Blow-Up was on one of the movie channels last night. Odd because as I was watching it I realized how faulty my memories of it had been, first viewed during Robert Merritt's summer film class. I had thought it much more ambigious, didn't remember the corpse in the park at all. 1966: how old was David Hemmings then? As old as I still want to be and not want to be.

So at 4 am I woke up, fresh from a dream of saying goodbye to our wonderful interns who had worked with us during the summer. My mind raced with math: my son's age, Smiranda's age, my age, my mother's age -- and the gaps between us that seemed so small.

A curse of getting older is perspective, I think.

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Tonight's MTV awards, every 17-year-old's favorite show, and I never miss it either: perhaps Eminem was sent here to destroy all the boy bands, but I pray that The Hives and The Vines were sent here to destroy Eminem, and if they have to learn Brazillian jujitsu to do it, I'll pay for the classes.

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Canada's Department of Justice has posted a consultant's report on the application of the principle of "lawful access," or police search and seizure, on computer network data. The objective: "to maintain lawful access capabilities for law enforcement and national security agencies in the face of new technologies and to preserve and protect the privacy and other rights and freedoms of all people in Canada..." The Register has a story about it, mentioning that the proposed changes would permit Canada's ratification of the Council of Europe Convention on Cyber-Crime.

Posted by John at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Sex Under the Microscope: "Men aren't the only ones with cheating hearts, and scientists do not believe that there is any such thing as a battle of the sexes either, according to a new book that takes a scientific look at sex."

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Stop your engine.

Thank you for financing global terror.

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From 2600: "An ACLU press release and salon.com story are reporting on a move which will surely make political satire irrelevant: the Department of Justice has begun forwarding calls destined for its TIPS program to the producers of the Fox television show America's Most Wanted."

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Daniel Brandt: PageRank: Google's Original Sin: "Google's claim that 'PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web' must be seen for what it is, which is pure hype. In a democracy, every person has one vote. In PageRank, rich people get more votes than poor people, or, in web terms, pages with higher PageRank have their votes weighted more than the votes from lower pages. As Google explains, 'Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."' In other words, the rich get richer, and the poor hardly count at all."

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"Imagine IC, the new centre for the visual representation of migration and cultures, is the location for a temporary public media laboratory from September 12th till 22nd. Open at all times to the wider audience, artists, campaigners, local and international media makers and activists will develop and discuss their work for 10 days, hold workshops with local media groups, present examples, realise live media programs on-line and via radio and tv, and execute various projects... The key-concept "tactical media" originates from a series of infamous conferences and festivals that have been organised in Amsterdam since 1993 under the title Next 5 Minutes. Tactical media deals with the meeting point of art, media, and social and political questions... The purpose of the international series of TMLs is to investigate the role of media in contemporary cultural and political life, each time from within a new local context and perspective. At the heart of our concern is the question who is given a voice in the contemporary media landscape, and which voices are left out."

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"Unfortunately, due to recent copyright legislation, WNYU has ceased streaming its broadcast on the Internet."

"UCLA Radio will cease webcasting as we assess the impact of a recent decision that set the structure for fees that webcasters - like UCLA Radio - must pay to play music over the internet."

"Due to recent threats of litigation from the record industry KBVR-FM has been forced not to stream our station's content over the Internet."

Posted by John at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Knowledge Management channel at gantthead: How much do you know about your clients? Is your intranet a dinosaur? How about integrating your current systems to maximize their full value?

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The Invisible Library is a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library's catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound.

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"3BillionBooks, Inc. (3BB), is planning to become the first company to globally deploy a low cost (under $100,000), totally automatic book machine, which can produce between 15 - 20 library quality paperback books per hour, in any language, in quantities of one, without any human intervention. This technology and process, with three issued patents and four patents pending, will produce one each of ten different books at the same speed and cost as it can produce ten copies of the same book. 3BB plans to be beta-testing the machine and its related technologies through the first quarter 2002 at multiple locations, after which it plans to begin commercial use of the machines throughout the world."

Posted by John at 1:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Ars Electronica exhibits current world map projections in which geography legitimated by the nation-state system is overlaid by the reciprocities and points of rupture in our modern Information Society-cyber-graphies of a world of data and information systems whose meridians are lines of economic, ecological and political power.

Artists as cartographers: a confrontation with topological world models is meant to formulate and/or inspire a critique of the topographic Weltanschauung and patterns of behavior on which it has had an impact.

(September 8-12, 10:00 AM - 7:00 PM, Brucknerhaus)

Artists and works:

Peter Fend/USA - Energy Solution / Water Resources

Josh On, Futurefarmers/USA - They Rule

RSG Radical Software Group/USA - Carnivore

Maia Gusberti, Michael Aschauer, Nik Thoenen, Sepp Deinhofer/A - ./logicaland

Mark Napier/USA - net.flag - flag for the Internet

schoenerwissen/D - Minitasking

Thomas Feuerstein/A - Internet-Metrik::Biophily*Warp Map

Werner Jauk, Heimo Ranzenbacher/A - Klimakonverter
social impact/A - border rescue

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AllAfrica.com to launch sustainable development channel: "In coordination with the UN Conference on Sustainable Development being held in Johannesburg next week, AllAfrica.com is calling for content submissions for its forthcoming Sustainable Development channel. The new resource area, which is scheduled to launch Aug. 26, will be funded by the AllAfrica Foundation, a non-profit organization that develops "topical channels devoted to urgent African issues.' The Web site has already aggregated a number of articles related to the conference, also known as the Earth Summit, including a Business Day story on the attempts of the conference to monitor waste production in an effort to live up to its 'green' ideals."

Posted by John at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Virtual Acquisition Shelf & News Desk: Updated daily with info industry news, Web search resources, online research tips, and a selection of new web documents, databases, and tools that have some reference value (full-text reports, lists, fact sheets, etc.).

Posted by John at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Battling Bishops, Moundbuilders, White Mules, Trolls, Wonder Boys, and Praying Colonels.... all fighting. College Nicknames.

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Infranet - Circumventing Web Censorship and Surveillance: "An increasing number of countries and companies routinely block or monitor access to parts of the Internet. To counteract these measures, we propose Infranet, a system that enables clients to surreptitiously retrieve sensitive content via cooperating Web servers distributed across the global Internet. These Infranet servers provide clients access to censored sites while continuing to host normal uncensored content. Infranet uses a tunnel protocol that provides a covert communication channel between its clients and servers, modulated over standard HTTP transactions that resemble innocuous Web browsing. In the upstream direction, Infranet clients send covert messages to Infranet servers by associating meaning to the sequence of HTTP requests being made. In the downstream direction, Infranet servers return content by hiding censored data in uncensored images using steganographic techniques. We describe the design, a prototype implementation, security properties, and performance of Infranet. Our security analysis shows that Infranet can successfully circumvent several sophisticated censoring techniques."

Posted by John at 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Haiku vs Spam: "Mark Cantrell was among several people who sent in a story about a company using 'Haiku to Stop Spam. Essentially you use a copyrighted Haiku to tag that a message meets criteria (1 Recipient, Pre-Existing Relationship, etc) which then makes it a simple matter to filter the mail. I'm sure the spammers in China will laugh wildly as they forge the haiku. I challange comment posters to post only Haiku in this discussion ;)'"

Posted by John at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Ever wonder what it would be like to break the bank in Vegas? If so, you have to read this wonderful Wired article on the MIT Blackjack Team. Of all casino games, blackjack offers by far the best odds to perfect gamblers, and card counting can dramatically swing the average cash flow in the card counter's direction. That's why casino's hate it so much. While it wasn't an official extracurricular activity, the team did invent a whole new method of card counting and took the casinos for some cash before the ride ended in the 1990s. The Slashdot discussion is also good reading.

Posted by John at 3:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

One day after calling for corporate crooks to serve 'hard time' in jail, President Bush will campaign in California on August 23, 2002 for Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon Jr., whose company was fined almost $80 million in July for fraudulent business dealings.

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Border controls crumble in DVD land: "Hollywood fixed the DVD market so films could only be played in the region they were purchased. But viewers got round it with "cheat codes" and now the system is on the verge of collapse."

Posted by John at 5:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Bracing for the Digital Crackdown: "The government is preparing a national crackdown on file traders that would crush the rogue swapping networks in the same manner hackers were pushed underground 12 years ago... The fear and loathing focused at the file-trading community is reminiscent of 1990, just before the Secret Service and the FBI conducted raids in order to smash the loosely affiliated hacker organizations around the country, as chronicled by Bruce Sterling in The Hacker Crackdown."

Posted by John at 5:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

How Hate Media Incited The Coup Against The President: "Never even in Latin American history has the media been so directly involved in a political coup. Venezuela's 'hate media' controls 95% of the airwaves and has a near-monopoly over newsprint, and it played a major part in the failed attempt to overthrow the president, Hugo Chavez, in April. Although tensions in the country could easily spill into civil war, the media is still directly encouraging dissident elements to overthrow the democratically elected president - if necessary by force."

Posted by John at 5:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

RE/Search Goes to Source to Document Fringe Culture: "I didn't even know I was going to be a publisher," says RE/Search founder V. Vale, "[Then] I found myself at the very, very beginning of the San Francisco punk rock scene." All it took was reading a number of derogatory articles that "reduced punk to spitting and safety pins ... [and] I knew I had to publish something that was the so-called truth."

Posted by John at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Punishment by Detail by Edward Said: "Suicide bombing is reprehensible but it is a direct and, in my opinion, a consciously programmed result of years of abuse, powerlessness and despair. It has as little to do with the Arab or Muslim supposed propensity for violence as the man in the moon. Sharon wants terrorism, not peace, and he does everything in his power to create the conditions for it. But for all its horror, Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, has been stripped of its context and the terrible suffering from which it arises: a failure to see that is a failure in humanity."

Posted by John at 3:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Robert Kagan at PolicyReview.org, Power and Weakness: "It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power -- the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power -- American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant’s 'Perpetual Peace.' The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might."

Posted by John at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Net copying didn't prompt music slump: "A recent report by Forrester Research found that the Internet is not to blame for the 15% drop in music sales and that music labels can actually recover costs by selling music via the Internet. The report predicted that recording companies could earn about $2 billion per year by 2007 from online music sales. Findings also indicated that former Napster users could be convinced to pay for music, which could then be downloaded from the Net to different platforms such as CDs and MP3 players. The study was based on a sample of 1,000 U.S. online consumers."

Posted by John at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"The link between Asperger's Syndrome (AS) and computers is well-known. Computers were designed by -- and for -- people with AS," said AS expert Tony Attwood. "Those with AS seem to know the language of computers better than social or conventional languages. It is quite plausible that people with AS may pursue an interest in cracking."

Posted by John at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

Coalition formed to fight growing Open Source acceptance: "A coalition calling itself The Initiative for Software Choice has been set up by companies which develop proprietary software, to counter the move by various governments to explore the use of Open Source software in the public sector... The chair of the coalition is the Computer Technology Industry Association but reports indicate that Microsoft is leading the charge..."

Posted by John at 9:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"ACOUSTIC.SPACE is an exploration into the acoustic dimension of electronic technology and networked media environment, featuring a series of magazines (1998-2000), Xchange - streaming audio network and mailinglist (since 1997), the Acoustic.Space.Lab research programme (since 2001) and now an upcoming book will be the closing publication of this period ... This book --"Acoustic.Space.Reader"-- will contain research texts and articles on the experiments, activities and tactical interventions of artists, media activists and 'cultural scientists', who use audio communication tools to build new contexts and open spaces by pushing the boundaries of electro-acoustic environments, acoustic cyberspace, radio ether and emerging cell-space."

Posted by John at 9:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"CPsquare is offering its online workshop on Communities of Practice next fall, starting on September 30th and presented by Etienne Wenger, John Smith, and Bronwyn Stuckey. This online workshop examines what communities of practice are, why they are important, how to develop, nurture, and leverage them, and how to build a knowledge strategy around them... This workshop is an extraordinary, participant-driven, interactive learning experience. It provides the opportunity to consider community issues in general and examine a range of specific communities of practice, whether presented by our guest speakers or by workshop participants. The workshop itself simulates a community of practice so that many community issues are available for direct observation and reflection. In addition, for many people this workshop serves as an entry point into a larger community that's concerned with the world as a social learning system."

Posted by John at 9:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"The net-art01 event functions as an open friendly gathering for 'net-art' where once a year we can get together the stuff we have all been working on and take a look around. By asking you to vote from 10 to -5 on the sites you visit we hope we have created a system (however limited) for you to express your approval, enjoyment etc. or otherewise of these projects that have been created for the web during 2001."

Posted by John at 9:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Attorney general shows himself as a menace to liberty: "Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft's announced desire for camps for U.S. citizens he deems to be "enemy combatants" has moved him from merely being a political embarrassment to being a constitutional menace... Ashcroft's plan, disclosed last week but little publicized, would allow him to order the indefinite incarceration of U.S. citizens and summarily strip them of their constitutional rights and access to the courts by declaring them enemy combatants."

Posted by John at 9:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Germans discover ancient life, offer climate hope: "German scientists have discovered micro-organisms deep under the sea that may provide an insight into some of the earth's first lifeforms and offer hope in the fight against global warming, the Max Planck Society said... The marine biologists and geologists believe they have shown life could have existed by processing methane without the presence of oxygen."

Posted by John at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's the basic pitch. Let's imagine you are Joe or Juanita Global-Civ. There you are, a selfless, activist policy-wonk, one civilized soul in a darkening world where ethnic throat-cutting is rising sharply and trust in the biz community has plummeted.

That's our conceptual victory condition.

Posted by John at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

_][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode_: "Mary-Anne Breeze, mo[ve.men]tion, new media art, net.art, net art, codework, code.wurk"

Posted by John at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Talking bull: "Two years of stock market collapse have done much to transform public opinion in America... It has brought on one of the most severe - most well-deserved - corporate crises since the 1930s. But nothing touches the public intellectuals of the bull market.... [M]any of the ones who wrote the Dow-worshipping books and who handed down all those daring pronunciamentos from the silicon heights are still cruising from one posh gig to the next."

Posted by John at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Bootleg culture: "Bootlegs constitute the first genre of music that truly fulfills the "anyone can do it" promises originally made by punk and, to lesser extent, electronic music. Even punk rockers had to be able write the most rudimentary of songs. With bootlegs, even that low bar for traditional musicianship and composition is obliterated..."

Posted by John at 2:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Vegas Braces for the Hackers: "It's time once again for Defcon, the infamous hacking convention where mysterious incidents -- like smoking swimming pools and FBI arrests of Russian programmers -- are more commonplace than not. Michelle Delio reports from Las Vegas."

Posted by John at 2:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pioneer Space Plaque Redesign by Edward Tufte: "Since the principles of physics hold everywhere, magic is conceivably a cosmological entertainment, with the wonder induced by theatrical illusions appreciated by all, regardless of planetary system. Accordingly the plaque aboard the Pioneer spacecraft for extraterrestrial scrutiny billions of years from now might have escaped from its conspicuously anthropocentric gestures by showing instead the universally familiar Amazing Levitation Trick. [Thanks kottke.org

Posted by John at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

World's oldest photo analyzed: "The image acknowledged as the world's first photograph — taken by a French inventor in 1826 — has passed its first full-scale analysis with flying colors and is now awaiting an airtight case that will keep it safe for centuries to come, scientists said Wednesday."

Posted by John at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Comprehensive guide to .htaccess: "I am sure that most of you have heard of htaccess, if just vaguely, and that you may think you have a fair idea of what can be done with an htaccess file. You are more than likely mistaken about that, however. Regardless, even if you have never heard of htaccess and what it can do for you, the intention of this tutorial is to get you two moving along nicely together. If you have heard of htaccess, chances are that it has been in relation to implementing custom error pages or password protected directories. But there is much more available to you through the marvelously simple .htaccess file..."

Posted by John at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Minimalist Web Project: "This is a collection of good-looking websites that are built with minimalism in mind, the idea of beauty through 'less is more.' I started this project June 27th, 2002 by posting a 'matchmaker' project on Kaliber 10000 and allowing people to submit all other sites. I started the list by posting 3 of the sites listed below, Pseudofamous, 37 Signals and Fifth Third Bank, and all others have been submitted by those who are fans of HTMLminimalism."

Posted by John at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Visually impaired Web users can now go to the Tate Gallery Web site and use a system called i-Map to print raised images from specially-formated files: "This digital project has been designed for visually impaired people and aims to explore some of the ideas, innovations and working methods of Matisse and Picasso, two of the twentieth century's most influential artists," reads a presentation of the project on the Tate Web site. According to Ananova, the service incorporates text, image enhancement and animations to study the work of the two painters in detail. Tate plans to include works by other artists in the service.

Posted by John at 6:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The new messenger offered by Indiatimes.com, which belongs to the Times of India, has made online chatting in local languages a reality. The new version 3.0 enables chatting in 11 Indian regional languages and interoperability across four major instant messaging platforms: MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AOL. The languages offered are Assamese, Bengali, Oriya, Telegu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, and Hindi. The service reaches the site's one million users free of cost. The messenger also provides constant updates of news, the stock markets and the latest weather reports.

Posted by John at 6:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)