category: internet

Kids.net.au is now my favorite childrens encylopedia. Note the opening HTML comment :-)



Here's to book-learning: Article Link

During the Silver Age of comics many Batman covers featured Robin freaking out in a bottom corner, often in the same pose, as if horrified and fascinated at the same time. The Robin Corner Shock Pose:



But there was a problem. Robin only ever did this in Batman franchise comics, he was never around to be shocked by, Archie say. Now, for the first time, and thanks to the wonders of the internet history can be rewritten and Robin can gasp, elbow-in-air, at every page of every comic ever written. I give you; Robin Corner Shock Pose Generator:



Follow the link, upload or download an image and add Boy Wonder :-)

via: BoingBoing

According to this proxy test strix.org.uk is now banned in China. Hooray! I'm a dissident!



Actually, this site is banned all over the world, from UAE to Boston. As many readers will be aware, Boston was recently a victim of a heinous plot to blow up the city, and everyone in it, using D batteries inside Mooninite Lite Brites. Police responded swiftly and decisively by blowing up a city traffic counter that treacherous actors unknown (in the transit department) had chained to a lamp post. So I understand why its necessary to take certain dangerous freedoms - such as reading this blog - away from the Boston public. I'm actually quite pleased to be Banned in Boston, even if only on municipal WiFi; it's a longstanding accolade of porn and progressive writing:

Boston was founded by Puritans in the early 17th century. Puritans held highly negative views regarding public exhibitions of sex. Boston's second major wave of immigrants, Irish Roman Catholics, also held conservative moral beliefs, particularly regarding sex.

In the late 19th century, American 'moral crusader' Anthony Comstock began a campaign to suppress "vice." He found widespread support in Boston, particularly among socially prominent and influential officials. Comstock was also known as the proponent of the Comstock Law, which prevented "obscene" materials from being delivered by the U.S. mail. Some critics have pointed out if the list of banned words were strictly enforced, then even the King James Version of the Bible would be unmailable.

Following Comstock's lead, Boston's city officials took it upon themselves to ban anything that they found to be salacious, inappropriate, or offensive. Aiding them in their efforts was a group of private citizens, the Boston Watch and Ward Society. Theatrical shows were run out of town, books were confiscated, and motion pictures were prevented from being shown; sometimes movies were stopped mid-showing, after an official had "seen enough". [Wikipedia Link]

James Ferman, newly appointed secretary of the BBFC, was very influenced by [sensationalist] advance publicity. He convinced himself that there was no way that the sustained terrorisation of a young woman could have a beneficial effect on the British public. Well, correction here. He was worried about the effect on the British working class. After the film had been shown, uncensored, to members of the British Film Institute at the London Film Festival, Ferman got up on stage and, thinking he was among friends, said,

"It's all right for you middle-class cineastes to see this film, but what would happen if a factory worker in Manchester happened to see it?"

When they heard this gaffe, the audience became hostile, and Ferman was visibly shocked. He never again referred to the true nature of his job as a censor - to stop working class people being stimulated by controversial films. [link]

One of the coolest things about making tools is getting to see what other people use them for. My Google Video search thingy is now thoroughly redundant, but it was cool when I made it (Way back before GooTube, back when Google Video didn't yet have a feature for searching for video) it's still used, mostly for finding porn. I keep a log of searches, for my own statistical fiddling, some of the queries people (you! the public) make are pure gold. Some recent nuggets:

Google AdSense has a testimonials page, these are usually very lame - often fictional quotes dreamed up by PR people, PR people posing as customers whacked on MDMA:

I'd like to thank Shady Company for a fantastic product, it's increased our revenue by 12,000% since an hour ago, and its such a pretty color. Whee! Look at the colors! The after-sales people are fantastic, I love you guys, I love you so much, I just want to touch your shirt... wow, thats so... amazing... your shirt... it feels so furry... wow.
Dr Martin Horseworthy, Nebraska

'General: You further agree not to display on any Serviced Page any non-Google content-targeted advertisement(s)'

I was thinking about newspapers today. Ordinary, pervasive, everyday things. They're almost an icon of normalcy, like cars and houses boxes of milk, things real and tangible in a world increasingly driven by unreal and intangible things. The things that actually shape our lives at this point in time are not real at all: Emails, bands, ideologies, credit card transactions, voice and text from our cell phones. There's no substance or form to these, they're only nouns by convention. What is an email? A lot of microscopic fluctuations in a magnetic field on the surface of an aluminum disc? Bursted, multiplexed dance on the surface of a carrier wave, existing only instantaneously as it flies right across the globe, into space and back again. If you give it substance by printing it on paper is it still an email, or just the text of an email, a rendering, like a photograph can be a rendering of a face, but isn't the face itself? I don't know. It's doubtful that the otherworldly magic of our technology can be readily understood in the traditional nouns and verbs of human languages that have developed over millennia to communicate the realities of the physical world.

That's why technology is still magic. The uncommon knowledge, jargon and whole technical languages used to work with computers are not very different to the forbidden knowledge of the occult and unintelligible incantation of spells that was widely believed to be the realm of magic not so very long ago. Witchcraft and black magic are still widely feared in much of the developing world by people educated and westernized enough to know better. I think for many ordinary people feeling of stigma and unknowability of the occult has been inherited by the technology.

A hacker writes a script to enter the CCTV system of a building on the other side of the world. He composes several verses in an esoteric language, written in a special, concise way, literally commanding mysterious and distant forces to summon an image of a faraway place into a piece of glass in front of him. The only difference between the hacker and a wizard chanting over a crystal ball is that the hacker actually has the power the wizard was imagined to have. The same is true of the geneticist mage creating plants and animals with supernatural properties, for the way the chemist mixes up drops and vials of things to make liquids that cure disease or make water safe to drink. It's all sorcery to most people. (continues after the jump)

A panel from xkcd, one of my favorite webcomics. Click to enlarge.

The Councillor of the Exchequer has commanded a treasury-level review of the complicated mess that is the UK's intellectual property law, and you're invited to contribute. The Open Rights Group was asked to participate and have issued a call for evidence. If you have any war stories highlighting the failure of current system, please send them in.

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Via BoingBoing

Today is Dean Gray Tuesday, a day for angst and the dowloading of free music. So for the next couple hours, I'll be getting to the spirit and sharing with you some illegal MP3s here or you can go to www.americanedit.org
to find more mirrors of this years album.

Fuck Warner! Up the Revolution!

Logogle.com is a site which allows users to customise the google logo, like so:





Its freaking genius. The ability to change the logo is so-so as far as cool things go, technically easy, not amazing. As a business idea its totally awesome, here we have a way to take advantage a neat little meme to harvest money from google, simply by putting ads in the same place google does, and charging them for their own adsense :-) or yahoo ads! And its hella good viral marketing, because it takes advantage of poeple's exhibitionism and hubris, they're going to work hard to drive people to your site to see 'their' logo. I absolutely love this site, for sheer chutzpah and business sense. Its technically boring but psychologically brilliant as a get-rich-quick scheme. I need to come up with some ideas like this.

via

NewNova.org has a huge listing of fresh documentaries. This is like finding bittorrent gold :-) Not that any of you good people would download an illegal BBC documentary of course... You'd buy a television, an then buy an ariel and a freeview box, and then pay a licence fee, which is used for god knows what. You wouldn't use the internet to get hold of something your tax money payed for...

*grin*

link

UPDATE: May 2007, newnova is no more, however there is now a huge array of downloadable BBC and Channel4 documentaries available on Google Video.



If that doesn't suit you Torrentz.com list over 600 files for the phrase 'BBC Documentary'.