Month: July 2006

Worth1000 – Earth Canvas

Earth Canvas photochop is a hard one to explain briefly in an article title, so we’ll just rip the contest description from the Worth1000 page.

Are we supposed to believe that Italy was ‘accidentally’ shaped like a boot? That Mt. Rushmore just ‘happened’ to contain the faces of four American presidents? Obviously God was feeling a little artistic with nature. Now it’s our turn.

The rules of this game are thus: Use nature and geography as your canvas. (i.e. Make a lake shaped like a teletubbie, or volcanic rock look like a dragon, constellation patterns that seem to look like images, or rock shapes that seem to resemble actual things). So long as it is inanimate (i.e. no animal print patterns) it is fair game for your pictures, patterns and symbols. Manmade objects are allowable too if they are extremely large and unconnected in nature (i.e. the lights of North America seen from outerspace) otherwise stick to ‘natural’ occurences. As always, quality is a must. We will remove poor entries no matter how much we like you. You’ll have 48 hours for this contest, so make your submission count.

Hit List: Spacescapes. Use it and get disqualified.

As always, there are some well done images and some not so well done images. They are all better than what I could do, but some really stuck out to my eye as especially well done. Here are a couple of samples. Be sure to hit the contest page to pick out your favorites. I really like the earth and air spirit images, too, but decided that you might need some incentive to head over and view more.

Siren of the Stones:

W1000-stone-woman.jpg

Beauty and the Beast:
W1000-beauty-and-beast.jpg

[tags]Worth 1000, Earth Canvas, Photochop[/tags]

New feature – sideblogging

I’ve been looking for a good way to do short posts that are not much more than a few words and a link – what the blogging world calls asides.  None of the themes I’ve tried over the past few months have handled the previous ‘asides’ tool I was using very gracefully, so I finally shut it off.  This week, I’ve found, installed, and been using the sideblogging tool for WordPress.  If you check out the right sidebar, you’ll see a new category at the bottom labelled “Asides” for all these short posts.  I’ll be playing around with this over the next few days.  One thing to note is that any post which is tagged for sideblogging will not show up in the main page’s posts.  I doubt much will change in this as I work on it, but you may occasionally see a change or three until I get the sideblogs how I want them.

[tags]Sideblogging, New site feature, WordPress[/tags]

Anti-RFID techies are here to protect you

(via Engadget)

With the recently announced RFID passports we’ll be getting here in the states soon, some folks are wisely concerned about their electronic safety in a world were RFID signals are easy to pick-up.  Given a desire to protect RFID identities in the coming age where you will not be able to be sans RFID, the folks at RFID-guardian have worked on a device to protect you and all your RFID-ness.

The Guardian has three main components: an RFID tag emulator (that consists of a receiver part, a transmitter part, and an antenna), an RFID reader (also with antenna), and an embedded computer.

. . .

The Reader that is built into the Guardian is used to perform periodic scans of all tags that the Guardian owner carries around with her. If tags keep turning up in those scans, they will probably belong to the Guardian owner, so they must be protected from interrogation or corruption by unknown RFID readers. The Guardian decides this for itself, but it can (of course) be overridden by its owner.

. . .

The RFID Guardian could eventually be integrated into a PDA or a cellphone, but our research prototype is currently built on a breadboard (the next one will be on a single PCB). The current prototype consists of three separate parts:

  • some electronic circuit boards, one for its tag emulator receiver, one for its tag emulator transmitter, and one for its reader (plus some voltage translator boards)
  • a number of radio frequency antennas
  • an embedded computer that performs all the software tasks. This is an XScale PXA270 (an ARM descendant manufactured by Intel) on a development board, the Triton-270 sold by Karo.

There is no estimate yet on how much this will cost.
[tags]RFID, anti-RFID, privacy[/tags]

Anna Konda – firefighting snake robot

(via Engadget)

When I first read about this earlier in the week, I was going to skip it. It sounds pretty cool, but I wasn’t sure it was Blah-worthy — it just didn’t seem interesting enough to me to makeannakonda.jpg a post about it. But I’ve run into this news item some 6 or 8 times since I first ran across, it. So, when I saw it on Engadget while catching up with my news-reading there, I decided I had better just post it and get it out of my head. That said, here’s some of the details on the newest robot that’s not likely to someday destroy you puny humans in its bid to take over the world.

Try to picture a snake-like robot that can move into places that are too dangerous for humans to enter. The snake can climb up stairs, force past beams and twist itself round corners. Imagine that it has a built-in advanced water tap that not only can be turned on and off, but can allow the direction of the water flow to be altered.

. . .

The snake contains 20 water hydraulic motors that move the robotic joints – and a similar number of valves to control the water flow to each motor. Each module consists of two hydraulic motors and two valves. The outer layer is comprised of a strong steel skeleton containing the joint modules,which can rotate around two orthogonal axes. The joints are controlled by custom-built electronics.

. . .

The energy to move the joints comes from 100 bars of hydraulic water pressure. “This pressure is strong enough to lift a car up off the ground, something that again explains how the snake can in principle break through a wall. But both the hydraulic pressure and the use of pure water without additives in the hydraulic system have posed challenges”, Liljebäck says.

. . .

The steel skeleton and motors are being custom-built at local workshops in Trondheim, partly because the research scientists needed to take a novel approach in the construction of the water hydraulic valves.

“The lack of space has been a major challenge,” says Liljebäck. “We needed power valves that were small, water tolerant and capable of controlling both the direction and the amount of the water flow. The closest thing we found on the market that met the criteria was valves used in Formula One racing cars, but these cost NOK 100,000 each and didn’t tolerate water. As a result, we decided to manufacture our own valves and, in co-operation with a local workshop, we built a prototype from scratch.”

Wow. Lift a car or break through a wall? Maybe this snake will one day crush you puny humans in an attempt to take over the world.

[tags]Robot snake, Firefighting robot[/tags]

Wait, there are people not actively seeking that?

According to ArsTechnica, the just passed Internet SAFETY (Stop Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Youth) act includes provisions for prison sentences to people who deceptively link to p0rn. So anyone who links to p0rn and attempts to pass it off as other legitimate web link can be penalized by this new law. So anyone who accidentally find p0rn online could possibly get the link provider in trouble. This doesn’t worry be, as I neither link to p0rn nor get to it accidentally – I get all my p0rn from quality sites, so I have to actively seek it out.

The bill deals mostly with sex offenders, though it also includes provisions for stopping the sale of the “date rape” drug and boosting the National Police Athletic League. For our purposes, the end of the legislation is the most interesting. Section 703 deals with “deception by embedded words or images,” and rehashes the idea found in the Internet SAFETY Act.

(a) In General- Whoever knowingly embeds words or digital images into the source code of a website with the intent to deceive a person into viewing material constituting obscenity shall be fined under this title and imprisoned for not more than 10 years.

(b) Minors- Whoever knowingly embeds words or digital images into the source code of a website with the intent to deceive a minor into viewing material harmful to minors on the Internet shall be fined under this title and imprisoned for not more than 20 years.

The bill purposely leaves the provisions vague. What constitutes “deceit,” for instance? The law is worded loosely enough to allow prosecutors to use their discretion, and remains broad enough to deal with future changes in technology that might render a more specific bill obsolete.

Though the bill obviously applies only in the US, the government has recently shown a willingness to go after foreigners who operate web sites that are largely used by Americans.

[tags]Internet SAFETY Act, Online pr0n[/tags]

RIAA gets $115 million from Sharman Networks, Ltd.

(via boingboing)

Ending a years-long legal battle, the recording industry has settled with Sharman Networks, Ltd., operator of popular Kazaa peer-to-peer software.  Naturally, my first question is “How much of that money is going to the artists that the RIAA told us they were suing to protect?”

Record labels and movie studios won their long fight against one of the most notorious networks for online piracy Thursday, but the deal is unlikely to slow the worldwide trade in bootlegged songs, movies and television shows.

The entertainment industry’s settlement with the operator of Kazaa was hailed as a milestone because it ends an era in which backers of file-sharing networks could make millions of dollars a month luring people to their services with pirated goods.

. . .

Online piracy, meanwhile, continues.

“I don’t think anything has been accomplished here,” said Michael Goodman, a senior analyst with the Yankee Group in Boston. “From a legal perspective, this is a yawner. They won the battle, but the battlefront moved on about three years ago. That’s the problem with court systems. Technology and markets move way faster than courts can typically keep up with them. By the time you win that battle, who cares?”

Kazaa once accounted for nearly half of all online file-sharing, but its popularity has plummeted in the five years since its owners were sued for encouraging piracy.

. . .

Under the terms of the settlement, Kazaa will introduce filtering technologies to ensure that users can no longer share copyrighted music, film or software files. Sharman has paid $115 million to the recording industry, according to sources familiar with the negotiations. Studios received a separate undisclosed sum, reported to be in the tens of millions of dollars.

Sharman Networks issued a statement, saying the agreement cleared the way for Kazaa to offer licensed content.

“The settlement marks the dawn of a new age of cooperation between peer-to-peer technology and content industries which will promise an exciting future for online distribution in general and Kazaa users in particular,” said Nikki Hemming, chief executive of Sharman Networks.

Here’s what that all means

  • Sharman Networks, Ltd. promises to stop people from sharing coprighted material on the Kazaa network (impossible, by the way)
  • The recording industry get $115 to pay lawyers to continue going after music fans who like to hear music before buying (which we all know is illegal, but hard to stop in this age of 98% crap music)
  • Sharman Networks, Ltd. has aspirations to fail in the legal music download business the same way Napster has (with the extra burden of competing against Apple and iTunes)
  • The recording industry and Sharman Networks management types tell people that a new age in licensed digital music distribution is upon us (the same new age that has successfully been built up and practically controlled by the iTunes marketplace)

So we’ll see what happens from here.  Somehow, I doubt anyone on the consumer end will notice.

[tags]RIAA, Kazaa, Sharman Networks, Recording industry, Peer-to-peer[/tags]

OpenDNS – trying to improve your surfing experience

A recent ArsTechnica article provides more details and insight into the OpenDNS project which we have recently mentioned here.  Jeremy starts the article by noting that DNS isn’t something he (nor most other surfers) even thinks much about.

Thus, the announcement of a new, free DNS replacement service took me somewhat by surprise. Why would I want to change my DNS provider? What would I gain by doing such a thing? And more importantly, what was the catch?

According to David Ulevitch, founder of OpenDNS, the experience he gained starting and running EveryDNS (a free DNS service for web site hosts) taught him a lesson about the state of DNS services in general and the increasing problem of spam, phishing scams, and botnets. He noticed that nefarious groups were using EveryDNS as a vector to perpetuate these sorts of attacks. He added code to EveryDNS that would search for and deny these attempts, and shared information about the perpetrators with other DNS services. While he noticed the attacks no longer targeted his system, they simply moved elsewhere to find easier targets.

His idea was to attack the problem from the other end. Instead of trying to fix every web hosting DNS service, he thought about providing a DNS service for end users.

. . .

To attract people to this new service, Ulevitch promises that it will speed up DNS resolution, making for a faster web browsing experience. If that wasn’t enough, the service is designed to catch common typos, delivering the URL you want rather than the one you typed, and putting an end to sites that try and deceive users by typo-squatting.

So how well does it work? The answer depends very much on your current service provider. I’ve never had to spend much time waiting for DNS resolution, mostly because my provider, Shaw, keeps a very large cache of DNS addresses on a high-speed server. However, this can have its drawbacks when sites shift IPs too often and the cache isn’t updated quickly enough.

So, is OpenDNS something worth using?  Well, Chris Pirillo seems to think so.  Jeremy, the author of the above-quoted ArsTechnica article has this to say:

Is the site useful or not? With phishing filters coming in IE 7 and Firefox 2.0, it may be a solution looking for a problem. Still, it’s nice to have a backup option in case your ISP’s DNS services flare out temporarily. The one really nice thing about the service is that it requires no software installation (merely setting your DNS settings for your network connection) and if you decide you don’t like it, it’s trivial to change back to your ISP’s DNS service. Having a no-hassle “opt-out” clause is definitely a good thing to have with any new service you wish to try out.

[tags]OpenDNS, Faster surfing[/tags]