Posts Tagged ‘christmas’

Unsurprisingly, not everyone is crazy about Amazon’s attempts to register top-level web domains like .book, .author, and .read. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, two publishing industry groups, along with rival bookseller Barnes & Noble, are objecting to Amazon’s requests with ICANN, the standards body responsible for managing the internet’s top level domains. Continue reading…

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Amazon’s application for .book domain opposed by industry groups and rivals

The SXSW Gaming Expo is preposterously loud. At one side of the room, a Starcraft tournament is reaching its climax, but on the other side, one group of guys is yelling louder. They sound like a basement full of adolescents discussing the newest Electronic Gaming Monthly cover story, or like the NINTENDO SIXTY-FOUR kid unwrapping his Christmas present. “Is the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality 3D headset , the future of gaming?” they ask.

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Oculus Rift at SXSW: is virtual reality the ‘Holy Grail’ of gaming?

Amazon’s review system has played host to everything from absurdist humor to political grandstanding to the much more mundane practice of inflating a product’s score with fake or reviews. Now, The New York Times says , the site is cracking down on book reviews, with mixed results. Some writers say reviews by direct relatives or longtime fans have been purged, but others have successfully urged people who haven’t even read their book to rate it, a practice Amazon allows.

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Amazon cracks down on fake reviews, but shady accounts aren’t the only casualties

A San Antonio high school student was told she would be expelled last week for refusing to wear an RFID tag (a small, battery-powered radio transceiver) that would let school staff track her location on campus. Now, Wired reports that sophomore Andrea Hernandez has won a temporary restraining order blocking the expulsion until a hearing is conducted next week. Hernandez’s months-long fight with the Northside Independent School District over its Student Locator Project has often appealed to religious freedom, but the use of RFID in schools has also been roundly criticized by groups like EPIC, the EFF, and the ACLU on the grounds that it dehumanizes students and staff, raises concerns for free speech, and carries the potential for abuse… Continue reading…

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Student’s expulsion for refusing to wear RFID tag put on hold until next week

Peter Molyneux-led game studio 22Cans is still fresh off the disappointing launch of the mysterious Curiosity experiment , but that isn’t stopping the team from announcing its next project — and taking to Kickstarter to fund it. Called Godus , the new title is described as a “reinvention” of the god game, a genre that Molyneux is largely credited with creating through his 1989 game Populous . With Godus , it appears that he wants to return to his roots. ” Godus blends the power, growth, and scope of Populous with the detailed construction and multiplayer excitement of Dungeon Keeper and the intuitive interface and technical innovation of Black & White ,” the Kickstarter description explains. The studio is looking to raise £450,000 to…

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Peter Molyneux wants to return to his roots with Kickstarter-funded ‘Godus’

Mountain View, Colorado couple Luigi and Angie Bellaviste claim they were victims of a religious hate crime after their “Vote Satan” sign was cut down from their front porch. Whether it fits the local legal definition of a religious hate crime or not, most of their neighbors agree that destroying the Bellaviste’s property was absolutely

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Satanists claim vandalism to home a religious hate crime

You’ve likely heard that the New York City Department of Education wants to avoid the user of certain words or phrases on standardized tests if “the topic is controversial among the adult population and might not be acceptable in a state-mandated testing situation; the topic has been overused in standardized tests or textbooks and is

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New York City Dept of Education’s "banned" words list

UK chancellor George Osborne was confronted on his government’s decision to charge value-added tax (VAT) on hot take-away food like pasties. Labour MP John Mann asked Osborne when he’d last had a pasty from Gregg’s, a chain of bakeries. Osborne couldn’t recall. But PM David Cameron was ready for the question when it next arose

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UK tories embroiled in Cornish Pasty row

Michael Geist sez, The Canadian committee on copyright reform conducts its final witness hearing today and not a moment too soon. Based on the demands from music industry witnesses this week, shutting down the Internet must surely be coming next. The week started with the Canadian Independent Music Association seeking changes to the enabler provision

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Canadian record industry demands SOPA-style censorship

Copyfighting nerd rapper Dan Bull’s latest track is “Bye Bye BPI.” He created the video by asking his musician Facebook fans to submit photos of themselves holding messages to the British Phonographic Institute (the UK equivalent of the RIAA or IFPI). Here’s Thomas “CommandLine” Gideon commenting on Bull’s astonishing production process: It is astonishing how

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Copyfighting rapper Dan Bull to record industry: Bye Bye BPI

[Video Link] Arizona state Rep. Katie Hobbs has introduced a bill requiring disclaimers on ads that digitally retouch models because they are “deceptive.” As video producer Ted Balakar points out, even though Hobbs believes Photoshop is a great menace that needs taxpayer money to control, she’s OK with “makeup, lighting, haircare products, cosmetic surgery,” and

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Arizona politician: Makeup on a freckle = good; Photoshopping it out = bad

The following is a list of the “23 Types of Vagabonds” as identified in a 1566 book by Thomas Harman called “A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors, vulgarly called vagabonds.” These “types” were the chapter titles and a decade later compiled into a list in William Harrison’s book “Description of Elizabethan England, 1577″ I’m

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Types of vagabonds, 1566

Piotr Czerski’s manifesto, “We, the Web Kids,” originally appeared in a Polish daily newspaper, and has been translated to English and pastebinned. I’m suspicious of generational politics in general, but this is a hell of a piece of writing, even in translation. Writing this, I am aware that I am abusing the pronoun ‘we’, as

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Web Kids’ manifesto

The new OS X Gatekeeper encourages desktop apps to be registered with Apple, with users warned against installing unsigned software unless they disable the prompts. The benefits—and the potential pitfalls—are obvious. It’s intended as as an anti-malware system (with a whitelist rather than a blacklist), and the registration process will be simple and inexpensive. It’ll

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Gatekeeper: Cancel or Allow?

Aaron Swartz, the young activist and entrepreneur who kicked off the fight against SOPA and PIPA, talks strategy and tactics with the MIT Technology Review, and makes a lot of important points about the way that the future’s information wars will be fought. Swartz: I first heard of the bill shortly after it was introduced

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Aaron Swartz on the strategy and tactics of fighting SOPA and beyond

Writing in the WSJ, Tom Downey describes what he perceives as a new shift in the way that Japanese food, coffee, cocktails and fashion relates to the outside world; according to Downey, the ideal now combines the much-vaunted Japanese attention to detail and precise copying with a kind of remaking that produces a “replica” Brooklyn

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Japan’s high-detail coffee, booze, food, and fashion simulacra

Alcoa’s 50,000-Ton forging press in Cleveland is “one of the great machines of American industry.” Built in 1955, the “Fifty” broke down three years ago, and Alcoa considered scrapping it. But it’s back in operation. Tim Heffernan has the story in The Atlantic. A forging press is — begging the forgiveness of the engineering gods

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Bringing a 50,000-ton forging press back to Life

Victoria Johnson revisits the maps we “wandered into” as kids: If I ruled the world, or at least a publishing company, all books would contain as much supplementary information as possible. Nonfiction, fiction—doesn’t matter. Every work would have an appendix filled with diagrams, background information, digressions and anecdata. And of course, maps. I did not

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Fantasy Maps

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Never change the oil in Michael Bay’s car

“My Favorite Museum Exhibit” is a series of posts aimed at giving BoingBoing readers a chance to show off their favorite exhibits and specimens, preferably from museums that might go overlooked in the tourism pantheon. I’ll be featuring posts in this series all week. Want to see them all?

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"My Favorite Museum Exhibit": John Lennon’s Rolls Royce

The wizards at Sparkfun, an open source hardware company, show us how to make one of these spiffy furry barbarian leather arm-bracers with a charmingly anachronistic D&D dice-roller built into, built around a Lilypad soft Arduino controller. I’ve got nothing but respect for the DIY/open source community who take conductive thread, LEDs, and Arduino boxes

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HOWTO make a fur-lined barbarian forearm bracer with a digital D&D dice-roller built in

Gary Hesterberg was in a national park in San Francisco with his two lap dogs. A park ranger saw him with his dogs and told him that the dogs must be leashed. She asked for his name and told him to not to leave. When he started walking away, she shot him in the back

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Ranger tazes off-leash dog walker

For ten years, Kickstarter founder former CTO Andy Baio has been compiling his “Pirating the Oscars” reports, which document which Oscar-nominated movies are available as downloads on P2P and other file-sharing services, measuring how effective the studios are at controlling leaks of “screeners” — DVDs set to members of the Academy for review consideration. This

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Studios winning the battle to stop Oscar screeners from leaking; losing the war

In its earnings call today, Google just announced that there are now some 250 million Android devices in the field, progressing at a rate of 700,000 activations per day — that’s no different than the figure that Android boss Andy Rubin threw out last month , but it’s 50 million more in total than the number given last November. It also says that some 11 billion apps have been downloaded in the Market; it hit 10 billion in early December , so it’s added another billion in about six weeks’ time. To put things in perspective, Apple announced that the iOS App Store had reached 18 billion downloads at last count — the company’s next earnings call is next week, and we’d expect updated stats then. Continue reading…

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Google: 250m Android devices, 700,000 activations per day, 11b Market downloads

I first read Robert Anton Wilson in 1985, which also happened to be my Weirdest Summer Ever. After freshman year at college back East, I went to Berkeley and lived with my high school girlfriend in Barrington Hall, the most legendary and notorious of Berkeley’s student-run co-ops, already sunk into a long sunset of countercultural

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RAW Week: My Weirdest Summer Ever, by Erik Davis