note pad

Yes, this will remain an open notebook. I'm scribbling: what if pixels were searchable? Metadata for pixels, some how auto-generated, or generated for 1 pixel according to the elements of its neighbors. You won't search for discrete images, but your search will turn up images in which a statistically significant number of pixels meet the criteria. Is this using a hammer to turn a screw, creating far more metadata than we can handle in order to execute jobs that could be done much more simply in another way?

ISHUSH is Moving

==update==
this is still my backup blog.
tech probs at we dot com, so for a while i may camp here.
---

Follow me over to WoodyEvans.Com. The party continues there, 'til real, real late at night. ISHUSH has been fun, but now I'm homesteading in new territory.

It'll be about a week until I sort out all the technical bits, but do drop in.

- WE, 09 Oct 06.



















p.s.....

I intend to let ISHUSH stand here for as long as it will. I may even, sometimes, add bits to it, develop bits, and move bits around. It'll be an archival-bank-type-thing for what I was thinking on this year. It's going to slow-burn, now, down to smoke and cinders... kind of like StreetMeatStation did. So.

drm again -- and a book, to start

The "internet of things" is coming -- what kind of a place do we want it to be?

rootkits for books? drm and print media?

From comments following on a recent post at reBang:

1. Woody E Says:
   September 28th, 2006 at 3:53 pm

   Books don’t run root-kits on people.
   DRM movies do run root-kits on people’s computers.
   Thassa crucial difference, sho!

2. csven Says:
   September 28th, 2006 at 4:19 pm

   C’mon, Woody. You know better. DRM is no more about rootkits than any other piece of software, because ANY software can have malicious code in it.

   Are cars weapons? Some people use them as transportation. Some people use them as bombs. All depends on what the person does with the technology.

   This is really about people and their behavior. Nothing more. Nothing less. It would be possible to have a fair DRM system, but there are a few problems in getting there:

   1) most of the people behind DRM systems don’t create the content they’re trying to protect; they’re protecting profits.
   2) most of the people accessing content using DRM hacks probably don’t have a clue about Intellectual Property laws and if they do probably don’t really care; they only care about getting something for free.
   3) deciding what’s “fair” depends on whether one is a consumer or a content provider, and there are way more consumers.
   4) the two sides are, for the most part, polarizing the issue.

   We’ll see if Sony’s new e-book makes inroads. If it does, it’ll be interesting to see if some people change their tune (of course I’m referring to those who don’t have other sources of income).

Librarians, where do you stand on this? Should the current impossibility of using books to run rootkits on readers necessarily exclude print media from the DRM debate? Are the old-fashioned copyright laws good enough -- or should readers get the kind of rights Cory Doctorow argues for in re: digital content? And is it hypocritical not to provide such usage rights to readers if you take a similar stance against DRM? Where are you on this?

5 cell phones in the library

...busted. Roger has put down a challenge after reading my post with the QR haiku... And I lack the ketai to rise to the occassion*. Can somebody help him out?

--

*We had a volcanic dispute with Sprint, over at my house. We don't like them too much anymore. They probably don't like us, either. Regardless, investigation has revealed that we live in a dip into/outof which no cell towers will give/get good signal. So we wait.

Listening: Andrew Bird
Shushing: used cars, new cars, cars, trucks, cars. where's my solar-powered jetpack?

QR code in action

Could it work for libraries too? Imagine programs using QR for scavenger hunts... Using them to solve puzzles, find clues that send them off to read certain books... How about a "real life" choose-your-own-adventure tale? Let your patrons forward the notices to each other through phones... Play "guess the poet"... Link to public-domain novels online... Link to Project Vote Smart pages... Not to mention some of the previous ideas -- useful grafitti, this could be.
(Vid via Smoothplanet.)

from Anousheh Ansari's space blog:

"I always knew in my heart that I would go to space, but did not know exactly how. But I kept telling everyone how much I love space and I want to go to space, and finally found the way... My destination tomorrow will be Earth… But the Earth is not the same Earth that I left. It is a little bit better now because there is more love in it. I can see it from your written words that are sent to me in the emails… I only hope that I can help grow this wave of positive energy that we have started and to make sure it touches more and more people."



















--

Reading: The Kite Runner, Ken Wilber's stuff, and Watership Down
Listening: Chinesepod.com (...newbie lessons...)

for your consideration: joe scarborough doing his job

...speaking truth about power:

new fiction

New fiction (by me) up at 971 MENU. It's a short, "From Florida".

for your consideration: keith olbermann doing his job

...speaking truth to power:

haiku in kaywa qr-code

UPDATE:

"Warm engines cool. The rain hits, hissing, steaming on metal.
Write on foggy glass"

Decoded with the KAYWA Reader from the screen ;-)
Cheers!

Jerome Chevillat did it. J, if we're ever in the same city at the same time, I'll buy you a drink.



--

Just experimenting. You can use your cellphone camera to read the haiku (if you download the free QR reading software).

arphid melodrama?

I appreciate the dangers of RFID chips in passports, I really do.
A bad idea? Almost certainly.

But hasn't anybody ever heard of tinfoil?
If the policy makers make bad policy, hack the effect.
Come on, people!

banned books week post 9/11

So a patron wanders in because she saw our sign about Banned Books Week.

"Hi," she says. "I saw that it was Banned Books Week. What the heck is that?" Her worried brow made it clear she thought it was the week the library banned its books.

"Well, since the terrorist attacks on our nation five years ago, the federal government," (here the blood drained further from her face, causing her cute little brown specs to stand out in high contrast) "has started requiring all publicly funded libraries to discard or ban one-tenth of one percent of our collection that has some sympathetic leanings toward the ideology of terrorist organizations." I give her a cheery grin. "See? And we'd rather not throw our books away, so we just ban them for a week."

"What?"

"Just kidding!" Then I told her all about the ALA and how zealous we librarians are to prevent such a thing. You gotta have fun with this, right?

2 library program idea

RFID tags aren't toys... Arphid tags are!

From the badlands east of Hattiesburg, we welcome Doc Coyote and her troupe of Happy Hairy Hackers.

Learn! How to manipulate data on RFID chips.
Explore! The wonders of interactive "arphid" projects.
Meet! Local hacktivists with an eye to make the Internet tangible.

Doc Coyote is an old hand at making, breaking, and re-writing RFID chips with home-made, hand-held RFID reader/scanners.* She'll teach you how to build your own with parts from WalMart and RadioShack for less than $30. So bring your soldering iron and an open mind to your local library this Friday night at 6:30.** Go ahead, take the red pill! And welcome to "the Internet of things!"

*The library in no way assumes any responsibility for any theft, fraud, invasion of privacy, or distribution of misinformation that its patrons may participate in after learning these skills.
**Library patrons are strongly discouraged from using any skills learned at this program to manipulate the RFID chips in library books. If such tampering can be proven, any guilty patrons would be excommunicated from the library forever and ever and ever and ever. And ever.

orderly global economies / drm: redux in situ

I posted on the question of intellectual property and global economies here [link], and posted a video of Cory Doctorow at LIFT 06 speaking on DRM here [link]. Great comments followed both posts.

The conversation bleeds over to reBang blog [link], where Sven, Cory, The Mad Natural Historian, and I get into an discussion about all this in the context of a contest design posted at BoingBoing, following on one of Sven's post about how designers are exploited under the auspice of an "open source" contest.

Librarians not only have to worry about the impact of root kits on our computer systems, but we've also got to wonder about the fallout of DRM and IP law on our lending policies. How long before we're forced to buy restrictive licenses for [what we used to call] books at a jacked-up "institutional" price?

I don't know if small libraries could survive that. What do you think?

--

Weather: hot, wet, windy.
Reading: The 39 Steps again and again and again.

Vinay Gupta: worldchanging

You should get to know Vinay Gupta and his hexayurts project.

At Mind is Moving blog, he keeps a page detailing the idea. Hexayurts have been written about in the New York Times, and were featured at Strong Angel III.

It's a quick & endemic diaster relief project that uses simple materials to make a very sturdy shelter -- no complicated international NGO bureaucrastructres required. An excellent design makes duct tape and cardboard into roomy hexagonal shelters.

What he's done, as Surgeon Captain Peter Buxton, O.B.E, put it, is make "teaching people how to use materials that are availabe for them" primary over shipping in materials and techniques from developed countries (see vlog link below). This really does empower those who are affected by disaster.

Nominate this man for a Genius Award!

Here's Vinay's vlog from Strong Angel III [link].

Some questions come to mind... I wonder about modding the hexayurt for the needs of specific environments -- for instance, how would they have fared in SE Louisiana after the hurricanes of 05, in such a wet environment?

Might these structures be cheaply chipped, so that they become spimey (trackable in space/time for recycling, usage statistics, and info on wear and tear)?

Or might they be outfitted with arphids so that a collection of structures in a community could ooze info about which families live in which yurts, etc.?

How tough/expensive a task would it be to outfit these structures with a solar panel and basic wiring?

How tough/expensive a task would it be to use the structure of the walls (the fiber itself) as part of a water filtration system, Katavolos style?

What's the max lifespan for this structure?

The hexayurt is simple, elegant, and eminently helpful.

















This could be a world changer.

Cory Doctorow on Digital Rights Management

Cory Doctorow, novelist and former EFF man, breaks it down at LIFT 06. Now I think I get DRM.

14 comics: Rushkoff

Why do I have this dreadful (and not-yet very deeply explored) suspicion that Testament and Club Zero are very like Waking Life and What the Bleep?

Is it because the "story" is utterly sacrificed to the "ideas" the author is trying to share? I love ideas (and Rushkoff's work is mostly full of cool and good ideas), but I love stories more -- and, yes, the best stories are able to communicate ideas without the audience feeling like "uh-oh, I think this is some kind of statement or idea or something... I think I'm supposed to be getting it or something..."

Maybe it's because I don't like being instructed in what constitutes cool. Maybe I like to be shown, not told.

The characters in Testament read like walking barcodes. These aren't people with an array of terrible and wonderful and meaningful particularities; these are cliche cardboard people that the author musn't realize he's parodying. I really don't think he meant to parody the counter-culture he's writing about -- I do, in fact, take him at least that seriously.

I mean, who care'ss about all this Torah-as-metaphor stuff? We get it already! And it's atemporal and all that too. Eternal struggle against the forces of singular domination, yada yada yada -- we get it!

What Testament should have been was a story that started as a story -- instead of a manifesto that got a spackling with plot.

Well. I won't be buying any more comics by Mr. Rushkoff -- but I might check them out from the library some time, see if future attempts make for better stories. And good luck to him... his non-fiction rocks, after all.

1 library program idea

LEARN the art of sousveillance, "watching from below"!
BECOME an active watcher of watchmen!
REALIZE the potential of ketai!

Sousveillance means you're watching the cameras that watch you. In a world of total surveillance by 'the man', why not take back the streets and turn the panopticon culture on the corporate-government overlords who would seek to see all?

In this library program, you'll learn how to use ketai, or cellphone-camera-gadgetry-culture, to manifest your right to watch the world around you. Police abuse? Thing of the past! Detention without charge? No more! Now you've got streaming video documentation of every breach of your civil liberties!*

So bring your cell phones, digital cameras, laptops, baggy clothes, offensive hats/buttons/teeshirts, loud music, and bad attitudes to your library this Saturday afternoon at one o'clock.

Cookies and punch served to a soothing background of techno-ambient musical compositions by local DJs and electronic artists.^


*No guarantee or assumption of liability for indefinite detention implied.
^If we don't play your track, we're not dissin' ya!

1 happy world: forget the 5th amendment or any of that other stuff

It just gets in the way!



"

Associated Press 09:45 AM Sep, 17, 2006

The U.S. military in Iraq has imprisoned an Associated Press photographer for five months, accusing him of being a security threat but never filing charges or permitting a public hearing.

Military officials said Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi citizen, was being held for "imperative reasons of security" under United Nations resolutions. AP executives said the news cooperative's review of Hussein's work did not find anything to indicate inappropriate contact with insurgents, and any evidence against him should be brought to the Iraqi criminal justice system.

Hussein, 35, is a native of Fallujah who began work for the AP in September 2004. He photographed events in Fallujah and Ramadi until he was detained on April 12 of this year.

"We want the rule of law to prevail. He either needs to be charged or released. Indefinite detention is not acceptable," said Tom Curley, AP's president and chief executive officer. "We've come to the conclusion that this is unacceptable under Iraqi law, or Geneva Conventions, or any military procedure."

Hussein is one of an estimated 14,000 people detained by the U.S. military worldwide -- 13,000 of them in Iraq. They are held in limbo where few are ever charged with a specific crime or given a chance before any court or tribunal to argue for their freedom.

In Hussein's case, the military has not provided any concrete evidence to back up the vague allegations they have raised about him, Curley and other AP executives said.

"