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I just think he's an enormously overrated author who is enamored with his own l33+n355. I've read some of the short stories he has made available (and to be honest, I haven't finished them; I got so sick of his imitation-Gibson prose and warmed-over Philip K. Dick themes that I just couldn't finish them). Add to that his posts on boingboing.net, where he zealously drops buzzwords the way some people drop names and is eternally trying to prove his mastery over all things "geek" and "tech". (I mean, who really needs to advertise that they "wrote a mail filter"? I know it's just a throwaway point, but its presence in the article strikes me as posturing.) Most of what he posts is just cute net "memes", devoid of any interesting technical aspects or issues. I'm sorry, Mr. Doctorow, but I'm not impressed because you have mouse gestures and you've "written mail filters" (as if they're more complex than IM messages) and you might (gasp!) know how to turn a mozilla tarball into a working browser on the linux machine someone set up for you.

This is not to criticize people who are not technically inclined; the trouble is when they try to start talking intelligently about it, rather than actually being an expert on it (or just as good, consulting with experts). He comes off as a guy who reads Wired magazine for the hype and the jargon watch. But watching him pontificate on technical things is like watching a teenager comment on beltway politics. It's the difference between someone who churns out a Pearl Harbor vs. Tora! Tora! Tora!.

An anonymous reader sez, "The BBC made a unique deal with Real Networks which disposes of their spyware tactics. Basically, if a user clicks on a link to download Real Player from a BBC website, the referrer script sends them to a page where they can download an expiry-free, spyware-free and nuicance-free version of the player. It's because the BBC have such a stringent public service remit, that it was offensive to charge people a license fee for BBC content, then make them pay all over again for the facility to view/listen to it."

Story on BoingBoing.net

boingboing.net is reporting that the BBC has entered into an agreement to provide an ad-free, spyware free version of Real Player, if you download it from the BBC's website.
JP

According to Boing Boing Blog here the BBC has a special deal with Real Networks to provide a spy-free, nag-free version of the player. Apparantly to do with the fact that the British public already pay for the BBC content. I don't know the details but Real has special download pages for BBC readers.

Another reply mentioned the printing press; when it was invented we started dirty books. Coincidently, there was a link to some olde style smut on BoingBoing (Cory's blog) the other day.

It goes back further. Since we started drawing on cave walls, we've been drawing titties and dicks. Ditto scupture and art. Sex lines, late night porn on TV, erotism has always been the centre. Even the first movies that most folk saw ("What the butler saw") were smut. At least it's better than then running away from a celluloid train, however with this demo they might want to rush the stage instead!!

I can't remember where I read this; think it was a sig in the last week or so:

"If you took all the porn of the internet, there would only be one page left; BringBackThePorn.com"

There's a good rebuttal of Scoble's post at Boing Boing.

From boingboing.net via Stephen Frank:

"Confidential to T-Mobile: NASA is downloading 36 MB TIFFs from Mars and I only get 2 bars of signal on my cell phone inside my house. Please look into upgrading."

> I can show you where they shoved it up - but trust me, you don't want to go there.

I tried to see, but they took it offline :-(

A women, katie horn did the same thing.

Well, turns out goatse.cx is offline. :(

Guess we'll just have to rely on some Michael Moore (click for GIS) pics to digust the newbies now, eh?

According to BoingBoing.Net someone finally complained to the .cx registrar and had the site pulled...

Not sure if the DVD Tivo allows you to burn is a 'normal' dvd you can play on any player or is similarly crippled.

I agree, plus if you would charge, then you need to track the revenue for tax purposes, and if I remember a cost analysis I saw on boingboing.net (for hotels, so not a 1 to 1 comparison) suggested the management involved for a pay service did not balance with what people were willing to pay, and the goodwill generated was worth the extra cost. I know I choose to frequent places I get a connection for free. I think you and the owner need to price it out on a monthly basis (including some advertising of the new service) and see if it meets the budget and run a trial service. Be sure to get the accountant involved to see how these business expenses impact the bottom line (depreciation and all that other stuff I don't understand).

While this is an example of a page with a sidebar.

This is only worth commenting on because I had no idea what the hell you meant.

Robots. One acts as a wheelchair to carry handicapped people around, walking up stairs, etc., while the other plays the flute in a band. Every time I see the useful functions of robots I get worried. I'm a Luddite -- or should I say somewhat self-protective of the human race. I'm not scared of Aibo or the Honda Sapien, they just walk around and look human. But when I see robots replacing human beings, I worry that we're one step closer to obsolesence. We are replaceable by robots which will soon be superior to us in every way. I just hope they don't think like humans, or they will perform ethnic cleansing on us. Will robots have their own Darwinian philosopher advocating survival of the fittest?

I'd better ask Cory Doctorow, or better yet, Ray Kurzweil.

That would make a great WiFi antenna (which is, of course, the 21st Century's version of "that would make a great bong.") Cory Doctorow

Charles Miller

It appears that this guy has been trying to get arrested for the last year, so that he can be the next world-famous hacker martyr, like Kevin Mitnick was. A close friend of his registered FreeAdrian.com over a year ago, though it now forwards to freelamo.com.

Read all about it and beware of giving publicity to publicity hounds. This guy's ambition in life appears to be that hackers everywhere will deface web sites and put his name on them, like people did for Kevin. If he hadn't been busted by the New York Times, he would have kept on going until he did get busted.

He's been doing things that would be very easy for him to get away with and that no one would really care about all that much. Instead of getting away with it, Adrian made a decision a long time ago to become a hacker martyr.

May have already been mentioned, but I found this, on BoingBoing.

Already done.

From http://boingboing.net

Help pay back the RIAA's 12-year-old victim
Emmett Plant is running a collection-plate to pay back the 12-year-old honor student who lives in a New York housing project who was intimidated into turning $2000 over to the RIAA to keep them from suing her for file-sharing.

Donate here

While guest editing BoingBoing's mini-blog, Macki posted his opinion.

"Marlowe" offers up some Timothy Leary on the message boards.

What are we really feeding into here?

How odd to see so many posts from the /. community railing against what is clearly a prototype technology.

Yes, ebooks are sucky. Yes, the nicest fonts on the most optically undemanding monitors are still no substitute for the feel of the dead-tree edition in our hands. But isn't this just a thinly disguised cousin to the decades-old analogue/digital debate? Am I the only one who is sick of vinyl die-hards and their "CDs have no warmth" rhetoric?

The current problems with ebooks, as Cory Doctorow says, is the ever-present spectre of DRM.

"I believe that the electronic publishing models that have been tried -- especially those that rely on restricting readers' freedom with "Digital Rights Management" software -- are dead ends. There are lots of ways that electronic texts are inferior to paper (every discussion of "e-books" has to involve at least one paen to the smell of old books and another to the wonder of reading a book in the tub), but there are also lots of ways in which they are superior. You can carry a lot of them around in a small device. You can back them up. You can email them to friends. You can convert them to your favorite file-formats, you can search them, you can copy-and-paste them. When we turn to use-restriction technology, we foreclose the possibilities that make electronic text superior to printed text." (source)

Some journalistic follow-ups from this article:

"Demand for e-books has been growing quickly, but remains relatively tiny. According to the Open eBook Forum, a trade organization, e-book sales totaled about $5 million in the first half of 2003, compared to $3.8 million in the first half of 2002.

"One bookseller dropping out will have no impact on Random House's commitment to e-books," said Random House Inc. spokesman Stuart Appelbaum.

Open eBook Forum executive director Nick Bogaty said he has no individual corporate statistics, but believes Barnes & Noble.com had just a small percentage of sales. Palm Digital Media, OverDrive, Inc., and Amazon.com are among the leading e-book competitors, Bogaty says.

Barnes & Noble.com had been quite active in the market, even starting its own digital imprint in 2001 and releasing an original work by Dean Koontz.

"We all believe there is a future for e-books," Goldman said. "It's just not here yet."

this might work too...

Ian Clarke announced in this slashdot comment that he's leaving the US. Here's the story at boing boing.

Are you sure you wanna? Apparently T-Mobile just nuked all the games from color devices. Let me clarify. Not only have they stopped offering color games, if you had "purchased" a color game for the device, they deleted it for you.

Link to boingboing about it...

RIAA has a press release at:
http://www.riaa.com/news/newsletter/062503.asp

(grabbed the link from BoingBoing)

This looked familiar - it's not so new, as it was on BoingBoing last October

http://boingboing.net/2002_10_01_archive.html#8554 7387

see also
http://www.enorgis.com/arc20021013.htm#BlogID1043
http://radio.weblogs.com/0103443/2002/10/10.html

But it's still quite amazing - that's why it stuck in my mind I s'pose

Looks like someone's getting things started already...

www.riaa.org [riaa.org] is completely inaccesible at the moment, at least from where I am.


Its been like this for months. It got hacked so much that they put it on a private network (10.10.10.1) that doesn't have internet access. Security through obscurity I guess. Hell, its not even registered anywhere anymore:

whois -h magic www.riaa.org
Crsnic.net hasn't heard of riaa.org

Whois Server Version 1.3

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

No match for "RIAA.ORG".

Google for it or go here and search for the story. Might even be archived here on /.

One can blog just to get stuff out to the public, and get a bit of a response. Gibson said during a reading that he felt that blogging was too fun; it didn't feel like work. Even interracting to two or three dozen people in a blog struck him as a time sink.

Neil Gaiman is writing very conversationally, responding to questions. (In verifying the address, I noticed he has written about this topic already.)

Elsewhere, Warren Ellis & Bruce Sterling are just commenting on stuff that comes up as they research their upcoming work. Cory Doctorow (and co.) & Charlie Stross just have more varied interests than Gibson, I guess. And hell, the way they're working on a new story is in a blog.

Um. I feel weird that I'm pointing out so many examples. I read all these regularly, though.

NPR has a strange history of alienating people. For example, a snippet on Cory Doctorow's site boingboing from last June, then featured on TechTV's The Screensavers, told a strange story of NPR not allowing people to place an NPR link on their web site:

Examples of such "inappropriate" links include "certain kinds of commercial linking," [an NPR spokesperson] said.

"For example, if Salon.com writes a story about NPR and links to us, that would be fine," because the online magazine wouldn't be using the NPR link for its commercial benefit. "But what wouldn't be fine is if someone sets up a business to link to us and profit from that" -- for example, if someone sets up an online "radio station" whose main content was NPR's programs.

Pretty weird, huh? How exactly would anyone see any "commercial benefit" from letting their readers link to NPR? By that definition, ANYONE could be suspect of profiting from the link.

Wake up, NPR. Now Quicktime? Do you you all just hate the world?

NPR has a strange history of alienating people. For example, a snippet on Cory Doctorow's site boingboing from last June, then featured on TechTV's The Screensavers, told a strange story of NPR not allowing people to place an NPR link on their web site:

Examples of such "inappropriate" links include "certain kinds of commercial linking," [an NPR spokesperson] said.

"For example, if Salon.com writes a story about NPR and links to us, that would be fine," because the online magazine wouldn't be using the NPR link for its commercial benefit. "But what wouldn't be fine is if someone sets up a business to link to us and profit from that" -- for example, if someone sets up an online "radio station" whose main content was NPR's programs.

Pretty weird, huh? How exactly would anyone see any "commercial benefit" from letting their readers link to NPR? By that definition, ANYONE could be suspect of profiting from the link.

Wake up, NPR. Now Quicktime? Do you you all just hate the world?

Toshiba's ApriAlpha can already use their laptop methanol fuel cell.

Also, tons more pictures linked at boingboing.net. I'm too lazy to post all the links so just go there and click.

There's even a photo of that exoskeleton for nurses that was mentioned a while ago.

First off, it's very cool that you released your book as such. I saw a link off of BoingBoing saying that you released your book for free and reaction seemed very favorable. That said, next time (assuming there is a next time) you should release your book on a P2P network (such as Freenet) and direct everyone to search the network for your book. The more people who download it, the more available it will be. Encourage people to mirror it on their own servers for WWW access and you can save yourself a world of hurt.

Maybe you could make back some of that $15,000 by writing about how to release something for free to the audience and the publisher...

His authenticity has been questioned, however (via Boing Boing).

Lessig: ...Coase's arguments reflected the state of the art at the time. Property was the best way to allocate spectrum in 1959. But it's the wrong answer today. Not because property does no good -- in fact, it does a great deal of good. This should not be taken to imply that administrative allocations are inevitably worse -- a market has costs, and if those costs exceed the value, then markets result in misallocation. Coase's insight -- most prescient -- is that spectrum is not in its nature rivalrous. It's not a thing at all. Colors, sounds correspond to frequency.

There's no reason why you couldn't do the same with video files.

btw, I made Andromeda and if you're interested in trying this sort of thing, please let me know...

Don't forget his weblog, BoingBoing which should be in everyone's rss readers by now (bonus: he puts the full article in his rss feed, unlike some sites).

Thanks for posting that link, I found it informative.

There's another good article on boingboing: Gbloogle: what it all (may) mean

I might like technical consistence & cluefulness more than most people. The following list of writers reflects that.

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing just released Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Cory and his work have been mentioned here a time or five before. He just co-wrote Jury Service with Charlie Stross, another loopy fun writer. Stross' Lobsters is online; Stross' interview and appearance on Slashdot made me seek out more. Stross' list of published fiction includes a dozen online versions of stories. Both Doctorow & Stross are entertainingly loopy, and technically consistent & clueful.

John Brunner's "The Sheep Look Up" and "The Shockwave Rider" are good dystopian lit.

Bruce Sterling is still around; he just wrote "Tomorrow Now," a non-fiction futurist book. Zeitgeist, Distraction, and Holy Fire were all enjoyable and insightful.

Vernor Vinge coined the term "singularity." "A Deepness in the Sky" and "A Fire Upon the Deep" have a joining character pre- and post-Singularity, and both won Hugos. He just released some short stories, but I haven't read it yet.

Matt Ruff wrote the science fiction "Sewer Gas & Electric" and fantasy "Fool on the Hill." The first is funny and fast-paced.

I've enjoyed K. W. Jeter, Rudy Rucker, Roger Williams (The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect) a bit...

Technical accuracy isn't his forte, but Jim Monroe, a former managing editor of Adbusters, wrote Angry Young Spaceman and Living in Silico. I downloaded AYS ages ago, but bought a copy during his tour so I can loan it to friends. Oh, and checking now, he's put his 1999 book Flyboy Action Figure Comes with Gasmask up.

cory doctrow is great new writer, and blogger who has just released a new book free under the new creative commons licensing system. it's recieved 50000 downloads in it's first week. not to shabby.
boingboing is his site.

I gotta agree with Cory Doctorow, who said "Thanks, Apple, for making my computer less functional."

• "Doesn't taking their $20 payoff constitute an agreement that they have paid their debt? If they have in fact engaged in price fixing, they owe us a hell of a lot more than $20 each. I suspect that taking the $20 in hush-money will preclude one from participating in any future, similar legal action against them."

Too bad I don't have Microsoft-level resources for lawyers, or I might end up owning the RIAA. (Yeah, right.) On second thought, I'd better be careful -- MS might get ideas...

The question of SSNs also came up, and was addressed -- it looks like they have a legitimate reason for asking.

A number of posters on those site feel it's no big deal, a guy holding things in front of a projector... That's what I thought at first. But what I can't figure out is why doesn't the image show on the guys hands and face. You'd think at least some light would be reflected off of his hands.

Don't look now, but you're all about to get sued. I'd have e-mailed you, but most of your profiles don't have e-mail addresses with them. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. :-(

Here's what I just wrote up for a Slashdot story. It got rejected, but it ought to see the light of day somewhere. Hope posting in this thread doesn't make Ralsky take me to court ...

Deluged Spammer Threatens Suit Against Slashdotters

Spam king Alan Ralsky is now evidently receiving several tons of 'snail mail' spam per day thanks to an 'organized campaign' against him, according to Mike Wendland's column in today's Detroit Free Press. The story refers to Slashdot's previous articles and specifically quotes this comment by a Slashdot user. It also indicates that Ralsky has retained Michigan attorney Robert Harrison to bring suit against "the anti-spammers" responsible for his deluge, who he seems to think are the Slashdot users who commented in either of those threads.

[Got the news from Boing Boing.]

Seth Schoen's Broadcast Protection Working Group montor now has a blog, and there is a more general page that looks like it will be the directory for similar endeavours inside the EFF. Cory Docotrow of course maintains the excellent boingboing and he now works for the EFF as well.

Jesus H Christ. I'm not sure if this is a troll or an honest question, but does nobody read BoingBoing besides me? Mark Frauenfelder, who was featured in the first run of ads (which are no longer available on Apple's web site) has been mainting BoingBoing with Cory Doctorow for quite a while now. I was reading his blog long before the switch ads started appearing. The cynicism of some people amazes me. Yes, the men and women featured in Apple's commercials are real people telling their real stories.

But I have to disagree with you that slashdot is a group-weblog. Slashdot is more like a new-commentary system

Well, that goes back to the distinction between "filter" blogs and "journal" blogs...I consider this and that that to be blogs as well, but more about links ala the filter type. Slashdot also is link centric...and given all the ranting and raving that takes place on the comments boards, it's even more journal-bloggy than the other sites, where commentary plays at best a secondary role.

I think there's a rather untapped potential for the blog format in the professional world. I think that kind of comments page, but where anyone can take the central soapbox, might be very useful in certain medium or large-size product teams.

I'm no big fan of the "this is where I went for lunch today" blog, but for better or worse, blog is a large-ish umbrella term, with some very promising parts.

Not every "big business" professional thinks like the knuckle-draggers at the media companies. The brainiacs at KPMG have been very critical of how the music biz has handled this issue. The music industry has been ignoring huge potential markets, which *is not* in the interest of their shareholders. Read more about it here:

www.boingboing.net

I see stuff like this all the time.

It begins with a teenager who approaches the help counter at a library. He tells the librarian that he can't find the books he has on a list, which he hands her. She looks them up in the computer, and replies, "These books are no longer available... may I have your name, please?" When the kid walks away from the counter without giving his name, he's approached by two men in suits (one of whom takes his arm) appearing from behind some shelves, who "just have a couple of questions" for him. Meanwhile, the librarian is watching with a look of sadness and concern.

A tagline appears: "What if America wasn't America?

Freedom. Appreciate it. Cherish it. Protect it." Definitely one of the most chilling (and unfortunately appropriate) ads I've ever seen.

Ripped off from boingboing.net

I hope they made sure to take care of the appropriate licensing agreement.