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In Seedship, you play a colony ship's AI, piloting a thousand hibernating colonists through unimaginably vast stretches of space, scanning candidate planets and deciding whether or not to found a colony there. (more…)

Benjamin Mako Hill (previously) collaborated with colleagues involved in critical technology studies to write a textbook chapter analyzing the use of computational methods in social science and providing advice for social scientists who want to delve into data-based social science. (more…)

Britain's Intellectual Property Office admits that its cartoon informing children about copyright infringement is "dry and niche," despite exciting scenes such an old man in a suit explaining intellectual property and a goatlike charicature of popular singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran.

The Intellectual Property Office is leading the government's efforts to crack down on internet piracy and protect the revenues of Britain's creative industries.

The government agency is spending £20,000 of its own money on the latest Nancy campaign, which is part-funded by the UK music industry.

Catherine Davies, head of the IPO's education outreach department, which already produces teaching materials for GCSE students, admitted IP was a "complex subject" for small children and something of a challenge to make accessible and entertaining.

Some fear, the BBC reports, that the campaign is so numbing and heavy-handed its message about piracy "could backfire." [via Tim Cushing]

Inspired by this artwork depicting Bruce Lee with lightsaber nunchucks, artist Patrick Nan of San Jose, California decided to add some light-weapons to the karate master's 1972 Fist of Fury. It's a cool effect!

(The Awesomer)

The music of Journey and Beyoncé shouldn't work well together but this mashup by oneboredjeu (aka Maddy) proves otherwise. By combining "Any Way You Want It" with "Drunk in Love," she's created a super-trippy mix called "Any Way You Love It."

Previously: Listen to this fantastic mashup of Pearl Jam's 'Jeremy' and the Footloose theme

(Digg)

Amazon was the last major tech company to issue a "transparency report" detailing what kinds of law-enforcement requests they'd serviced, and where; when they finally did start issuing them, they buried them on obscure webpages deep in their corporate info site and released them late on Friday afternoons. (more…)

Motherboard reports that a university professor created an app that detects net neutrality violations -- that is, when service providers block, throttle, prioritize or otherwise interfere with legal internet use. It's like a speed-test app, same as all the others, but with more detail and a serious research goal in mind. Apple, sadly, finds it contains "objectionable content" that lacks "direct benefits" to its users, unlike utilitarian AppStore mainstays such as iFart: The Original Fart Sounds App and Thump Trump.

An Apple App Store reviewer told Choffnes that “your app has no direct benefits to the user,” according to screenshots reviewed by Motherboard. According to Apple’s reviewer, the app contained “Objectionable Content,” a catch-all for apps that Apple doesn’t want to let into its App Store. Apple is blocking the app and no one is quite sure why, including Choffnes; neither Apple nor Verizon responded to requests for comment for this article.

Wehe is is designed to be part of Choffnes’s research work to determine geographic and carrier-related differences in video throttling. When you open the app, you are presented with a consent form that “invites you to take part in a research project.”

Can't imagine why deep academic research, performed by the general public at the app layer when the Senate is one vote from enshrining Net Neutrality in law and permanently undermining the federal regulator that ISPs spent years capturing, might set off alarm bells in the walled garden at the world's most profitable phone company

Last week, cowards from both sides of the aisle caved into America's lawless spy agencies, and today bipartisan senators reprised that cowardice to ensure that the Senate would not get a chance to vote on amendments to the renewal of Section 702, the rule that has allowed the NSA to conduct mass, warrantless surveillance on Americans in secret, without meaningful oversight or limits. (more…)

A few weeks ago we were shocked to learn that Playboy had, without notifying us, sued us over this post (we learned about it when a journalist DM'ed us on Twitter to ask about it). Today, we filed a motion to dismiss, asking the judge to throw out this baseless, bizarre case. We really hope the courts see it our way, for all our sakes.

Playboy’s lawsuit is based on an imaginary (and dangerous) version of US copyright law that bears no connection to any US statute or precedent. Playboy -- once legendary champions for the First Amendment -- now advances a fringe copyright theory: that it is illegal to link to things other people have posted on the web, on pain of millions in damages -- the kinds of sums that would put us (and every other small publisher in America) out of business.

Rather than pursuing the individual who created the allegedly infringing archive, Playboy is pursuing a news site for pointing out the archive’s value as a historical document. In so doing, Playboy is seeking to change the legal system so that deep-pocketed opponents of journalism can shut down media organizations that displease them. It's a law that they could never get from Congress, but which they hope the courts will conjure into existence by wiping us off the net.

It's not just independent publishers who rely on the current state of copyright law, either. Major media outlets (like Playboy!) routinely link and embed media, without having to pay a lawyer to research the copyright status of something someone else posted, before discussing, explaining or criticizing it.

The world can't afford a judgment against us in this case -- it would end the web as we know it, threatening everyone who publishes online, from us five weirdos in our basements to multimillion-dollar, globe-spanning publishing empires like Playboy.

As a group of people who have had long associations with Playboy, reading the articles (really!) and sometimes writing them, we hope the judge sees it our way -- for our sakes... and for Playboy's.

You can read our motion here, and EFF's press release here. We'll have more to say after the judge issues his ruling.

Here's the introduction from our motion to dismiss:

This lawsuit is frankly mystifying. Playboy’s theory of liability seems to be that it is illegal to link to material posted by others on the web — an act performed daily by hundreds of millions of users of Facebook and Twitter, and by journalists like the ones in Playboy’s crosshairs here.

Defendant Happy Mutants, LLC (“Happy Mutants”) is the corporation behind Boing Boing, a blog created and written by five people to share “mostly wonderful things.” For three decades, Boing Boing has reported on social, educational, political, scientific, and artistic developments in popular culture, becoming one of the Internet’s leading sources of news and commentary. Plaintiff Playboy Entertainment Group Inc. (“Playboy”), an entertainment behemoth with a notable history of defending freedom of the press, is suing this much smaller but important news site for reporting on the existence of a collection of Playboy centerfolds and linking to that collection. In other words, rather than pursuing the individual who created the allegedly infringing archive, Playboy is pursuing a news site for pointing out the archive’s value as a historical document.

The facts pleaded in Playboy’s First Amended Complaint (“FAC”) do not state a claim for either direct or contributory copyright infringement. With respect to direct infringement, Playboy alleges that third parties — not Boing Boing — posted the collection at issue, and that Boing Boing made reference to that collection with a hyperlink. As for secondary liability, Playboy does not allege facts that could show that Boing Boing induced or materially contributed to direct infringement by any third party. Playboy’s claim fails for these reasons alone.

What is more, Playboy’s own allegations show that further amendment would be futile. Boing Boing’s post is a noninfringing fair use, made for the favored and transformative purposes of news reporting, criticism, and commentary so that the reader can, in the words of the post in question, “see how our standards of hotness, and the art of commercial erotic photography, have changed over time.”

The Court should dismiss Playboy’s First Amended Complaint with prejudice.

A legal battle against the recent repeal of Net Neutrality regulations by Trump's Federal Communications Commission has begun.

(more…)

https://vimeo.com/233573799

Joey Eschrich from ASU's Center for Science and Imagination writes, "To celebrate the official 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (previously) on January 1, 2018, we’ve launched Frankenstein200, a free, interactive, multiplatform experience for kids. Developed in partnership with the award-winning transmedia studio No Mimes Media (cofounded by the hyper-talented Maureen McHugh), with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Frankenstein200 is a digital narrative paired with hands-on activities happening in January and February at museums and science centers across the United States." (more…)

A group of Princeton and Purdue researchers have demonstrated a successful acoustic attack against mechanical hard-drives where low-frequency noise keyed to the resonant frequency of the drive components is played nearby, causing the drive to vibrate so that the drive can neither be read nor written to. (more…)

Bruce Lee was the most badass martial arts movie star ever. How could you possibly make his moves any cooler? Maybe with a lightsaber! Inspired by a digital artwork by DeviantART member Ameeeeba, Patrick Nan altered a scene from the 1972 movie Fist of Fury to include lasers in dangerous places- like nunchucks.  

(YouTube link)

Yeah, that could leave you with some serious armpit burns, but it looks good. -via Tastefully Offensive 

Large German companies are required to give board-seats to representatives from their workers' unions, which makes the companies both more profitable and more equitable, so it's unusual for German workers to go out on strike, but 15,000 members of IG Metall union, the country's largest trade union, are engaged in short-term "warning strikes" against 80 companies for the right to take up to two years' worth of 28-hour working weeks, a kind of "work-life-balance" leave that has evolved out of the country's existing parental leave, but would allow workers to take extra time to care for aging relatives. (more…)

Libertarian wisdom holds that "the answer to bad speech is more speech," but if you're a Peter Thiel libertarian (that is, the kind of "freedom lover" who doesn't think women should vote, wants to spy on everyone in the world, and secretly wields power to censor the free press), then "the answer to bad speech is secretly backing lawsuits by washed-up pro-wrestlers in order to kill a media outlet whose reporting you don't like." (more…)

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer BewareThe Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has issued an alert on copyright infringement by the Internet Archive. Other professional writers' groups taking notice include the UK's Society of Authors,... [...]

Continue reading Alert: Copyright Infringement By the Internet Archive (and What You Can Do About It)

Apple was the last major holdout on proprietary video codecs, the only major industry player that hadn't signed onto the Alliance for Open Media, home of the AV1 video format, a successor to On2's groundbreaking open formats of the early web years, which led to the company's acquisition by Google in 2010. (more…)

A Ninth Circuit Appellate Court has rejected Oracle's attempt to treat violating its website terms of service as a felony under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, (more…)

On January 11, the House passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act bill which renews a controversial NSA surveillance program that allows the spy agency to intercept the communications of Americans without a warrant.

(more…)

If you had an email address in the late 1990s, you probably received a video file titled “badday.mpg” at least once. It was big- 5MB, and took a while to download, if you were lucky enough to have a video player on your computer. The 26-second video was worth it, though, as we saw a man sitting in his office cubicle losing his temper at a computer. He picks up his keyboard and whacks the monitor so hard it falls off the desk! It was one of the earliest examples of a viral video, and it made Vinny Licciardi a star. Twenty years later, the video is still shared.   

That the clip still resonates is a testament to our broader cultural feelings about technology, especially vis-a-vis the workplace. “I’m kind of amazed it’s still going around as much as it is, but I think everyone can relate to that moment,” Licciardi says. “They’re so ticked off because their software is not working, or there’s some glitch, and everybody’s wanted to do that at one point in their life.”

(YouTube link)

You might want to learn the story of why the video came to be, and how it became a viral hit, at Wired. -via Metafilter

Thank you, DJ Cummerbund. Thank you for perfectly combining Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" and Kenny Loggins' Footloose theme (and a little of Tina Turner's "Proud Mary" too) into "Jereloose." That was thoroughly enjoyable.

YouTube commenter Ramanan amusingly calls it "the jauntiest song about a school shooting since Pumped Up Kicks!"

(The Awesomer)

The He-Man Woman Haters’ Club is about one thing: Family.

This recut of The Little Rascals movie, using audio from Furious 7 is probably the best thing you'll see today.

You’d never know it, but hearing Vin Diesel,  Tyrese, and Jason Statham’s voice come out of Alfafa, Spanky, and Buckwheat is incredible. Not to mention the perfect matching of the soapbox derby with the dubstep of Furious 7. 

Ugh. This is perfect. And thank you for not putting Donald Trump (that billionaire, reality-TV gameshow host who won the presidency last yera) in this trailer because he’s 100% in The Little Rascals movie as, get this, the loser rich kid’s father.

In 1998, Disney led an entertainment industry lobbying effort that resulted in the term of copyright being extended by 20 years, even for works that had already been created -- a law with an incoherent basis, given that the US copyright system is constitutionally constrained to passing laws to promote new creative works (giving creators more copyright on works they've already created doesn't get them to make new ones, and it reduces the ability of new artists to remix existing works, the way Disney did with the Grimm's fairy tales). (more…)

https://youtu.be/VcQZAzDVTlA

This 10-hour-long video of nothing but white noise was created by Australian musician Sebastian Tomczak and uploaded to YouTube in 2015. He says five different parties are accusing him of copyright infringement and are demanding the advertising revenue derived from it.

From BBC:

The claimants accusing him of infringement include publishers of white noise intended for sleep therapy.

"I will be disputing these claims," he told the BBC.

In this case, those accusing Mr Tomczak are not demanding the video's removal, but instead the reward of any revenue made from advertising associated with it.

Without the claims, Mr Tomczak would receive such revenue himself.

"I am intrigued and perplexed that YouTube's automated content ID system will pattern-match white noise with multiple claims," he said.

His video was originally made along with other 10-hour recordings - including one of a continuous electronic tone.

The claims relate to specific portions of similarly lengthy videos of white noise also posted on the site.

Image: Pixabay/CC0 Creative Commons

What is Life? collects some of the more interesting takes on whether we may be living in a computer simulation. (more…)

27-year-old writer and artist Joe Veix had the genius idea to create Facebook for the world. He published the login details on Twitter and everything after that was a blur.

Steam 250 lists the best-rated games ever on Steam, but its hidden gems page lists uses an absolute weighting that exposes little-played titles with few negative votes. First impression: bullet hell shooter fans know what they want, and they get it. Pictured here is Yorkshire Gubbins, the 25th-best-rated game on Steam, "a collection of incomprehensibly daft comedy adventures" set in the climate-challenged English county of that name.

Five months after learning of the devastating Spectre and Meltdown bugs, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich sold off more than $39,000,000 worth of his Intel stock, all he was permitted to liquidate. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcQZAzDVTlA

Sebastian Tomczak, who blogs his fascination with sound and technology at little-scale.blogspot.com, reports that "My ten hour white noise video now has five copyright claims!"

The culprit appears to be YouTube's hapless and hostile contentID system, which automatically matches portions of different videos, makes stupid conclusions about intellectual property, then invites corporate customers to "claim" and monetize other people's work as their own. https://twitter.com/littlescale/status/949032404206870528

Owning white noise today are "White Noise Sleep Therapy", "El Muelle Records", "Rachel Conwell" and "Silent Knights."