[Q...] But is it legal for the president to ignore the law?://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/boingboing/iBag?a=I9gvX5">A. Maybe not according to plain ol stupid ol regular law, but we're at war! You don't go to war with regular laws, which are made outta red tape and bureaucracy and Neville Chamberlain. You go to war with great big strapping War Laws made outta tanks and cold hard steel and the American Fightin Man and WAR, KABOOOOOOM!
Q. How does a War Bill become a War Law?
A. It all begins with the president, who submits a bill to the president. If a majority of both the president and the president approve the bill, then it passes on to the president, who may veto it or sign it into law. And even then the president can override himself with a two-thirds vote.
Today, Fortune has a piece on plans by retail giants, Costco, Target, and Wal-Mart to move to fingerprint biometric technology as a way of cutting down on fraud and to expedite check-out line time. Sounds good, but it turns out that a simple finger molded from Play-Doh can foil 90% of these systems. We say: Doh. (Couldnt resist!) Read More about Play-Doh and FingerPrint Scanning Here…
Fingerprints Security Play Doh Alice Hill RealTechNews
Direct and Related Links for 'Play-Doh Can Foil 90% of Most Fingerprint Scanning Security Systems'
"he (Sen. Ted Stevens R-AK) put the adult entertainment industry on notice that if it didn't come up with a rating system, Congress would do one for them."I guess he wasn't talking about a rating system of "Good", "Better", and "Best".
Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds
Why does it seem that the RIM drama is really taking place on two trains heading in opposite directions: in the
Patent Office where NTP's questionable patents seem close to being invalidated, and in federal court, where RIM is but
one ruling away from being forced to shut down sales and service nationwide? Maybe it's because an injunction by Judge
James Spencer on February 24th could spell disaster for the Blackberry maker, even though it most likely didn't do
anything wrong (at least with regards to NTP). While Crackberry addicts across the country prepare for possible
withdrawal, those of us with smartphones who don't care about getting our email the nanosecond after it's sent smugly
go about our daily business without a care in the world.Now here is a interesting site that will let you backup your DVD' disc. There have been a lot of tools in the past that would do this but this is the first one I have seen in a while. [DVD Shrink]
I heard through the grapevine that the in production version of Yahoo Messenger, that is being rewritten from the ground up, for the Macintosh will include Video.
I'm also hearing that the USA launch of VOIP with Y! Messenger is likely within the next month or so, and certainly before VON in March. It seems Yahoo has internal promotional programs that new product releases need to fall into.
Expect to see Beta of the new version just before the actual offering goes live here in the USA. Folks in Canada can get it now though and in a few other countries around the world.
Big thanks to Konomi who forwarded and translated for me a few robot news from Japan (as he did a few days ago for these robotic curiosities).
Yasukawa Denki has built a new robot factory in Kitakyushu (picture on the left). The factory, poised to become one of the largest in the world, can build about 2,000 robots a month and may be in full operation late 2007/ early 2008.
Via Yomiuri.
AIST upgraded the HRP-2 Promete humanoid robot by integrating a new 3D vision system called Versatile Volumetric Vision (image on the right). A laser-based distance mesurement device is built into the head so that they can build a 2D map of the area while walking. The head scans right and left while the robot makes small movements. Four cameras are attached to the head, one for a panoramic view and the other for depth vision. The images are processed to recognize the shapes of objects like chairs, the refrigerator door handle and cans of juice. Moreover, HRP-2 Promete can hear better using microphone arrays that allow them to distinguish spoken commands from background noises.
The scientists also developed an interactive learning system allowing people to teach robots how to open a fridge and get something.
Experiments showed that when told to get a can of juice from the fridge the robot was able to negotiate its way to the kitchen, move a chair that was blocking the way, open the refrigerator, get the juice and bring it back to the other room and place it on a table near the person watching TV.
Via Nikkei. Also in Robot Gossips.
Shiga Medical College and Ritsumeikan University are now showing the outcome of their research on micro robts at Collabo 21 in the Japanese city of Ohtsu.
Their new capsule-shaped robots can go into human bodies for medical purposes. They measure about 2cmx2cm, and are therefore much smaller than the many-legged robot that crawls through intestines and other similar tiny robots developed elsewhere. The researchers' goal is to finish implementing these robots by 2010.
Related: ragworm for "pleasurable" endoscopy.
A few weeks after Mayor of Paris decided that the city needed a fiber network for universal Internet access, the city of Vienna (Austria) has announced similar plans, according to Heise.de, a German tech news publication. The city will try and get fiber connections to about 960,000 households, and hopes that the work for first 50,000 home pilot will start in February, with likely connections by this summer. The city is said to be in talks with real estate owners, the report says. The network which will be IPv6 ready will be looking to provide one gigabit per second connections. This is a trend started by folks in Amsterdam, and is clearly gaining momentum across Europe. (Hat Tip, Dirk!)
A bit of news that went unnoticed over here in the United States. Arun Sarin, chief executive of wireless giant Vodafone said that he has no plans to sell his company’s share in Verizon Wireless.
“We’re not saying we will not sell this asset in the future - we’re simply saying we want to make sure that when we sell this asset we have maximised value for shareholders.”
Many of Sarin’s investors have been campaigning for a quick sellout of the Vodafone 45% stake in Verizon Wireless. The stake is said to be worth between $30-to-$50 billion. Sarin was quick to point out, that in last two years, the value of that bit has gone up a whopping $10 billion. Still, there is perception that with US cellular market penetration over 70%, the upside clearly is limited. The money could be put to better use in shoring up less-than-stellar operations in Japan and buying a piece of the fast growing markets like India, Russia and Brazil.
Sarin’s comments would have come as welcome news inside the VZ executive chambers, because if Vodafone had decided to sell, Verizon would be in a bit of a pickle, as our friends from across like to say. Verizon is spending a lot of money on its high-speed fiber optic network.
Still, the issue is far from settled. June 10, 2006 is when Vodafone will get a “60-day window” to exercise a put option forcing VZ to cough-up about $10 billion of VZ’s stake. I had a little chat with Daniel Berninger, analyst with Tier1 Research. In his estimate, using the Cingular/AT&T Wireless and Sprint-Nextel deals as the yardstick, Vodafone could easily get $66 billion for its stake. He pointed out that Verizon is in fund raising mode. The second largest phone company in the US is selling access lines and directory business to raise cash. Given the recent downgrades from Moody’s and S&P, Berninger points out that bond market may not be as easy to tap now as they were few months ago.
The telecom landscape is getting recast and the battle is becoming one of finding sustainable ways and means of extracting value from the digital content. As we wrote the takeovers of AT&T and MCI officially usher in the long-heralded Internet era.The old phone companies are artifacts, and the new telecoms will look more like their counterparts in cable and computers. Consumers and business will increasingly have their pick of new services from a bunch of providers that are fighting hard to win their business.But as that era fades,another is dawning.The telco’s if they have their way may decide whether msn or yahoo could load faster in an user’ system. The telco’s proposals have the potential, within just a few years, to alter the flow of commerce and information - and one’s personal experience - on the Internet. For the first time, the companies that own the equipment that delivers the Internet could, for a price, give one company priority on their networks over another. The telco’s do not think that the fees imposed by carriers alter the basic nature of the Internet. No broadband provider has proposed to block certain Web sites. But they have said Yahoo, for instance, could pay a fee to have its search site load faster than Google. Other possibilities include restricting bandwidth-hogging file-swapping applications, or delivering their own video content faster than a similar service provided by rivals. SBC CEO Ed Whitecare says that the internet sites & VoIP payers would like to use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! () or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts! Recently an executive with BellSouth was quoted saying that the company would consider charging Apple five or 10 cents extra each time a customer downloaded a song using iTunes. Google and others say that the prospect of telephone companies imposing new fees on innovative and successful ventures is exactly the kind of thing that deters online commerce. Cable companies abhor the idea of enforced network neutrality just as much as the telephone companies. This represents a break with the commercial meritocracy that has ruled the Internet until now. Network neutrality is increasingly becoming the buzzword that some are trying hard to have it indoctrined into law and regulation. Google and Yahoo have joined their lobbying efforts. And online retailers, Internet travel services, news media and hundreds of other companies that do business on the Web also have a lot at stake. Giving priority to a company that pays more, they say, is just offering another tier of service - like an airline offering business as well as economy class. Network neutrality, they say, is a solution in search of a problem.
The year that past by was an eventful year for enterprise software vendors - small vendors finding difficult to expand and began to get acquired, the acquiring entities after spending so much on acquisition found their stocks wailing at several year lows. New technologies keep getting mindshare. 2006 appears to be another testing year for software vendors. Courtesy of Paul Kedrosky. saw this collection of perspectives on Enterprise Software. Greg Gianforte sees 2006 as the horrible year for software vendors. As he sees it,2006 will be a horrible year for software vendors who don't understand the technical and business implications of SaaS, as well as for those that remain slaves of Oracle and Microsoft. Pointing out that the issue as usual isn't just the technology itself It's whether the vendor can package and deliver the technology in a way that solves the customer's business problem and is relatively painless to assimilate into an IT environment that's already quite complex and tough to manage. He predicts that the hosted SaaS model will continue to grow, while the conventional high-TCO model will become increasingly unappetizing to corporate IT buyers who now have a great alternative. Open source will also continue its ascent as buyers realize there is no reason to pay outrageous licensing fees for proprietary operating systems, databases and web servers when the open source alternatives are just as good or better. Companies will also spend on technologies that enable them to create a superlative customer experience across all channels, since competitive success in a "flat earth" economy will depend more and more on differentiated service - rather than price and/or features. In a globalized economy, it is tough to compete on price. And with technology proliferating so quickly around the globe, it's also tough to compete on technological innovation alone. So a great customer experience has become a critical competitive differentiator.
Radha Basu, CEO, President and Chairman, SupportSoft, Inc sees transition happening for enterprise software vendors. She sees the rising trend of convergence of the consumer world and the enterprise. In 2005 there has been an increased convergence in consumer-facing technologies that is forcing enterprises to re-inspect their internal software needs. Fast adoption of wireless, VoIP, high speed data access and other forms of IP-based service delivery when combined with an increasingly mobile workforce, is causing enterprises to re-evaluate how they use technology to serve themselves and their customers. Mass adoption of technology is now helping drive enterprise adoption of new solutions. For, David Gould, CEO and Chairman, Witness Systems 2006 looks favourableccess may not ensure greater business this year onwards, market consolidating or not. Clearly we shall see a different landscape of enteprise software vendors when 2006 closes.
OGLE (The OpenGLExtractor) is a software package that allows for the capture and re-use of 3D geometry data from 3D graphics applications running on Microsoft Windows. It works by observing the data flowing between 3D applications and the system’s OpenGL library, and recording that data in a standard 3D file format. In other words, a ’screen grab’ or ‘view source’ operation for 3D data. Grab city-scapes from Google Earth, characters from Warcraft, Second Life, etc.
via Eyebeam reBlog
dflare">
Important Milestone for Digital Copyright Law
San Francisco - A federal district court in Nevada has ruled that Google does not violate copyright law when it copies websites, stores the copies, and transmits them to Internet users as part of its Google Cache feature. The ruling clarifies the legal status of several common search engine practices and could influence future court cases, including the lawsuits brought by book publishers against the Google Library Project. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) was not involved in the case but applauds last week's ruling for clarifying that fair use covers new digital uses of copyrighted materials.
Blake Field, an author and attorney, brought the copyright infringement lawsuit against Google after the search engine automatically copied and cached a story he posted on his website. Google responded that its Google Cache feature, which allows Google users to link to an archival copy of websites indexed by Google, does not violate copyright law. The court agreed, holding that the Cache qualifies as a fair use of copyrighted material.
"This ruling makes it clear that the Google Cache is legal and clears away copyright questions that have troubled the entire search engine industry," said Fred von Lohmann, EFF senior staff attorney. "The ruling should also help Google in defending against the lawsuit brought by book publishers over its Google Library Project, as well as assisting organizations like the Internet Archive that rely on caching."
Field v. Google ruling:
http://www.eff.org/IP/blake_v_google/google_nevada_order.pdf
Contact:
Fred von Lohmann
Senior Intellectual Property Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
fred@eff.org
Sam Bulte, the Liberal MP for Parkdale/High Park participated in an all-candidates meeting last week in which she was questioned about her morally dubious campaign financing. Listeners to the MP3 can hear her resopnse:
"I am not taking money from special interest groups. As you know, you can look at my returns. All of my election returns are noted, they are transparent. Ninety percent of my donations came from individuals. Ten percent came from organizations or corporations. They are not hosting a fundraiser for me. A fundraiser is being held. Individuals are invited. Everyone is invited. It is self-funding. And yes, there will be artists there. It will be a celebation of my support for the arts community."Michael Geist's blog features a point-by-point takedown of these statements. Bulte does take lobbyists' money. She raised 57 percent of her campaign money from individuals, not the ninety percent she claims. Most incredible the claim that her fundraiser isn't being hosted by the entertainment industry is a bald, bold, easily disproved lie.
That would be the whole point, guys. As Soderbergh ago in Wired:Bubble, a low-budget movie made with untried actors, is being sold on DVD and shown on cable TV the same day it debuts at the theatre. Theatre chains in more than 15 states have refused to show the film, saying Soderbergh's plan will take a big chunk out of their bottom line.
"It's the biggest threat to the viability of the cinema industry today," John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners, said of the so-called "day and date" release strategy.
If a high-profile Hollywood name like Soderbergh, director of Sex, Lies and Videotape, Erin Brockovich and Traffic, is trying simultaneous release, there is too great a danger of the strategy becoming acceptable to the mainstream, the group says.
Name any big-title movie that's come out in the last four years. It has been available in all formats on the day of release. It's called piracy. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, Ocean's Eleven, and Ocean's Twelve - I saw them on Canal Street on opening day. Simultaneous release is already here. We're just trying to gain control over it.Link to CBC news item. (Thanks, Jeremy Gruman)
Previously on Boing Boing:
Trailer for Steven Soderbergh's Bubble
Xeni interviews Steven Soderbergh in WIRED
Soderbergh and Cuban, Wagner's 2929: Let's break all the windows.
Reader Comment: Reuben says,
Boing Boing readers can contact their local theater chain's customer relations department, and ask them why they are not showing the movie. I contacted Century Theaters, as I live in the Bay Area; their phone number can be found here.
From Jennifer Granick, director of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society:
The Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society is collecting stories about problems with locked cell phones to support our request to the Copyright Office for an exemption to the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions for cell phone unlocking. The original comments filed are here. These will be for the reply comments.
d story, know someone who does, or are aware of a community of people who might be interested, please send the link to them.
...in the Google v. DOJ case? Well, I've argued it's the slippery slope. But reading through the subpoena, it's clear that from where Google stands, there's something else at stake.
Remember this whole goat rodeo (on the size of indexes)? Remember how slippery both Yahoo and Google got when we tried to figure out exactly how many documents were in their indexes? Well, turns out, that's pretty much what the DOJ is trying to do as well. Hence, Google's defense on a "trade secrets" basis.
Apparently, the subpoena originally asked for a lot more than just a million addresses, as reported Thursday. From the motion the DOJ filed to force Google to comply with the subpoena:
"The subpoena asks Google to produce an electronic file containing '[a]ll URL's that rea available to be located through a query on your company's search engine as of July 31 2005."
ries that have been entered on your company' search engine between June 1, 2005 and July 31, 2005."
HELLO. You think Google is going to give that over? Me no think so.
This is why Google originally fought the order. The DOJ then narrowed its request to a random sample of one million URLs and agreed to not ask for personally identifying info on the search queries, but it still wants all search queries for a one week period. No way in hell Google would give that up, given the company's penchant for secrecy. Sure, the DOJ might guarantee that the data would not enter the public record, but, once in the DOJ's hands, it's out of Google's control.
So how to fight it? Well, standing up to the DOJ and getting major praise for doing so is a very smart strategy, in my book. As much as I'd love to believe Google is fighting this for heroic reasons, I'd wager that the data has more to do with it.
Also, just a note, but it's interesting to note that Google now has it's very own DOJ case, just like Microsoft did.
(Gary has a thorough overview of the docs in the case here).
Delicious Monster produces software in a coffeeshop: This is the most comprehensive and best story I've seen written about the relationship between Zoka Coffee's University Village cafe and the software company Delicious Monster. The company has no offices; rather, they work out of the cafe. While it's not unusual for individuals to adopt cafes as their working locations, nor for virtual companies to hold meetings in other venues, this appears to be unique. Zoka has free Wi-Fi in all its Seattle locations. They recently expanded the U Village branch, too.
Zoka's owner said to me when I was writing about Victrola Cafe turning off its Wi-Fi on the weekends last summer: "Students and young people are the majority of people who hang out at coffee shops, and they all use Internet and computers as a major part of the day," said Jeff Babcock, Zoka's owner. "And I'm not going to exclude that. If it gets too busy and packed, I'll build another one."
Word just in that the 802.11n proposal was confirmed: The IEEE task group on high-throughput wireless local area networking has confirmed the joint proposal group draft which itself came out of the Enhanced Wireless Consortium. Now 802.11n will move forward relatively rapidly to ratification, even though that formal process of finalizing details could take until 2007. That won't delay shipping products at this point.
Broadcom meanwhile announced that what it's dubbed its Intensi-fi chips are now available in sampling and incorporated in reference designs for manufacturers and support all mandatory draft 802.11n specifications. The chips will also support any changes in the spec through ratification via software updates. The chips will support over 300 Mbps of throughput.
Later yesterday, Marvell chimed in that they, too, have chips ready to go with early 802.11n compliance. They are predicting products from their partners this quarter, and they say their chipsets can operate using optional parts of the standard at speeds up to 600 Mbps.
Apparently German media giant Bertelsmann will head the Franco-German Google killer, Quaero. Good f'ing luck, boys. Apparently France is kicking in 150mm euros, and Germany a similar amount. Memo to Europe: Google's annual capex is approaching $1 billion US. Anyway.
PS - Might start spending that $300mm on buying the rights to http://quaero.com/.....
But not great enough. Stock was down more than 10 percent in after hours. Ouch.
Now, I don't think this is the sound of a bubble deflating. I don't think we're in a bubble. But maybe this is a reminder that outsized expectations are, well, outsized.
Today is the 20th Anniversary of the oldest computer virus known: the Brain virus.
It was a boot sector virus, and spread via infected floppy disks.
EDITED TO ADD (1/19): F-Secure has some amusing comments.
This seems like a really important development: an anonymous operating system:
Titled Anonym.OS, the system is a type of disc called a "live CD" -- meaning it's a complete solution for using a computer without touching the hard drive. Developers say Anonym.OS is likely the first live CD based on the security-heavy OpenBSD operating system.href=http://theory.kaos.to/projects.html>here.OpenBSD running in secure mode is relatively rare among desktop users. So to keep from standing out, Anonym.OS leaves a deceptive network fingerprint. In everything from the way it actively reports itself to other computers, to matters of technical minutia such as TCP packet length, the system is designed to look like Windows XP SP1. "We considered part of what makes a system anonymous is looking like what is most popular, so you blend in with the crowd," explains project developer Adam Bregenzer of Super Light Industry.
Booting the CD, you are presented with a text based wizard-style list of questions to answer, one at a time, with defaults that will work for most users. Within a few moments, a fairly naive user can be up and running and connected to an open Wi-Fi point, if one is available.
Once you're running, you have a broad range of anonymity-protecting applications at your disposal.
See also this SlashDot thread.
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch shows a chart which compares Web sites that offer flickr-like* services for video — places to which one can post videos, identify them with tags, and share them within groups or with the site’s community (or with anyone who visits the site) — YouTube, CastPost, ClipShack, DailyMotion, Grouper, OurMedia, Revver, Vimeo, and vSocial. [*flickr]
Television Archiving: Online Video and the Future of BroadcastingComparing Online Video Services points to another good compilation at twenty-fifth dimension, commenting that, All in all, it looks like there are now at least 50 services that are offering some variation on this theme.
[Television Archiving]
You have to give people credit for thinking outside of the box on this one. Turns out some stores are painting logos and signs on their rooftops to take advantage of satellite mapping services like Google Maps and MSN Earth. Let' hope Google doesn't start using crazy photoshop skills like they did to the White House Roof.