For those of us who followed the sterling saga of the Great Satan’s Pilsen Photobooth project we present Photobooth.net, a webpage devoted to photoboothing, today being the last day of the 7th annual International Photobooth Convention. Very appropriate, since the PPP actually only ended Saturday night, when #97 was shot.
Archive for May, 2005
The Register is reporting the current strange (court) case that Lessig is involved in: one that involves a client and his sexual abuse at the hands of a choir master when they were kids.
Lessig is representing John Hardwicke, who like himself is a former pupil of the American Boychoir School (now the Columbus Boychoir School) in Princeton, New Jersey. Hardwicke claims he was abused by multiple staff including the music director. The school argued it should be immune from such negligence lawsuits, and a trial court had agreed. Incredibly, the school even claimed the sex between now fugitive choir director and Hardwicke was consensual. The case was heard by the state’s supreme court, and in what reads like a movie script, the evidence turned on Lessig himself.
In the court room, Lessig tore up the rule book and confronted years of private torment by revealing that he had been abused himself at the school.
The Bayosphere is getting reading to launch. Dan Gillmor’s community based citizen journalism project is on the pad, and ready to launch:
As the Net matures, we are learning to write as easily and fluently as we read. At Bayosphere, we’re going to create a community fueled by that notion. We will reflect — and reflect on — the news, needs and ideas of the San Francisco Bay Area and especially the technology sphere that is the prime economic driver of the area.
I’ve moved my blog to Bayosphere, where I’ll report and comment on the Silicon Valley technology community — and a whole lot more including my observations about the burgeoning arena that’s variously called citizen journalism, personal publishing, grassroots media and a lot of other things. They all have something in common: the read-write Web.
(If you live in the bay area, or are interested in the goings on in Silicon Valley, stay tuned. It might be one more nail in the coffin of MSM, you never know.)
Eddie Albert, radio, TV and film star died tuesday. He was 99. He’s most Famous for playing the lead on TV’s Green Acres.
UPDATED:
This has been in the works for a while, demos and other mythological beasts have been shown, but their actually going to start selling the 770 internet appliance/super PDA. $350, Linux based with the Opera web browser and a killer screen. Is it cheap enough? No. for a few more bucks you could get the Palm Lifedrive with a hard drive, for the same price or less you could get the Tapwave Zodiac, without the Wi-Fi (ok, you could get a Wi-Fi card and stick it into the cheaper Zodiac for damn near the same money, but it’s not as elegant, nor does it have Opera.) Anyway, it gets added to the middle of our FFEJWORLD wish list of PDAs:
Tapwave Zodiac.
Continue reading ‘new nokia linux based PDA’
UPDATED:
So i’m reading the blog’s logs, the lists of IP addresses and domains and what not that have visited the blog. I’m used to seeing weird ass things, like the slow but steady decline of Internet Explorer and rise of Opera, Firefox and Safari. But i’m also used to 40 hits a month from someone using Lotus Notes Client, and another 20 from someone using Konquerer. And I’m used to 5-10 hits a month from people running FreeBSD, Solaris and even AmigaDos. This month however we have a stunner.
38 hits from someone reporting as running CPM. I laughed so hard diet soda came out my ears.
Back when Eric, Hairball and I ran the network at the Hardware Cafe, we configured our webserver to report various funny things when crackers attempted common M$ Windows exploits (mostly “here’s a nickel kid, go get yourself a real Operating System”). But i’m going to figure out how to make all of my browsers report their user agent as Mosaic .93 on NextStep, CPM, and Apple PRODOS. Or maybe GEOS, OS/2, Desqview, DomainOS, TriTos, MULTIX, RSTS, RT-11, MINIX, or shudder, MV/VMS. Instead of this:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/412
they’ll get this:
Opera/8.0 (RSTS; U; DEC PDP-8; en)
or this:
Mozilla/1.0 (compatible; NCSA Mosaic; Atari 800-ST)
(Which I found on this page, a master list of user agent strings.This page also covers robots and spiders. Here’s a page I set up to show what your browser has sent as it’s user agent.)
We may not have a federal ID card, but since the Feds now mandate that all state ID and drivers licenses have the same info, and in machine readable format, we have a de facto national ID card. And we’re pushing the Brits to adopt it. And the rest of the countries which don’t visas to enter the US. And the ID system is still flawed and insecure-data contained in the chip can read remotely at a distance, including the digital hash of the biometric data. Which makes it easier to steal identities, and makes us less safe. But it will cost more, and that as we know is a Good Thing.
The Chicago Tribune (free registration required) City of Chicago has backed of requiring permits for most photographers of the Bean, the sculpture in Millenium park. Turns out it wasn’t about intellectual property at all: it was about crowd control. And it turns out the permit price I was quoted by the guard was the right figure-for a videographer. (and leaving aside the fact that when I went to shoot it, they were working on it under tarps and scaffolding.)
Permits were initially priced at $350 a day for professional still photographers, $1,200 a day for professional videographers and $50 an hour for wedding photographers.
“We weren’t trying to make money,” she said. “But we needed to know how many people were going to be at elements of the park.”
After complaints from professional photographers began to surface last fall, Doria began re-examining the policy. She said she worked with Titan in its recruitment and training of guards for the park.
Neville, Hairball and Kenneth take note, a step by step guide to make Guinness popsicles.
Wired reports that a US task force took down a BitTorrent search site for providing pirate movies. Aparently the MPAA hacked the site first, and provided the Feds the server logs:
Acting on detailed information provided by the motion picture industry, federal agents descended on administrators and users of a popular pirate-friendly file-sharing site Wednesday in what the government is calling the first criminal law enforcement action against BitTorrent users.
[snip]
ICE, the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, spearheaded the investigation because of its international scope.
[snip]
The Justice Department wouldn’t comment on how officials zeroed in on Elitetorrent’s biggest players, but ICE’s Sevel credited the MPAA, which somehow got a line on the site’s server logs.
(Isn’t that illegal? oooo, bad MPAA! Bad!)
From the Register’s coverage of the raid:
The Feds always use almost comical language to describe P2P and BitTorrent sites, portraying them as the work of evil, swollen-brained mad computer scientists. This time we find that Elite Torrent was a “technologically sophisticated P2P network” and not just a link hub or search engine like you might find in myriad forms on the internet.
One gets the feeling that such language is meant to cover the P2P operations with a very sinister aura in the hopes that this will explain why the Homeland Security department is wasting time making sure George Lucas receives all his cash instead of protecting citizens from actual danger. Not to mention that Silicon Valley churns out far more cash for the US economy than Hollywood, meaning that jobs taken away from Disney might end up at Intel or Microsoft because of a P2P breakthrough. But such foresight would be asking a bit much of bureaucrats, especially ones greased by pigopolist pork.
(So good to see the Dept. of Homeland Security is keeping the right people safe…)
