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Thursday, September 22, 2011
Movie-industry self-piracy proves that IP addresses aren’t people, invalidates copyright enforcement schemes
Movie Institute Feels Pain Of IP Address-Only Piracy 'Evidence'Although SFI acknowledge that the IP address (or addresses) logged by DoubleTrace does indeed belong to them, they reveal that it's hardly trivial to discover the real-life person behind it. Not only do all of SFI's staff share that IP, but several tenants (such as film and TV producers) do too. And visitors to their library, and visitors to some of their cinemas, and diners in the restaurant, not to mention those using the open WiFi in the cafe and foyer areas.
As indicated by the way they have been proactive in this case by calling in the police, the SFI really seem to want to get to the bottom of the allegations. They say they have firewall logs that could show when and from where in their infrastructure the movies were being shared.
But – and little surprise here – DoubleTrace, the anti-piracy company behind the allegations, aren't being forthcoming with their evidence.
"The week before the incident became public we carried out intensive work in which we asked the information technology company DoubleTrace AB and production company Strix to show us the data that they claim to have, to get a chance to see if the sharing actually took place here, and if so, from where," the SFI explains. "Since we are being denied the material it means that we can not verify whether the information is correct."
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LA firefighters in hot water over use of f(ire tr)uck in porn
Los Angeles firefighters are under investigation by the LAFD for apparently allowing porn producers to use their fire engines (the actual fire engines, not a euphemism for their hubba-hubbas) in an adult film. This follows reports in April that two LA traffic cops from the Los Angeles Department of Transportation appeared in a porno.
In one of the movies, shot at Venice Beach, LAFD Engine 263 is used as the backdrop by an actress performing lewd acts.I'll tell you what's a lewd act. That goddamned lousy excuse for dialogue, that's what."Look at this fire truck," says porn actress Charley Chase, as she climbs on the engine and repeatedly exposes herself. "Isn't that nice."
It appears that a group of firefighters are watching the movie being shot.
"I know them," one man says on camera in the reality-style porn flick. "I'm a firefighter."
For several minutes of the movie, the actress appears to have free access to the engine, and asks numerous passersby to fondle her. "Look, I think we have more friends," she says, as a group of men stop to fondle the actress.
The incident in question involves LAFD staff and equipment in Venice, but there's more: a second investigation is under way involving a fire engine from LAFD in Hollywood in another pornographic film.
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Saturday, September 17, 2011
HOWTO track down a con-artist
Ken, a former "fed" (of some description) on the group blog Popehat, received a "toner-scam" (a scam whereby someone sends you an invoice for a service you never ordered or received in the hopes that you'll pay it without noticing) solicitation in the mail at his business. This pissed him off, so he decided to track down the scammers and document, in lavish detail, the process by which he ran them to ground. The series of posts is up to part four now, and it's fascinating reading.
For some reason, this one seriously pisses me off. Maybe its because the fraud is so blatant. Maybe it's because the weasel-worded disclaimer designed to give them a defense to fraud claims is so perfunctory and lame. Maybe it's because after I sent an email to the scammer's lawyer, the scammer himself called me and tried to run a con on me. Like I'm a fucking rube.Anatomy of a Scam Investigation: Chapter OneSo. I've decided to dedicate some time and money to investigating this scam and the people and companies responsible for it. I've also decided to write about the investigation, and use it as an opportunity to discuss con man culture and how anyone with an internet connection, a few bucks, and some time can investigate an attempted scam — or, preferably, conduct due diligence on a suspected scammer before they can even try to con you.
I'm going to discuss using Google, using PACER (which allows access to federal court records), using state court records, and taking effective action against scammers.
Anatomy of a Scam Investigation: Chapter Two
Anatomy of A Scam Investigation, Chapter Three
Anatomy of A Scam Investigation, Chapter Four
(via MeFi)
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Friday, September 16, 2011
Do users change their settings?
Back in the early days of PC computing, we were interested in how people used all those options, controls, and settings that software designers put into their applications. How much do users customize their applications?
We embarked on a little experiment. We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft Word. At the time, MS Word stored all the settings in a file named something like config.ini, so we asked people to locate that file on their hard disk and email it to us. Several hundred folks did just that.
We then wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how many people had changed the 150+ settings in the applications and which settings they had changed.
What we found was really interesting. Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had kept the settings in the exact configuration that the program installed in.
This was particularly curious because some of the program's defaults were notable. For example, the program had a feature that would automatically save your work as edited a document, to prevent losing anything in case of a system or program failure. In the default settings for the version we analyzed, this feature was disabled. Users had to explicitly turn it on to make it work.
Of course, this mean that 95% of the users were running with autosave turned off. When we interviewed a sample of them, they all told us the same thing: They assumed Microsoft had delivered it turned off for a reason, therefore who were they to set it otherwise. "Microsoft must know what they are doing," several of the participants told us.
We thought about that and wondered what the rationale was for keeping such an important feature turned off. We thought that maybe they were concerned about people running off floppies or those who had slow or small disks. Autosave does have performance implications, so maybe they were optimizing the behavior for the worst case, assuming that users who had the luxury to use the feature would turn it on.
We had friends in the Microsoft Office group, so we asked them about the choice of delivering the feature disabled. We explained our hypothesis about optimizing for performance. They asked around and told us our hypothesis was incorrect.
It turns out the reason the feature was disabled in that release was not because they had thought about the user's needs. Instead, it was because a programmer had made a decision to initialize the config.ini file with all zeroes. Making a file filled with zeroes is a quick little program, so that's what he wrote, assuming that, at some point later, someone would tell him what the "real defaults" should be. Nobody ever got around to telling him.
Since zero in binary means off, the autosave setting, along with a lot of other settings, were automatically disabled. The users' assumption that Microsoft had given this careful consideration turned out not to be the case.
We also asked our participants for background information, like age and occupation, to see if that made a difference. It didn't, except one category of people who almost always changed their settings: programmers and designers. They often had changed more than 40% (and some had changed as much as 80%) of the options in the program.
It seems programmers and designers like to customize their environment. Who would've guessed? Could that be why they chose their profession?
(Big takeaway: If you're a programmer or designer, then you're not like most people. Just because you change your settings in apps you use doesn't mean that your users will, unless they are also programmers and designers.)
We've repeated this experiment in various forms over the years. We've found it to be consistently true: users rarely change their settings.
If your application has settings, have you looked to see what your users do? How many have changed them? Are the defaults the optimal choice? Does your settings screen explain the implications of each setting and give your users a good reason for mucking with the defaults?
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Republicans wage war on good government, and no one notices
Republicans are probably just as surprised as anyone that it turns out that there are no political consequences for unprecedented legislative obstructionism. They have just kept at it for so long that it's no longer a fresh story. It has, in fact, become just the way things are, that proposals that in past Congresses would've been utterly uncontroversial a few years ago now require 60 votes to be considered. Did you know that a vote to fund FEMA failed in the Senate yesterday?
http://mobile.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/09/13/fema_funding_broken/index.html Sent from James' iPhone
Republicans wage war on good government, and no one notices
Republicans are probably just as surprised as anyone that it turns out that there are no political consequences for unprecedented legislative obstructionism. They have just kept at it for so long that it's no longer a fresh story. It has, in fact, become just the way things are, that proposals that in past Congresses would've been utterly uncontroversial a few years ago now require 60 votes to be considered. Did you know that a vote to fund FEMA failed in the Senate yesterday?
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USB Typewriter Interview
Want to renew your faith in humanity? Grab a slice of inspiration this weekend at the second Maker Faire New York, taking place September 17 and 18 at the New York Hall of Science in Queens. The amazing array of makers who will be present, each making a difference in their tiny corner of the world, is guaranteed to induce joy. Next up in our interview series is Jack Zylkin, who is on a mission to save old typewriters from obsolescence by giving them a hand into the 21st century. He is the inventor of the USB Typewriter.
1. Tell us about your USB Typewriter invention. What inspired you to make it and how long did developing it take?
I am a little upset by how disposable all of our modern gadgets have become — how the cycle of obsolescence has been driven to an absurd pace, with people junking their iPhone 3s to buy iPhone 4s, for example. Antique typewriters, meanwhile, are elegant, timeless machines, but no one uses them anymore because of the computerized world's need for immediate access and instant gratification. I think typewriters are just a more intimate, personal, thoughtful way to write, and what's more they're also amazingly beautiful works of classic engineering and design.
In terms of build quality and appearance, there is no comparison to modern plastic keyboards — it's like comparing a grand piano to a Casio synthesizer. So when I saw that most people who owned typewriters were either letting them collect dust, using them as mantle-piece decoration, or *shudder* cutting off the keys to make Etsy jewelry, I decided I needed to rescue these typewriters from irrelevance by reincorporating them into the routine of daily life — which meant taking them out of the attic and putting them on the computer desk.
2. What kind of reaction have you gotten since you launched your product?
The response from the maker community has been great. So many people wanted to buy USB Typewriter kits that I was able to quit my job and work as an inventor full time. There have also been lots of great suggestions from makers, including a suggestion for a portable model that saves to a memory stick (I'm still working on that one), and using a typewriter as a MIDI device.
3. How did you hear about Maker Faire and why did you decide to participate?
A few years ago I would have killed just to go the Maker Faire, ever since I first read about it in MAKE magazine, but it was all the way in SF back then. I can't believe I'm actually IN it now. I am so excited.
4. Tell us about yourself. How did you get started making things and who are your inspirations?
I'm an electrical engineer by training, but I originally wanted to be an artist or musician. As I went through engineering school I alternately turned my bedroom into a recording studio, and then a screen-printing studio — both with disastrous results. It wasn't until I found a home at Philly hackerspace Hive76 that I realized that engineering itself could be a mode of expression. The other hackers at Hive76 are also an inspiration, both as inventors and friends. However, my greatest inspiration is Doc Brown, who I hope to be just like when I grow up.
5. Is your USB Typewriter strictly a hobby or part of a budding business? Does it relate to your day job?
The USB Typewriter started as one of many inventions I was tinkering around with, but it took over, and now I've quit my job and work full time making USB Typewriters, selling kits, and investigating new inventions. I actually made up some business cards that say "Jack Zylkin: Inventor". I'm also about to unveil a brand new invention at the Maker Faire — it's a six-sided dice that changes color randomly when thrown. I don't have a name for it yet, but I'm thinking along the lines of LazerDice. There's a whole crazy boardgame that goes with the dice, too, involving Vikings, unicorns, and tarot cards, but it's still in development. Hopefully I can challenge some Maker Faire visitors to a few rounds!
6. What new idea has inspired you most recently?
Lately I've been marveling over the crisping sleeve — it might be the most incredible invention ever, or maybe a close second after penicillin.
7. What advice would you give to the young makers out there just getting started?
Always be working on something. Even if you don't have any good ideas at the moment, pick a bad idea and work on it. Even if a project has no chance of success, you will learn from it and it will hopefully take you somewhere new.
8. What's your motto? Favorite tool?
My favorite tool is the Craft Robo. It's a $200 CNC paper-cutting machine! It's so cool! I know a lot of my projects would have stalled if I didn't have the ability to cut precision pieces and templates right there on my desk. I don't understand why the Craft Robo isn't on every maker's desk already.
9. What do you love most about NYC?
Jazz.
Thanks Jack! For all the 411 you need to join in on the action this weekend, head on over to the Maker Faire website!
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Author’s Guild versus university libraries: a dead letter
Instead, the Guild makes much of imminent plans to make a small set of orphan works (i.e., in-copyright works where the rightsholder cannot be found) available to the university community – but here's where the Guild's standing problem arises. None of the owners of those works are part of the lawsuit. The Guild cannot sue on behalf of people who aren't members, and who aren't even known. Since it filed the lawsuit, the Guild has managed to identify a few potential rightsholders that the libraries had categorized as orphans, but they are still not parties to the lawsuit (and the libraries are pulling them from the list, as was always promised if a potential rightsholder came forward). To top it off, most of the defendants are state institutions, and therefore cannot be held liable for money damages for copyright infringement. See here and here for more detailed analyses.No Authors Have Been Harmed in the Making of This LibraryThe lawsuit gamely claims the libraries are causing "great and irreparable injury" to the authors the Guild claims to represent, as well as several additional individual authors, but it is hard to imagine what that harm might be. Presumably, most authors would like to have their works preserved, which is what the original scans are for, and can hardly object to the public having access to bibliographic information about them. The Guild claims there is an "intolerable" risk that the repository will be hacked – but offers no reason to imagine this will happen, or that the digital repository is less secure than the places where physical books (and digital works on microfiche, etc.) are stored. The Guild also complains that the problem of orphan works should be solved by Congress. That would be great, but it doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon and denying academic communities (and indeed all communities) access to these works while Congress fiddles seems deeply wrong.
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Wednesday, September 14, 2011
How to Become an Unforgettable Writer
Style is the answer to everything
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous
thing
To do a dull thing with style is preferable
to doing a dangerous thing without it
To do a dangerous thing with style, is what
I call art
Bullfighting can be an art
Boxing can be an art
Loving can be an art
Opening a can of sardines can be an art
Not many have style
Not many can keep style
I have seen dogs with more style than men
Although not many dogs have style
Cats have it with abundance
When Hemingway put his brains
to the wall with a shotgun, that was style
For sometimes people give you style
Joan of Arc had style
John the Baptist
Christ
Socrates
Caesar
GarcÃa Lorca
I have met men in jail with style
I have met more men in jail with style
than men out of jail
Style is a difference, a way of doing,
a way of being done
Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water,
or you, walking out of the bathroom without seeing me
"Style" by Charles Bukowski
danah boyd: “Guilt Through Algorithmic Association”
Snip from a thought-provoking post by danah boyd:
You're a 16-year-old Muslim kid in America. Say your name is Mohammad Abdullah. Your schoolmates are convinced that you're a terrorist. They keep typing in Google queries likes "is Mohammad Abdullah a terrorist?" and "Mohammad Abdullah al Qaeda." Google's search engine learns. All of a sudden, auto-complete starts suggesting terms like "Al Qaeda" as the next term in relation to your name. You know that colleges are looking up your name and you're afraid of the impression that they might get based on that auto-complete. You are already getting hostile comments in your hometown, a decidedly anti-Muslim environment. You know that you have nothing to do with Al Qaeda, but Google gives the impression that you do. And people are drawing that conclusion. You write to Google but nothing comes of it. What do you do?
This is guilt through algorithmic association. And while this example is not a real case, I keep hearing about real cases. Cases where people are algorithmically associated with practices, organizations, and concepts that paint them in a problematic light even though there's nothing on the web that associates them with that term. Cases where people are getting accused of affiliations that get produced by Google's auto-complete. Reputation hits that stem from what people _search_ not what they _write_.
More: Guilt Through Algorithmic Association.
Sent from James' iPhoneGuerrilla planter on a bike-locking stand
On the Boing Boing Flickr Pool, Half My Dad's Age's beautiful action shot of a guerrilla planter perched atop a bicycle locking-stand on the streets of Toronto. I like the way this beautifies the lock-up without making it less useful to cyclists.
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Mexico: two tortured, murdered, hung from bridge as warning to those using Twitter, blogs to report narco-crime
In Nuevo Laredo, Mexico today, bloggers and Twitter users who share information on crimes of drug cartels and related gangs received a gruesome warning. The tortured bodies of two people in their mid-twenties "hanging like cuts of meat from a pedestrian bridge" were found with posters warning various sites that publish news of narco-terror incidents to stop, or suffer a similar fate.
One of the blogs named, Blog Del Narco, was the subject of a recent Boing Boing feature: guest contributor Raul Gutierrez interviewed its anonymous author.
This is the first incident I am aware of in Mexico in which social media users and bloggers, as opposed to journalists working for more conventional news organizations, have been targeted in this manner.
The identities of the victims have not been reported, and it is not yet clear what their relation was, if any, to the blogs named on the accompanying placards.
One of the messages near the corpses read:
This happened for snitching on Frontera Al Rojo Vivo (A Grupo Refroma internet forum created to both inform of and denounce cartel activity)
The other message read:
This will happen to all the internet snitches (Frontera al Rojo Vivo, Blog Del Narco, or Denuncia Ciudadano) Be warned, we've got our eye on you. Signed, Z
A woman was hogtied and disemboweled, her intestines protruding from three deep cuts on her abdomen. Attackers left her topless, dangling by her feet and hands from a bridge in the border city of Nuevo Laredo. A bloodied man next to her was hanging by his hands, his right shoulder severed so deeply the bone was visible. Signs left near the bodies declared the pair, both apparently in their early 20s, were killed for posting denouncements of drug cartel activities on a social network.
Commenting on the news today, Nick Valencia of CNN tweeted,
This new development in the drugwar of threats to social media users speaks volumes to the subhuman nature of the cartels and narcos. Seemingly anyone is fair game for the narcos in their brutal campaign for money and power in Mexico. [But] social media users in Mexico have vowed to stand strongly united in the face of the narcos cowardly expressions of violence.
More: Mundo Narco, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.
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Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Star Trek Vertical Comics: Wesley Crusher Gets What’s Coming To Him
Crude, hilarious comics starting our favorite Star Trek characters? I want this like a Klingon craves combat! Creating vertical comics gives us a chance to push outside the confines of the sometimes stuffy Star Trek universe, so it should come as no surprise that the fanboys that made these things add a healthy dose of NSFW. Check out our favorites of these Internet created comics.
Tiny paper people and scenery
TERADA MOKEI, a Japanese company, makes dense sheets of punch-out people, animals and scenery intended for use in architectural models. The sets include sports matches, mass transit, street scenes, construction sites, and an orchestra. Sounds like a fun thing to have around on general principle, for models, art projects, and entertainment value. TERADA MOKEI (via Core77)
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Saturday, August 27, 2011
Hands up if you will miss your local computer game shop when it’s gone?
Anyone? No-one? Is it already gone, or bought out by a large chain that seems intent on running it into the ground? Mine has a couple of shelves of current PC games squeezed into a corner, and then a larger section of low priced budget PC titles and game guides. It's fairly clear which they make the most money from by the layout. The only reason I even bother to go in any more is on the offchance they have cheap second hand games (which they don't) or to see what's going on in the console markets.
There was a time when I would have missed my local gaming shop but now? Stick a fork in it, it's done.
Tobold writes today about the demise of retail games shops on the high street. The story that sparked this one off is quietly hilarious. Inside the Deus Ex: Revolution box is a voucher to play the game for free using OnLive, a streaming service. (This is roughly equivalent to putting a voucher for a kindle copy of a book inside a hardback.) Gamestop have decided to open up every box and remove the voucher, so as to avoid promoting competitor (ie. digital download) services to their customers.
Right. Because they removed the Steam voucher for Portal 2 on the PC from every PS3 Portal 2 box too? Nope, of course they didn't. Random retailer is random.
I can't help comparing the plight of computer games shops to boardgame/ tabletop shops and bookshops. The boardgame shop is I suspect doing the best of the bunch, if not in turnover then in longterm prospects. And this is because they provide gaming space, they hold social evenings in which people can turn up and find others to play with, and people who play board games NEED other local people to play with. A boardgame shop can support an entire local community of hobbyists, and the good ones are working hard to do exactly that. Of course you can buy the games online, but if you wanted to try the game out first, why not support the local games shop that's hosting the event? And if the difference in prices isn't huge, a lot of gamers are happy to do exactly this. It may not be a growing hobby but it does have a stable fanbase who are willing to support their retailers.
I think bookshops are doomed in the long run also, but at least you get the sense that they are fighting the inevitable. Local bookshops host reading groups, author signings, they have coffee shops and reading rooms, they encourage staff to pick out recommendations (which are usually pretty good), they sell book related gifts and sort their books into genres so that genre readers can have a shot at finding something they might like, they have regular interesting sales, and are generally appealing places to hang out and browse.
The trouble with bookshops is that it's all too easy for customers to enjoy all the bookshop facilities and then go off and buy their books online or as ebooks. The retailer is putting a lot of effort into advertising goods for other people. This is where the publisher sponsored author tours and signing events spring from: publishers know how effectively bookshops sell their books and that they need the support.
But still, even if I do prefer ebooks these days, I will at least miss the bookshops when they are gone. Not so the computer games shops; they gave up on trying to attract my custom years ago.
Art Student Hand-Illuminates, Binds a Copy of Tolkien’s Silmarillion
This German art student, Benjamin Harff, decided, for his exam at the Academy of Arts, to do something only slightly ambitious — to hand-illuminate and bind a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien's Silmarillion. It took him six months of work. In very 21st century elvish-monk style, he hand-illuminated the text which had been printed on his home Canon inkjet printer. He worked with a binder to assemble the resulting book.
I spent a year of my life, in my youth, fancying myself some sort of modern-day monastic scribe and doing this sort of Celtic knotwork-inspired illumination and calligraphy, so I am in awe of his talent. I know firsthand how hard this is to do well.
Interview with Benjamin Harff, upcoming Tolkien illustrator and creator of the Edel-Silmarillion
GIF.tv
I am kicking myself for not having thought of this first. www.gif.tv.
(via PSFK)
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Listen: Jackson Browne Creates Epic Love Song From Woody Guthrie's Diary
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