So, Lucas is still making money off Star Wars and defending his copyright left right and centre (see also the lightsabre article), but the actor who played the body of Darth Vader is cut out completely.
Because DMCA protects the artists, right?
Darth Vader Actor Banned From STAR WARS Convention.
Not only that, but presenting people with facts can entrench them further in their beliefs. People willfully ignore facts that don’t correspond to their opinions.
“This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.”
A very good article
How facts backfire – The Boston Globe.
Finally the Mac gets to see all the contents of the iphone as a usb disk device
Phone Disk Mounts iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad as USB Disks in Finder.
Star Wars creator George Lucas is trying to stop a company from making a high-powered laser that bloggers around the world have dubbed “a real-life lightsaber”.
The laser is cool, but isn’t called a lightsaber by the producer. It’s bloggers that made teh comparison.
This goes to show how outdated copyright law is: the original star wars movies stem from the 70s and Lucas is still scraping the bottom of that barrel… let him work like the rest of us and come up with something new!
A lot of people are blaming Lucas and calling him a douchebag, but to be fair, it’s the law that’s allowing him to do this, so even though he’s stretching things, he may be within his rights. The system needs to change to make it clear that this kind of thing is ridiculous.
via George Lucas, Star Wars creator, tries to block ‘lightsaber’.
This list includes distros for specific tasks:
Damn Vulnerable Linux
Tinfoil Hat Linux
CAINE (digital forensics)
CAELinux (engineering)
a gaming linux
Parated Magic (for manipulating your hard disk)
Musix GNU + Linux (for making music)
ZeroShell (for embedded systems)
Mythbuntu
and some very very small distro’s.
It could potentially also be used to regenerate bones
Tooth Regeneration Gel Could Replace Painful Fillings : Discovery News.
Touch is both the first sense to develop and a critical means of information acquisition and environmental manipulation. Physical touch experiences may create an ontological scaffold for the development of intrapersonal and interpersonal conceptual and metaphorical knowledge, as well as a springboard for the application of this knowledge. In six experiments, holding heavy or light clipboards, solving rough or smooth puzzles, and touching hard or soft objects nonconsciously influenced impressions and decisions formed about unrelated people and situations. Among other effects, heavy objects made job candidates appear more important, rough objects made social interactions appear more difficult, and hard objects increased rigidity in negotiations. Basic tactile sensations are thus shown to influence higher social cognitive processing in dimension-specific and metaphor-specific ways.
At $35.000,- they ain’t cheap, but you’ll look incredibly bizarre flying through downtown Tokyo at night. Probably bizarre enough to catch the attention of the Japanese!
Limited Edition Street-legal Tron Lightcycles Up For Grabs – Born Rich.
The Dutch government has released the current text of ACTA and invites comments on it.
Overheid.nl | Consultatie ACTA.
I’ve run through the text and this is my take:
2.3.2. Each Party shall further provide that its judicial authorities shall have the authority to order that materials and implements the predominant use of which has been in the manufacture or creation of [infringing] [pirated or counterfeit] goods be, without undue delay and without compensation of any sort, destroyed or disposed of outside the channels of commerce in such a manner as to minimize the risks of further infringements.
So they’re going to destroy computers and networks because they might be used to copy something again some time? Will they be burning notebooks, pens and pencils as well?
2.5.X. Each Party shall provide that its judicial authorities shall have the authority, at the request of the applicant, to issue an interlocutory injunction intended to prevent any imminent infringement of an intellectual property right … Each Party shall also provide that provisional measures may be issued, even before the commencement of proceedings on the merits,
so if a party decides they think someone may be about to copy them, they can get an injunction and go about destroying and / or confiscating material (as described in 2.3) without having to display any evidence! I can see newspapers magazines using this on one another quite happily. They limit this some in 2.5.3 but the wording: “to provide any reasonably available evidence” leaves much lattitude.
Liability
The competent authorities shall not be liable towards the persons involved in the situations referred to in Article 2.6 for damages suffered by them as a result of the authority’s intervention, except where provided for by the law of the Party in which the application is made or in which the loss or damage is incurred
2.14.1
Willful copyright or related rights piracy on a commercial scale includes:
[(a) significant willful copyright or related rights infringements that have no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain; and
Which means you can’t make parodies, cartoons where the characters wear Ralph Loren shirts may be subject to criminal persecution, etc.
2.14.3 Each Party shall provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be applied [in accordance with its laws and regulations,] against any person who, without authorization of the holder of copyright [or related rights] [or the theatre manager] in a [motion picture or other audiovisual work], [cinematographic work] [knowingly] [uses an audiovisual recording device to transmit or make] [makes] a copy of [, or transmits to the public] the motion picture or other audiovisual work, or any part thereof, from a performance of the motion picture or other audiovisual work in a motion picture exhibition facility open to the public.
Which means – you can’t back up movies you bought, you can’t show them to your friends, you can’t watch it in a park and you can’t use any of the footage therein for any purpose whatsoever, eg. to edit your own home film and / or parody.
2.18.3
(b) condition the application of the provisions of subparagraph (a) on meeting the following requirements:
(i) an online service provider adopting and reasonably implementing a policy[58] to address the unauthorized storage or transmission of materials protected by copyright or related rights
(ii) an online service provider expeditiously removing or disabling access to material or [activity][alleged infringement], upon receipt [of legally sufficient notice of alleged infringement,][of an order from a competent authority] and in the absence of a legally sufficient response from the relevant subscriber of the online service provider indicating that the notice was the result of mistake or misidentification.
Which means an ISP has to become some sort of copyright enforcer And they have to start censoring the internet – that’s not their job! They provide access to internet!
But option 2 3a gets worse:
Each Party shall enable right holders, who have given effective notification to an online service provider of materials that they claim with valid reasons to be infringing their copyright or related rights, to expeditiously obtain from that provider information on the identity of the relevant subscriber.
So without legal due process, ISPs are expected to give out personal information on their customers to ‘rights holders’ who don’t have to prove they are, in fact, rights holders of anything.
4b the manufacture, importation, or circulation of a [technology], service, device, product, [component, or part thereof, that is: [marketed] or primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing an effective technological measure; or that has only a limited commercially significant purpose or use other than circumventing an effective technological measure.]]
Which means you couldn’t invent the tape recorder, VHS, DVD recorder, photocopier maybe even the harddisk.
6 (a) to remove or alter any [electronic] right management information
(b) to distribute, import for distribution, broadcast, communicate, or make available to the public copies of works, [or other subject matters specified under Article 14 of the TRIPS Agreement] [performances, or phonograms], knowing that [electronic]rights management information has been removed or altered without authority.]
Again, you can’t use parts of anything for any reason and you’re not allowed to make edits. This would include the use of quotations in books, photocopies of pages in libraries,
3.3.5
[5. State parties shall endeavour to provide technical assistance in the following areas:
(a) Promoting the culture of intellectual property.
What? Why? I don’t think IP is a good culture to promote, it’s a call for stagnation. There are plenty of articles showing this, as well as articles showing that lacking IP, especially in the fashion industry, drives innovation.
Large problems:
ACTA leans heavily on the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which itself leans on the 1971 Berne Convention for the protection of literary and artistic works – how can a 1971 document still be relevant in this digital world? Especially when ACTA for at least a third concerns software piracy. Not only the medium but also the way the inhabitants of the world percieve it (as opposed to large corporations) has changed. In order to guarantee your IP you need to spend vast amounts of money, thus favouring the large IP companies at the expense of the smaller IP companies.
The EU is going to discuss whether or not to force ISPs to save the searches you make in online search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, whatever. Apart from the privacy implications, who is going to pay the ISPs for the massive extra storage capacity they’ll need, but more importantly: what defines a ‘search’ – what about if you’re looking through a job site, or a housing site or a forum? Why not force ISPs to store any and every bit of information passed through a form? Creepy stuff.
Emerce – Technologie nieuws: Bewaarplicht mogelijk uitgebreid met zoekopdrachten.
Apple updated its privacy policy today with an important and dare we say creepy new paragraph about location information. If you agree to the changes which you must do in order to download anything via the iTunes store you agree to let Apple collect store and share “precise location data including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device.”
Apple says that the data is “collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you ” but for some reason we don t find this very comforting at all. There appears to be no way to opt-out of this data collection without giving up the ability to download apps.
via Privacy Change: Apple Knows Where Your Phone Is And Is Telling People – The Consumerist.
It turns out that the metal band around the casing of the iphone 4 is part of the antenna. If you hold it like you would hold a phone, you hamper reception.
Steve Jobs doesn’t think it’s a problem though: his response?
Steve Jobs on iPhone 4 “Just don t hold it that way”.
This is a huge collection of rebuilt science fiction aircraft you can look inside.
The US are at it again: if you tape the police, they consider you dangerous. If the judge decides in the favour of the police, any tape you bring into court showing police malpractice will be inadmissible.
These laws were made in the 1970s, before even VHS was out!
Traffic stop video on YouTube sparks debate on police use of Md. wiretap laws.
Senuti is the tool you use to turn your mac into an iphone dock. It will play and copy music.
Senuti — Recover music from your iPod, iPhone or iPad to your Mac.
Ipoddisk turns your ipod into a disc device on which you can find your music and copy it
Iphone Explorer allows you to browse the files and folders as though it was a usb flash drive
Now that more and more police brutality is being exposed using camera’s, the police are now going after people who use their camera’s. What’s worse, the courts are standing behind them.
They’re using the two party consent sureveillance law to cover their arses, even in locations where there is no expectation of privacy.
This is a $60,- addition you can put onto a table saw. It detects electrical conductivity and stops the saw as soon as it gets into range – from 5000 RPM to 0 in a millisecond. This means you can shove your finger into the spinning saw without it being harmed at all. Of course, you destroy the device and the saw, but especially at that price it’s going to save a lot of fingers.
The Tinbasher Sheet Metal Blog.
This is a comprehensive guide to installing and setting up DD-WRT on your old wireless router.
Turn Your Old Router into a Range-Boosting Wi-Fi Repeater.
This site is free, you don’t need to register and streams TV and movies to all over the world…
Full Length TV Episodes, Latest Movies, TV Schedule and More – Picrap.com.
This package gets into your Windows boot and measures how long everything takes to start up, then reccomends which software to remove from the boot process, or put on a delay so that it starts up later. It gives details of the processes as well as showing you what other users with the same program have done.
Soluto – Anti-Frustration Software.
Fully charged it provides 4 hours of light. You hang it in the sun by day and use it (duh) at night. Cost? $15,- per piece and it will last between 5 – 10 years.
Solar light bulb to shine on developing world | Crave – CNET.
