Adafruit Industries has posted a pair of terrific videos in which Apple's "Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs talk about their short career building illegal telephone equipment, aka 'blue boxes.' Interesting how their two stories differ...the engineer and the marketer." Bonus: Cap'n Crunch! — Xeni • Comments: 4

Preschoolers being radio-tagged

Cory Doctorow at 4:36 PM Thu 

Mary Robinette Kowal sez, "Preschoolers in Richmond, California are being handed RFID jerseys when they get to school. The ACLU points out that in addition to the privacy concerns, these are not secure tags. It has the potential to make kidnapping and stalking very easy."

The editors of Scientific American said it well back in May 2005: "Tagging ... kids becomes a form of indoctrination into an emerging surveillance society that young minds should be learning to question."

      Comments: 20

Apple event, September 1: The Boing Boing Liveblog

Xeni Jardin at 10:00 AM Wed 

Xeni's in San Francisco for Apple's press event today. Watch this space for live commentary from the event, and tune in to the live streaming broadcast from Yerba Buena at apple.com (the short version: to watch the HTTP Live Streaming, you gotta have a Mac/iPhone/ipod/iPad. But following Boing Boing? Pick any OS and hardware you like.)

Liveblog archive after the jump.

Read the rest

      Comments: 84

Which ebook sellers will allow publishers and writers to opt out of DRM?

Cory Doctorow at 11:22 PM Sun 

My August Publishers Weekly column reports in on my experiment to see which of the major ebook stores would carry my books without DRM, and with a text disclaimer at the beginning that released readers from the crazy, abusive license agreements that most of these stores demand as a condition of purchase. Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Kobo were all happy to carry my books without DRM, and on terms that gave you the same rights you got when buying paper editions. Sony and Apple refused to carry my books without DRM -- even though my publisher and I both asked them to.

The upshot is that you can now buy electronic editions of my books in the Kindle, Nook and Kobo stores in DRM-free, EULA-free editions!

In May, I cornered Macmillan CEO John Sargent and CTO Fritz Foy at the Macmillan BEA party. As the publishers of my books with Tor, I asked them if they'd be willing to try offering my e-books to all the major online booksellers--Amazon's Kindle store, Apple's iPad store, Barnes & Noble's Nook store, Sony's e-book store, and Kobo--as DRM-free products with the following text inserted at the beginning of the file:

"If the seller of this electronic version has imposed contractual or technical restrictions on it such that you have difficulty reformatting or converting this book for use on another device or in another program, please visit http://craphound.com for alternate, open format versions, authorized by the copyright holder for this work, Cory Doctorow. While Cory Doctorow cannot release you from any contractual or other legal obligations to anyone else that you may have agreed to when purchasing this version, you have his blessing to do anything that is consistent with applicable copyright laws in your jurisdiction."

As I explained to John and Fritz, although all my books are available as downloads for free, I often hear from readers who want to buy them, either because it is a simple way to compensate me (I also maintain a public list of schools and libraries who've solicited copies of my books so that grateful e-book readers can purchase and send a print copy to one of them, thus repaying my favor and doing a good deed at the same time) or because they like the no-hassle option of tapping on their device to buy a book. I am more than happy to offer my otherwise free books for sale in any vendor's store, of course, but only if the vendors agree to carry them on terms I feel I can stand behind as an entrepreneur, as an artist, and as a moral actor.

      Comments: 12

10 Rules for Radicals: Lessons from rogue archivist Carl Malamud

Cory Doctorow at 12:47 PM Sun 

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud's 10 Rules for Radicals is the transcript of his keynote at the 19th World Wide Web Consortium conference in 2010. It's a thrilling and often hilarious account of his adventures in liberating different kids of information and networks from various bureaucracies in his storied and exciting career. Malamud has instigated the liberation of American law, the Blue Book describing the workings of the telephone system, the EDGAR database, the video archives of the National Technical Information Service, and many others. On the way, Malamud boils his experience down to ten amusing and useful rules for people who want to do the same work, including "When the authorities fire the starting gun [and authorize the experimental liberation of some data], run as fast as you can, so when they get that queasy feeling in their stomach and have second thoughts, it is too late to stop," and "Get standing: one can criticize government all one wants, and they'll often ignore you. But, if there is something clearly wrong and against the law and you can document that malfeasance and wrongdoing, they have to talk to you. If you have standing, you can insist."

It's all so engagingly written, and so useful, that it is truly a must-read for anyone interested in the history or future of universal access, open networks and free societies.

10 Rules for Radicals (Thanks, Carl!)

      Comments: 15

Govt to Scouts, 1917: take down your radios!

Cory Doctorow at 10:14 AM Sun 

This brief article from the June, 1917 issue of Boys' Life (a magazine for Boy Scouts) urges scouts to disassemble their wireless sets and turn in suspicious friends who refuse to stop using radio while WWI is raging.

Take Down Your Wireless (Thanks, Andrewmedley via Submitterator!)

      Comments: 16

Fly steers mobile robot

David Pescovitz at 1:23 PM Fri 

In this video, a fruit fly steers a small robot through an obstacle course. The researchers at ETH Zurich's Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems glued a fly down in front of an array of LEDs and flashed patterns that tricked it into thinking it was flying. Data from a computer vision system trained on the fly's wings was then translated into commands for the mobile robot in the obstacle course. The robot was outfitted with sensors that triggered the appropriate light patterns on the LEDs. The whole shebang is called The Cyborg Fly. From IEEE Spectrum:

"As autonomous robots get smaller, their size and speed approach that of the biological counterparts from which they are often inspired," they write in the paper, adding that their technique could "be relevant to the tracking of micro and nano robots, where high relative velocities make them hard to folow and where robust visual position feedback is crucial for sensing and control..."

The Cyborg Fly is not the only "flight simulator" for bugs, and other research groups have used insects to control robots. But still, the ETH project stands out because of its high-speed vision component. This system could be useful not only for biology research, to study insect flight and track fast movements of appendages or the body, but also for industrial applications -- for monitoring a production line or controlling fast manipulators, for example.

      Comments: 18

Microsoft.com is attacked "between 7000 and 9000 times per second" by script kiddies. [ZDNet] — Rob • Comments: 5

The people behind the Diaspora project—remember them? The open-source project that sought to swipe Facebook's crown, when everyone was freaking out over privacy stuff? Anyway, they've posted a project update. — Xeni • Comments: 22

Wikirapes: Assange cleared in Sweden; Pentagon/CIA "sex trap" theories now limp, flaccid

Xeni Jardin at 4:48 PM Wed 

The Associated Press reports that Wikileaks frontman Julian Assange has been cleared of all allegations of rape and "molestation" in Sweden. From all available reports, it sounds like the story involved a trip down the drama-hole between Assange and two female acquaintances, one of whom apparently volunteered with Wikileaks—not any act of physical coercion, and not any crime. Reason deftly debunks the conspiracy theories of Pentagon/CIA "dirty tricks," "smears," and "sex traps," which Assange himself blamed as the scandal spread this past weekend. Newsweek reports way, way, way more than I wanted to know about Mr. Assange's (alleged) intimate habits.

      Comments: 59

Found: Soviet moon rover

David Pescovitz at 3:18 PM Wed 

Above is Lunokhod 1, a Soviet robotic rover that landed on the moon in 1970 and eventually died, leaving its final resting place unknown. That is, until a few months ago when UC San Diego astrophysicist Tom Murphy fired off laser pulses at the moon and detected the photons reflected back in the ultrasensitive telescope at the Apache Point Observatory. It turns out that Murphy had found Lunokhod 1. Now, he's planning to use it to precisely measure lunar motion and test theories of gravity. From IEEE Spectrum:

Murphy suspected that (Apache Point Observatory's) superior capability might allow him to find the long-lost rover, and he decided to devote just a small percentage of telescope time to test this whim. At first, his attempts to locate the rover were fruitless. Because of atmospheric divergence, the laser pulse forms a beam footprint on the moon of 2 km. He later found out that he was working with coordinates 4.5 km off target. Then, in March, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter beamed back photographs of the Russian lunar landers Luna 17 and 21. "It was really fantastic imaging," Murphy says. "You could even see the rovers' tracks. You could trace out where they went and what their journey looked like."

      Comments: 25

Printing wings for microrobotic flying insects

David Pescovitz at 2:44 PM Wed 

Researchers from Cornell University are using 3D printers, which squirt out physical objects layer by layer, to develop wings for tiny flying micro-robots. Their latest robot, built from polyester stretched over a carbon fiber frame, weighs just 3.89 grams and can hover for almost 90 seconds. From New Scientist:

What's so special about 3D printers? They make it possible to create complex structures, such as wings that are warped to improve performance, like the manually curved wings of a paper aeroplane, says Richter. Their printer is capable of producing features just 40 micrometres wide, and thin films just 16 micrometres thick.

The other advantage of printing is speed, says Lipson. Once they have arrived at a new wing design, printing a set takes under an hour.

      Comments: 7