanted a life. He writes for The Seattle Times, The Economist, and TidBITS, among other publications.
Firesheep should freak you out, at least for a moment. It's a Firefox extension that lets any normal human being--I'm not talking about you, BoingBoing readers--install the add-on and then steal the active sessions of people using unencrypted browsing sessions with popular online services on the same Wi-Fi network. This involves no Wi-Fi foolery, because the necessary network traffic is openly available.
Walk into any busy coffeeshop, fire up the 'sheep, and a list of potential identities to assume at any of two dozen popular sites appears. Double-click, and you snarf their identifying token, and log in to the site in question as that person.
Firesheep is a business-model tour de force, not a zero-day technical one. It's a proof of concept that repackages and expands on earlier security research to expose a failure in the risk profile adopted by Web sites on behalf of their unsuspecting users. There's no money to be made by a Web site in fixing this problem for its customers or readers. Thus, only a security-conscious CIO might be able to push through the budget item necessary to bump the back-end systems up to the level needed.
Firesheep is a public relations exploit, too; it's so easy to use and to demonstrate that it shot round the world. Previous demonstrations spread the word in the tech community, and a little beyond. Firesheep is telegenic.
I'm coming to San Francisco next month to present the 19th Annual Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Awards (this year's winners are Stephen Aftergood, James Boyle, Pamela Jones and Groklaw, and Hari Krishna Prasad Vemuru -- see here for full announcement). The event's taking place at the 111 Minna Gallery at 7:30 PM, and is preceded by a "VIP event" with the Pioneer Award winners, EFF founders and board members at 6:30 (separate ticket). Funds raised from tickets go to support the EFF's amazing work (as a former employee, I can attest to how far they stretch your dollars), needed now more than ever in this era of increased pressure to surveil, control and censor the Internet.
My appearance at the Pioneer Awards is part of a longer trip that includes three days in Cedar Rapids, Iowa as guest of honor at ICON 35: A Steam Powered Convention of the Future -- they're footing the bill to get me from London to the USA. I'll be doing a post on ICON later, but I wanted to mention them here -- without their support, I couldn't do the EFF event.
"Sterling's Gold," the autobiography of mid-century advertising great Roger Sterling, is to be reissued by Grove Press after being out of print for 45 years.
This is the first in a series of three essays, written by a Stoic, about what it means to practice an ancient philosophy in the modern world. William B. Irvine is author of A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (Oxford University Press: 2009).
I never intended to become a Stoic. Who, after all, were the Stoics? They were those grim, wooden figures of ancient Greece and Rome whose goal it was to stand mutely and take whatever the world could throw at them. Right?
About a decade ago, though, I began a research project on human desire. The goal of the project was to write a book on the subject, but I also had a hidden agenda in conducting my research: I was contemplating becoming a Zen Buddhist and wanted to learn more about it before taking the leap. But the more I learned about Zen, the less it attracted me.
Practicing Zen would require me to suppress my analytical abilities, something I found it quite difficult to do. Another off-putting aspect of Zen was that the moment of enlightenment it dangled before its practitioners was by no means guaranteed. Practice Zen for decades and you might achieve enlightenment -- or you might not. It would be tragic, I thought, to spend the remaining decades of my life pursuing a moment of enlightenment that never came. Zen doubtless works for some people, but for me, the fit wasn't good.
Then something quite unexpected happened. As part of my research, I investigated what ancient philosophers had to say about desire. Among them were the Stoic philosophers -- people like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus -- about whom I knew little. As I read them, I discovered that they were quite unlike I imagined they would be. Indeed, it soon became apparent that everything I "knew" about the Stoics was wrong. They were neither grim nor wooden. If anything, the adjective that I thought described them best was "buoyant" or maybe even "cheerful." And without consciously intending to do so, I found myself experimenting with Stoic strategies for daily living.
Thus, when I found myself in a predicament -- being stuck in traffic, for example -- I followed the advice of Epictetus and asked myself what aspects of the situation I could and couldn't control. I couldn't control what the other cars did, so it was pointless -- was in fact counterproductive -- for me to get angry at them. My energy was much better spent focusing on things I could control, with the most important being how I responded to the situation. In particular, I could employ Stoic strategies to prevent the incident from spoiling my day.
The new MAZDA2 is one hot car. Foursquare is one of the biggest social networking apps ever to hit your Smartphone. What happens when the two team up? Two words: Zoom zoom.
Mazda is gearing up to give one lucky Foursquare user a brand new MAZDA2. All you need to do is log on and become a friend of Mazda. Then, head out to a different place in each of these three categories: gaming, style, and music. Hit up special hot spots in select cities and check-in to unlock the MAZDA2 Button Masher, MAZDA2 Beat Junkie, MAZDA2 Style Guru and MAZDA2 InnerDriver badges. The next thing you know, you could be handed the keys to unlock your very own MAZDA2.
So just go to Foursquare to get started, then check out what could be your new ride here!
Mammoth Arizona used book seller Bookmans made this sweet advert featuring a warehouse sized store in which thousands of used books do a domino run across counters, shelves, floors, etc. Hypnotic!
Back in September, I blogged Quilty1987's mesmerizing YouTube tutorial on making weird, erratically shaped gears that really mesh and spin. At the time, I pondered what these would look like if they were part of a larger, more ambitious project. Now I know: here's another Quilty1987 (AKA Clayton Boyer) video of several geared creations that do improbable and wonderful tricks with teeth and spins.
Tens of thousands of South Koreans have had their websites censored or been kicked off the Internet by their ISPs on the strength of a single, unsubstantiated accusation of copyright infringement, in a process that has no right of appeal, no right to face your accuser, and no right to see or contest the evidence against you.
South Korea changed its Internet and copyright laws a year ago, after being arm-twisted into a new set of rules as part of its US Free Trade Agreement (the US has also demanded new, tougher-than-domestic copyright laws in its FTAs with Australia, Chile, Central America, and many other states). Under the new rules, Korean ISPs are obliged to kick their customers (and their families) off the Internet after receiving three unsubstantiated copyright accusations.
But a second procedure allows the Minister of Culture to recommend that households be disconnected from the Internet; or that material hosted on web servers be censored, or that an ISP send a threatening "warning" letter to a customer. In the past year, the Minister has sent out 65,000 "recommendations" to Korean ISPs, and in all but 40 cases, the ISPs have complied with the recommendation -- meaning that the recommendation carries the force of law. Except, unlike a law, it has no judicial oversight, no due process, and is handed down by fiat from an unaccountable government bureaucrat.
The US-Korea FTA was the template for the much-watered-down Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret, closed-door copyright treaty negotiation through which the US is attempting to write the whole world's copyright and Internet laws (South Korea joined the US in fighting to keep the treaty process closed and the drafts secret). South Korea was once the world's leader in the use of Internet as an engine for economic growth and civic engagement, far outstripping the US's own rather anemic showing in the global league-tables for Internet penetration and speed. The US Trade Representative has done his damndest to undo that competitive advantage by forcing Korea's Internet to wear shackles and weights, and he wants to do the same for your country, too.
Hopefully, it's clear what's going on. Basically, the Commission has sent out a lot of warnings, and blocked/deleted a ton of content. A total of 31 users have had their accounts suspended -- again, with no indication that there was any number of warnings or pre-notice at all. Separately, the blog post in question does note that the other method (the actual three strikes way, involving the Culture Minister) has sent out a much smaller 275 warnings and 41 orders to delete content, but none to suspend accounts.
Martin Broughton, the chairman of British Airways, has called on Britain's aviation industry to stop "kowtowing" to the USA's ridiculous and inconsistent aviation "security" procedures. Broughton points out that carriers flying to the US from Britain are forced to subject their passengers to inconvenient and expensive checks that internal US flights often omit. Meanwhile, Colin Matthews, the head of BAA, has called for scrapping all security procedures and starting over with "a clean sheet of paper."
He suggested the practice of forcing passengers on US-bound flights to take off their shoes and to have their laptops checked separately in security lines should be dropped, during a conference of UK airport operators in London.
There was no need to "kowtow to the Americans every time they wanted something done", said Broughton. "America does not do internally a lot of the things they demand that we do. We shouldn't stand for that. We should say 'we'll only do things which we consider to be essential and that you Americans also consider essential'."
Ben Tripp sez, "Rise Again, my zombie apocalypse novel (reviewed here by Cory) is in bookstores today! In honor of the occasion, I wish to direct readers to my downloadable sheet of zombie wounds. Print them on full-sheet sticker paper, then cut, peel, and stick. You can also find some zombie eyeglasses on the site for the instant undead look."
As a fan of BoingBoing dating from a decade ago, when it was delivered on horseback, I wanted to share something positive with fellow readers in my first guest post. Unfortunately, the thing I've been most passionate about in my reporting and writing since 1999--cybercrime and tech security--doesn't lend itself to much that's happy. What I'm offering today is a compromise. It was good news to me personally, and it will be good news to those of you who have my read my book, Fatal System Error. For the rest of you, it won't be pleasant, and I'm sorry about that.
On Friday, I got a Skype message from a longtime source of mine: "My friend got his daughter back." We spoke on Sunday, and I will tell you what I can from that talk. To begin with, though, my source uses the fake name Jart Armin of HostExploit.
Like the people who work at Spamhaus, Jart is one of those people dedicated to tracking the worst cyber gangs who works in anonymity in order to protect himself. I don't like quoting people I can't name, but I did so in the book with Jart because he has done important research and because he is entirely right to be afraid of the people he has been tracking.
To explain that in the book, I briefly told the story of a colleague of Jart's who was investigating mob activity in St. Petersburg, Russia. The colleague made the mistake of working with the local police. Before he finished his assignment, the man's teenage daughter was kidnapped from her Western country, and the investigator got a message that if he dropped the case, the rest of his children might be okay.
That was five years ago. I had to leave the story hanging in the book because there had been no closure. A couple of weeks ago, the man got a new message. His daughter was in Kazakhstan, and he could have her back as long as he agreed not to look into certain of the gang's activities. One factor in the change of heart was the additional attention that Fatal System Error brought to the mob. The family has been reunited, though the young woman is not the same as she was. She was fed drugs and used to service men. A grim story, but at least it has an ending now, and I wanted to update those who knew the first part.
There are many reasons why cybercrime is as bad as it is, and getting much worse. One of them is lack of awareness of how dangerous and well-connected the gangs are. The most serious identity thieves and fraudsters are not isolated teenage script kiddies. They are mobsters who kill people, and worse, though those stories are seldom told. Folks need to know just how bad they are, every bit as much as they need to know the stories of the heroes who are risking their lives to stop them.
This Gerber machete has a normal 16" blade on one side and a serrated saw on the other side. I go gold prospecting in very overgrown and brushy areas, so the hollow ground machete blade will take care of the smaller stuff and the saw is right there for the occasional limb or larger brush.
This eliminates carrying a saw with me when I already have a lot of other equipment to carry. I had never seen a machete with a saw on the back, and when I noticed it in the catalog I knew I had to have one.
-- Glenn Kangiser
[Note: A commenter pointed out that Gerber recalled an older version of this machete. This model has an improved handle and many other reviews noted an improvement in quality post-recall.--OH]
Update to Cory's post:
Mike Pezzano, a member of The Lexington Rand/Ron Paul Campaign for Liberty Group, wore an instructive button to remind his pals not to curb stomp *him*.
An iPhone 4 security flaw makes it possible to bypass a passcode-protected lock screen with a few button presses: tap the "Emergency Call" button, then enter three pound signs, hit the green Call button and immediately press the Lock button. Voilá, full access to the phone function, including contacts, voicemail, and call history. Apple has acknowledged the issue and promises a fix in November. More: 9to5Mac, Wired News, MacRumors. — Xeni • Comments: 25
Star Wars figures reimagined in the form of traditional Mexican art one sees around Día de los Muertos time, by artist José Pulido (who is based in California).
Bill Barol (email, Twitter) is a former senior writer at Newsweek and his journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, Time, Slate, and elsewhere. He was a contributor to True/Slant and currently photoblogs at Pix365.
This is nerd porn of the purest uncut variety: A live webcam stream of the Mars rover "Curiosity" being built in a clean room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. It provides a weirdly mesmerizing backstage view of the nuts-and-bolts process that results in an extraterrestrial explorer. There's a chat window where viewers (1820 as I write this, mid-morning on a weekday) can ask questions for a JPL rep to answer in real time. The tandem of video and comment is educational in all sorts of ways. For instance, I've learned that the construction of a Mars rover apparently requires a lot of guys to stand around in futuristic white jumpsuits, making the scene look like an outtake from Woody Allen's "Sleeper." And as a bonus, I've learned what what the jumpsuits are called:
NASAJPL: Curiosity's clean room technicians are covered head-to-toe in white smocks, aka "bunny suits," to protect against [giving] Earthly contaminants a ride on the rover to Mars.
There are worse ways to spend a Tuesday. Curiosity will launch late next year for her seven-month trip to Mars.
Information designer Jess Bachman tackles the history of Google, and the ever-frequently asked question: is Google a monopoly?
Google has a dominate market share of a very important gateway; internet search. Can they stay impartial when they have their own products to pitch? Whether or not they are a monopoly is up to the government and the best way to predict the future is to look to the past. Examining these four historical monopolies, and their outcomes, should give us a better sense of Google's fate.
"If Prop 19 passes and marijuana becomes legal(ish) in California," asks Todd Lappin, "what might that mean for pot’s future as a consumer product? This being California, some will inevitably be positioned as an artisanal item — like locally produced wine or gourmet food."
Letterpress printing was all about pounding deep grooves down with the ink, right? Wrong! Like handcrafted pottery and bread you could kill a burglar with, the flaws didn't become desirable until the tech was commercially dead. [Economist] — Rob • Comments: 13
MAKE blasts into orbit and beyond with our DIY SPACE issue. Put your own satellite in orbit, launch a stratosphere balloon probe, and analyze galaxies for $20 with an easy spectrograph! We talk to the rocket mavericks reinventing the space industry, and renegade NASA hackers making smartphone robots and Lego satellites. Of course, as usual, we've got a full payload of other cool DIY projects, from a helium-balloon camera that's better than Google Earth, to an electromagnetic levitator that shoots aluminum rings, to a simple stroboscope that takes the most amazing freeze-frame photos.
Plus: party-pleasing automated photo booth that prints out photo strips, MythBusters' Adam Savage teaches you hard-shell moldmaking, and much more.
MAKE Volume 24, on sale October 26.
Short listing of articles:
• Making Your Own Satellites by Chris Boshuizen - Build and launch your own sat for as little at $8,000
• Rocket Men by Charles Platt - Mavericks of the Private Space Industry
• Listening to Satellites by Diana Eng - Tune in to space with a homemade yagi antenna
• Weather Balloon Space Probes by John Baichtal - Sense, signal and snap photos in the stratosphere.
• High Resolution Spectrograph Simon Quellen Field - Lab-worthy spectrum analysis for cheap
• Five Cool Participatory Space Projects by Ariel Waldman
• Cash Prizes for Space Scientists by John Baichtal - A summary of student and professional challenges
• Space Science Gadgets You Can Make for NASA - by Matthew F. Reyes
Our pals at Neatorama just launched a new fiction page, Bit Lit:
We're thrilled to announce a new sub-blog we're launching today, BitLit. Bit, as in binary digits, Lit, as in literature! As far as we know, this is unique to the blogosphere in that we'll be serializing entire novels and short stories--even some poetry, many published by major publishers like Random House. Every day, a new chapter until the entire story is complete.
It's launching with chapters of Frostbite; a far-from-routine werewolf tale by David Wellington, and Trivial Pursuits, by David K. Israel and Jennifer Byrne; and something by me, too!
When you peel off a strip of Scotch tape, you're holding a tiny particle accelerator. Think of this during the upcoming holiday season. As you wrap present after present, you're simultaneously creating an electric field powerful enough to accelerate any free electrons hovering around. Under the right conditions, this can coax the electrons into spewing out X-rays. The good news: As long as you aren't playing Santa in a vacuum, you don't need to worry about the radiation exposure—the electrons will bump into air molecules long before they get a chance to start emitting any X-rays. Science News explains:
Peeling tape separates positive and negative charges, creating an electric field. The field jump-starts free electrons in the neighborhood, accelerating them fast enough to emit X-ray photons. This bremsstrahlung radiation is like that created in the bellies of particle accelerators as they whip charged particles around near the speed of light.
Other materials can generate X-rays using the same principle, says Putterman. He imagines that soldiers and medical workers in the field could use a hand crank to peel off adhesives and create X-rays. The light is powerful enough to image a human finger.
But it's still a mystery how tape could separate enough charge to create a strong electric field.
Menn has spoken at major security conferences including RSA, Black Hat DC and DefCon on his findings, which include hard evidence that the governments of Russia and China are protecting and directing the behavior of some of the world's worst cyber-criminals. He also has given invited talks at meetings convened by the US Secret Service and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
"Fatal System Error accurately reveals the secretive global cyber cartels and their hidden multibillion-dollar business, proving cybercrime does pay and pays well," said Richard A. Clarke, special advisor to President George W. Bush for cyber security. The New Yorker magazine said it was "riveted" by the tale, comparing it to the novels of Stieg Larsson, while Business Week called it "a fascinating high-tech whodunit." Fatal System Error has been placed on the official reading list of the US Strategic Command and is being translated into Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
Menn has reported on technology for more than a decade at the Financial Times and the Los Angeles Times, mostly from his current base in San Francisco. His coverage areas for the FT include technology security and privacy, digital media, and Apple and the PC industry.
Sounds very terrorism-cyberpunk, doesn't it? Sort-of-luckily for the state of Minnesota, it's actually a meteorological term. I say "sort of" because bomb cyclogenesis will probably work out better for us as a weather phenomenon than it would as a tactic of the android jihad, but it's still not great.
Basically, bomb cyclogenesis is the formation of an over-land cyclone ("cyclogenesis") in a dramatically short period of time ("kablooey"). The phenomenon might be involved in the formation of Atlantic Nor'easters, and was the force behind some of the biggest blizzards of the mid-20th century. In fact, Minnesota Public Radio's Updraft blog is going so far as to call this incoming weather system a "land hurricane" ("telegram"). The Eastern side of Lake Superior is expecting 25-foot waves this afternoon. Should be exciting. And we've all learned a new word.
Scotland-based artist Lola Dupre cuts up photographs and collages the snips into mind-bendingly weird and witty deformed portraits. She is a master of scissors, glue, and surrealism. Hi-Fructose posted an interview with Dupre and includes shots of the cutting room floor too. From Hi-Fructose:
First an image for manipulation has to be selected and sometimes this is what takes most of my time. Going into a project I often have a very fixed idea of what I want to work with: finding the image with the right background, foreground, resolution, and content can take all day sometimes! I usually search Google images for sources, or alternatively I scan images that myself or my contacts have.
When I have selected the right image to use, I crop and print this at various sizes and edits on various sizes of paper. Working like this, the only limitation is the resolution of the source image. I am currently planning to do some giant paste up art works on buildings and walls, and this requires just the same formula but slightly tweaked...
Originally I would cut up perhaps two or three images or work from a small handful of duplicates. But with time my technique has developed and now I need more! This is just technique development - like how a young painter might begin work with just a few colours of poster paints and one large brush, and years later they are working with multiple colours and honed techniques to blend and create with all the experiences they have learned through practice and exploring their medium.
For me, I take a certain delight in the ready-made colour schemes and the detail of the images I work from.
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He suggested the practice of forcing passengers on US-bound flights to take off their shoes and to have their laptops checked separately in security lines should be dropped, during a conference of UK airport operators in London.
This Gerber machete has a normal 16" blade on one side and a serrated saw on the other side. I go gold prospecting in very overgrown and brushy areas, so the hollow ground machete blade will take care of the smaller stuff and the saw is right there for the occasional limb or larger brush. 
Update to Cory's 
, was published this January in the US and comes out today in an updated paperback form. 
First an image for manipulation has to be selected and sometimes this is what takes most of my time. Going into a project I often have a very fixed idea of what I want to work with: finding the image with the right background, foreground, resolution, and content can take all day sometimes! I usually search Google images for sources, or alternatively I scan images that myself or my contacts have.
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