spriteleigh

Microsoft's internal network has begun censoring Torrentfreak, an excellent investigative journalism site that reports on file-sharing, censorship, copyright and Internet regulation around the world. Torrentfreak, which does not host or link to infringing files, is identified as a "security policy violation" by Microsoft's corporate spyware/censorware, supplied by Edge. Microsoft employees who try to read the site are shown a message that says, "The requested resource has been blocked as an identified risk to your client and the Microsoft corporate network."

(YouTube link)

You are in charge of reporting sports at the TV station, and your local team has just won a game that puts them in the Final Four of the March Madness basketball tournament. It's big news, but the NCAA has restrictions on airing clips from the game! What to do? WCJB TV-20, the ABC affiliate in Gainesville, Florida, grabbed the available staff at the TV station and recreated those winning moves to show their viewers! Hey, you do what you gotta do. Putting the “basket” at about seven feet was a smart move. -via Daily Picks and Flicks

(Video Link)

Classic animated series like Tom & Jerry are often studied by animation students so they have a better understanding about timing, staging, and character animation.

The short in this particular study is Down Beat Bear from MGM, 1956, which is heavy on the musical numbers and just the thing to show off your sense of timing as an animator, and the cutesy characters on the anime side are from a video game series called Touhou Project.

This surreal side-by-side short was created by YouTube user dfj688 using an animation program called MikuMikuDance, which explains all the dancing but very little else about this strange project.

-Via Cartoon Brew

A group of developers who worked on Ultima Online, one of the earliest successful MMOs, are creating a game called Shards Online over which players will have enormous control. Players will be able to run their own servers, change the code that the game runs on, and add their own challenges. The internal logic of this is a game set in a multiverse, and players who hop from one server to the next are entering an alternate reality. Shades of World of Democracycraft. (via /.).

(Image Via Awkward Elevator)

A trailer for Michael Bay's controversial Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot movie finally made its way onto the interwebs this week, and while it relieved some of the anxiety felt by fans of the franchise it also created a whole new meme- the Michaelangelo.

Mike’s odd appearance in the trailer was immediately likened to that of Shrek, then other folks jumped on board the Michaelangelo meme train and created some hilarious visual masterpieces sure to make net surfers say cowabunga.

Got a Michaelangelo meme of your own design? Post it in the comments section!

-Via Gamma Squad

Crummy Gummy (previously at Neatorama) presents a new photo series in which he imagines what his favorite toys would say if they could talk (hint: not what you'd hear in the cartoons). The photographs are part of the exhibit Toy Talk opening April 17th at Redefine Gallery in Orlando, Florida. Continue reading for a sneak peek. -Thanks, Crummy!

Microsoft read the email of Hotmail users without a warrant, in order to catch someone who'd leaked some Microsoft software. When they were caught out, the pointed out that they'd always reserved the right to read Hotmail users' email, and tried to reassure other Hotmail users by saying that they were beefing up the internal process by which they decided whose mail to read and when.

Now, citing the "'post-Snowden era' in which people rightly focus on the ways others use their personal information," the company has announced that it will not read its users' email anymore when investigating theft or copyright violations -- instead, it will refer this sort of thing to the police in future (they still reserve the right to read your Hotmail messages without a court order under other circumstances).

As Techdirt's Mike Masnick points out, this is a most welcome change. The message announcing the change by Brad Smith (General Counsel & Executive Vice President, Legal & Corporate Affairs) is thoughtful and forthright. It announces a future round-table on the questions raised by the company's snooping that the Electronic Frontier Foundation can participate in.

Smith asks a seemingly rhetorical question: "What is the best way to strike the balance in other circumstances that involve, on the one hand, consumer privacy interests, and on the other hand, protecting people and the security of Internet services they use?" That is indeed a fascinating question, but in the specific case of Hotmail, I feel like it has a pretty obvious answer: change your terms of service so that you promise not to read your customers' email without a court order. Then, if you think there's a situation that warrants invading your customers' privacy, get a court order. This is just basic rule-of-law stuff, and it's the kind of thing you'd hope Microsoft's General Counsel would find obvious.

The fact that the question is being raised casts more light on Microsoft's extensive "Scroogled" campaign, which (rightly) took Google to task for having a business-model that was predicated on harvesting titanic amounts of personal data. The takeaway here is that while Microsoft's business-model (at the moment) is less privacy-invading than Google's, that is not due to any inherent squeamishness about spying on people -- rather, it's just a practical upshot of its longstanding practices.

In part we have thought more about this in the context of other privacy issues that have been so topical during the past year. We’ve entered a “post-Snowden era” in which people rightly focus on the ways others use their personal information. As a company we’ve participated actively in the public discussions about the proper balance between the privacy rights of citizens and the powers of government. We’ve advocated that governments should rely on formal legal processes and the rule of law for surveillance activities.

While our own search was clearly within our legal rights, it seems apparent that we should apply a similar principle and rely on formal legal processes for our own investigations involving people who we suspect are stealing from us. Therefore, rather than inspect the private content of customers ourselves in these instances, we should turn to law enforcement and their legal procedures.

This also has focused our attention on other important questions about the privacy interests of consumers as they use services across the Internet. What is the best way to strike the balance in other circumstances that involve, on the one hand, consumer privacy interests, and on the other hand, protecting people and the security of Internet services they use? It’s an important question across the tech sector. And it’s the type of question we believe would benefit from broader discussion rather than a single company or industry trying to divine the answers by itself.

We’re listening: Additional steps to protect your privacy (via Techdirt)

James Lileks is a writer perhaps best known for his long fascination with advertising from postwar America. Lint, one of his several blogs, is a long collection of ads from the Mad Men age. You could spend hours scrolling there.

Recently, he's been playing around with adding icons from Google Street View into classic paintings. At the top, you can find "Boulevard Poissonnière" by Jean Béraud (1849-1936) and "River Landscape with Horseman and Peasants" by Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691).

-via Ka-ching!

(YouTube link)

Freddie Wong walks around, enjoying the internet on Google Glass. What could possibly go wrong? Well, considering it’s Freddie Wong, the sky is the limit! Google Glass, used for the purpose for which it was designed, can be hazardous to your health. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Once again, the "piracy-stricken" motion picture association has had a banner year, with box office revenue breaking all records (as they've done in most recent years). The biggest gains this year come from China -- a market condemned by the studios as a hive of piracy.

Some of the best news in the report is that American movies are seeing success in China, which has become the first international market to reach more than $3 billion in movie sales. The Chinese enthusiasm for US-produced movies comes despite the fact that China continues to restrict the number of foreign-made films that can be released in theaters to 34 imports a year.

But the country at the top of the MPAA's sales charts is also at the top of its piracy target list. Last year, the MPAA placed China on the list of the “most notorious” markets for distributing pirated movies and TV shows. As reported by the LA Times, MPAA spokesperson Michael O’Leary has explained:

The criminals who profit from the most notorious markets through the world threaten the very heart of our industry and in doing so threaten the livelihoods of the people who give it life. These markets are an immediate threat to legitimate commerce, impairing legitimate markets' viability and curbing US competitiveness.

Despite prolific piracy, China's increase in sales has been positively "meteoric," MPAA chief Chris Dodd said at a press conference yesterday, noting a 27 percent increase.

Piracy notwithstanding, MPAA enjoys a “very strong year”—again [Joe Silver/Ars Technica]

Remember the copyright trolls at Prenda Law, the slippery crooks who claimed that no one actually owned their extortionate racket, that no one made any money from it, and that no one was responsible for it? Yet another judge has called bullshit on them, insisting that they produce financial statements prepared by a chartered public accountant, and dismissing their objections as "attorney speak."

Worker-owned co-ops are a mainstay of crappy economies, and are thriving around the world. Worker-owned co-ops have better productivity than regular businesses, pay higher wages, and offer better benefits packages. As Shaila Dewan points out in the NYT, they're also easier to accomplish than hikes in the minimum wage or fairer tax-codes. On the other hand, this may be an argument against them, since they may diffuse energy that could make a bigger impact on ordinary workers' lives if it were devoted to systemic fixes.

Still, the worker-owned co-op movement is doing very well, and some co-ops are even using their profits to kickstart other co-ops around the world -- helping fund the worker buyout of a profitable Chicago window-factory that was suddenly closed by its investors because it wasn't profitable enough. The workers took in money from the Latinamerican Working World fund, bought the factory's equipment, and moved it themselves into a new facility. Now they're their own bosses, running a worker-owned window company called New Era Windows.

It's unimaginable heresy in today's world to suggest that doing things is as important as owning things, and that this entitles the people who do stuff to a say in the disposition of the businesses they make possible. But there was a time, not so long ago, when this was a mainstream idea.

Another persistent critique is that workers don’t have enough experience to make good management decisions. Some co-ops solve this problem just as other businesses do, by buying expertise they don’t already have. In 2008, the owners of a Chicago window factory decided to close it with little notice, and the workers staged a six-day sit-in that made them celebrities overnight. Another owner took over but closed the factory again. The workers bought the equipment and moved it to a new factory, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars with sweat equity. The new company, called New Era Windows, opened last year. Though the workers are still paying themselves minimum wage, they elected to hire a high-priced, experienced salesman to drum up business.

New Era was lucky to find financing, borrowing $600,000 from a nonprofit called the Working World, which started lending to co-ops in Latin America and has branched out to the U.S. The biggest challenge co-ops face is lack of capital, which is why they are often labor-intensive businesses with low start-up costs. Banks can be hesitant to lend to co-ops, perhaps because they aren’t familiar with the model. Meanwhile, credit unions — another form of cooperative — face stringent regulations on business lending.

Who Needs a Boss? [Shaila Dewan/NYT]

(via Mefi)

(Image: IWW Printing Co-op, IU 450, Detroit Universal Label, Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)

The State of the Discordant Union: An Empirical Analysis of DMCA Takedown Notices , a paper publishing in Virginia Journal of Law and Technology by Stanford/NUS's Daniel Seng, documents the vast, terrifying increase in the use of DMCA takedown notices, which are self-signed legal notices that allow anyone to demand that material be censored from the Internet, with virtually no penalty for abuse or out-and-out fraud. The increase is driven by a small number of rightsholders who have automated the process of sending out censorship demands, industrializing the practice. The three biggest players are RIAA, Froytal and Microsoft, who sent more than 5 million notices each in 2012, and at least doubled their takedowns again in 2013. In the four years between 2008 and 2012, the use of takedown notices against Google grew by an eye-popping 711,887 percent.

Where copyright holders previously listed only one work per notice, there are now sometimes dozens of movies or tracks bundled in each. This is a worrying development according to Seng.

“It is disturbing to see the trend where more claims and more takedown requests are packed into each takedown notice. Up until 2010, each notice contained only one claim. But in 2011, the average number of claims per notice is 2.18, and in 2012, this average is 5.05,” Seng writes.

More copyrighted works per notice also means that the number of URLs per notice is increasing too. For example, between 2011 and 2012 the average number of URLs listed in each notice increased from 47.79 to 124.75.

According to Seng, these changes can be attributed to a small number of copyright holders. In fact, most copyright holders still submit only one notice.

“These increasing averages paint a slightly misleading picture. More than 65% of all reporters have only issued one notice, and almost 95% of all reporters have issued no more than 10 notices in 2012,” Seng writes.

Google Takedown Notices Surge 711,887 Percent in Four Years [Ernesto/Torrentfreak]

(YouTube link)

Ensemble ACJW performs a whole slew of cartoon themes all in one medley. How many do you recognize? There’s a list of them at the YouTube page. I looked through them, and there was only an outside chance of my recognizing six of them, as these cartoons mostly premiered after I became an adult. For the biggest part of the internet population, they will probably bring back some fine memories. They do a very good job of playing them!  -via Tastefully Pffensive

[This op-ed is by Lizz Winstead, co-creator of The Daily Show and Lady Parts Justice - Mark]

The most important takeaway from yesterday’s Hobby Lobby arguments is thank God women sit on the Supreme Court. Had there been no female justices, these fundamentals would have gone unchallenged:

a. A corporation is a person.

b. An emulsion of sexy fun time fluids is a person.

c. Birth control is an abortion

d. A woman can be legally required to participate in a three-way with her boss.

The women on the court drove the questions while Chief Justice John Roberts and Co. bought Hobby Lobby’s 64-pack of crapola.

And even Green family lawyers are crafty. They took a hot glue gun and slapped together some smoke and mirrors to create a bullshit narrative that the billionaire Green family are running some religiously oppressed “Mom and Pop ” operation.

After the oral arguments, Hobby Lobby’s attorney flooded cable news, not seeing any hypocrisy in the fact that the Christian craft store had no problem profiting from customers who need centerpieces for their abominable gay weddings. It’s only when they have to fork out money to cover an employee’s sinful birth control that they play the “abomination” card.

Oh, and I am sure every Styrofoam wreath and tube of glitter are only made in the Christian Chinese factories located in the “abortion-free” provinces.

Please.

This isn’t about religion it is about their bottom line. Everyone knows not getting laid is the gateway drug to scrap booking. Seriously, if you are getting it on the regular, your desire to sponge glaze your bedroom walls greatly diminishes. More sex = less crafting. Period.

“But where will it lead if Hobby Lobby wins?”, is the question everyone and their mother have been furiously asking, writing and tweeting. So we at Lady Parts Justice have made this little video reminder of where we might be headed if a corporation is legally able to hide behind religion to enact hideous business practices.

The screen shots above don’t do justice to the web toy Patatap, because the images fade too quickly to capture at their best. Just load Patatap, and start pushing letter keys. You’ll hear sounds and colors and shapes and flashing effects. The space key will change the color scheme. Even your cat can play! With a little practice and experimenting, you just might become a virtuoso and create something spectacular. -via Metafilter

Why Lumosity.com (and other workouts for your brain) are unlikely to actually make you smarter or help you think better.

The Walt Disney Company has acquired Maker Studios -- a successful Youtube channel focused on millennials -- for $500M, with an additional $450M potential performance-related payout in the future.

The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe Malfunction #RuinAChildrensBook@midnight

— Judah Friedlander (@JudahWorldChamp) March 25, 2014

Make a slight alteration to a classic work from children's literature. Sometimes just a single letter. The results are hilarious. If you're not on Twitter, feel free to add your own in the comments.

#RuinAChildrensBook If You Give a Mouse a Roofie

— Robb Allen (@ItsRobbAllen) March 25, 2014

Harry Potter and the White Van of Secrets #RuinAChildrensBook@midnight

— Wil Wheaton (@wilw) March 25, 2014

Charlotte's Web 2.0 #RuinAChildrensBook

— MarcNash (@21stCscribe) March 25, 2014

@Popehat LeBron James and the Giant Peach #RuinAChildrensBook

— mrgunn (@mrgunn) March 25, 2014

Good Night Reverend Moon. #RuinAChildrensBook

— Popehat (@Popehat) March 25, 2014

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret Thatcher. #RuinAChildrensBook@midnight

— Chris Hardwick (@nerdist) March 25, 2014

#RuinAChildrensBook The Lending Tree

— Hal 10000 (@Hal_RTFLC) March 25, 2014

#RuinAChildrensBook Harry Potter & The Sorcerer's Kidney Stone

— Robb Allen (@ItsRobbAllen) March 25, 2014

The Babysitter's Fight Club @midnight#RuinAChildrensBook

— Jacob Givens (@jacobgivens) March 25, 2014

#RuinAChildrensBook Charlotte's Web Browser History

— Not at Third Base (@morethanBrando) March 25, 2014

Oh, The Places You Will Never Afford To Go #ruinachildrensbook

— Chris McGovern (@CMctheglassblog) March 25, 2014

Charlotte's Web of Lies #ruinachildrensbook

— Greg Hemphill (@greghemphill69) March 25, 2014

Where's Waldo's Father #ruinachildrensbook@midnight

— Nick Alexander (@NickOHlessA) March 25, 2014

Scott sez, "Privacy and security has been a huge problem since the Snowden revelations, and midwest SF/open source software convention Penguicon [ed: near Detroit!] wants to be part of the solution. With Guest of Honor Eva Galperin from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Cory Doctorow returning as Guest Emeritus, much of their tech track is focused on finding answers to the recent privacy problems highlighted by Snowden. Pre-registration tickets are available until April 1st. Programming was just announced." (Thanks, Scott!)

In Florida, District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro has dismissed a suit brought by notorious porno-copyright trolls Malibu Media on the grounds that an IP address does not affirmatively identify a person, and so they cannot sue someone solely on the basis of implicating an IP address in an infringement. This is a potentially important precedent, as it effectively neutralizes the business-model of copyright trolls, who use IP addresses as the basis for court orders to ISPs to turn over their customers' addresses, which are then inundated with threatening letters. The porno copyright trolls have a distinctly evil wrinkle on this, too: they threaten their victims with lawsuits that will forever associate the victims' names with embarrassing pornographic video-titles, often with gay themes.

“Plaintiff has shown that the geolocation software can provide a location for an infringing IP address; however, Plaintiff has not shown how this geolocation software can establish the identity of the Defendant,” Ungaro wrote in an order last week.

“There is nothing that links the IP address location to the identity of the person actually downloading and viewing Plaintiff’s videos, and establishing whether that person lives in this district,” she adds.

Judge: IP-Address Is Not a Person and Can’t Identify a BitTorrent Pirate [Ernesto/Torrentfreak]

This journey through the semiotic landscape of marketing is beautiful, charming, insighting, brandful, burtational. [Video Link]

This Is a Generic Brand Video is a generic brand video of “This Is a Generic Brand Video,” written by Kendra Eash for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. No surprise, it’s made entirely with stock footage. All video clips used are from dissolve.com. See and license them here: dissolve.com/generic The original piece is published on McSweeney's

Stingrays are cell phone tracking and monitoring devices disguised as cell phone towers. Harris, the corporation that sells the majority of stingrays, "profited an average of over $533 million in each of the last five years," according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Ars Techica reports that "Harris requires its law enforcement clients to sign ... nondisclosure agreements that forbid those agencies from publicly revealing whether they use the stingray."

Look, we got the cyperpunk dystopia of our dreams! Cities won't talk about spying devices disguised as cell phone towers

(Image: Cogdogblog CC share-alike)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is trying to figure out what the LAPD is doing with the mountains (and mountains) of license-plate data that they're harvesting in the city's streets without a warrant or judicial oversight. As part of the process, they've asked the LAPD for a week's worth of the data they're collecting, and in their reply brief, the LAPD argues that it can't turn over any license-plate data because all the license-plates they collect are part of an "ongoing investigation," because every car in Los Angeles is part of an ongoing criminal investigation, because some day, someone driving that car may commit a crime.

As EFF's Jennifer Lynch says, "This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity."

This reminds me of the NSA's argument that they're collecting "pieces of a puzzle" and Will Potter's rebuttal: "The reality is that the NSA isn't working with a mosaic or a puzzle. What the NSA is really advocating is the collection of millions of pieces from different, undefined puzzles in the hopes that sometime, someday, the government will be working on a puzzle and one of those pieces will fit." The same thing could be said of the LAPD.

In another interesting turn in the case, both agencies fully acknowledged the privacy issues implicated by the collection of license plate data.

LAPD stated in its brief:

"[T]he privacy implications of disclosure [of license plate data] are substantial. Members of the public would be justifiably concerned about LAPD releasing information regarding the specific locations of their vehicles on specific dates and times. . . . LAPD is not only asserting vehicle owners' privacy interests. It is recognizing that those interests are grounded in federal and state law, particularly the California Constitution. Maintaining the confidentiality of ALPR data is critical . . . in relation to protecting individual citizens' privacy interests"

The sheriff's department recognized that ALPR data tracked "individuals' movement over time" and that, with only a license plate number, someone could learn "personal identifying information" about the vehicle owner (such as the owner's home address) by looking up the license plate number in a database with "reverse lookup capabilities such as LexisNexis and Westlaw."

The agencies use the fact that ALPR data collection impacts privacy to argue that—although they should still be allowed to collect this information and store it for years—they should not have to disclose any of it to the public. However, the fact that the technology can be so privacy invasive suggests that we need more information on where and how it is being collected, not less. This sales video from Vigilant Solutions shows just how much the government can learn about where you've been and how many times you've been there when Vigilant runs their analytics tools on historical ALPR data. We can only understand how LA police are really using their ALPR systems through access to the narrow slice of the data we've requested in this case.

Los Angeles Cops Argue All Cars in L.A. Are Under Investigation [Jennifer Lynch, EFF]

(via /.)

Pure genius from Joe Sabia, and a beautiful example of what's possible when bright creative minds experiment with fair re-use.

The Office is relatable (and hilarious) because it borrows so much from culture, and people get the references. Culture is society’s collected knowledge, art, and customs. It’s what surrounds us and unites us, and it allows us to collectively laugh at a joke in The Office about Ben Franklin or M. Night Shyamalan. Culture, simply put, is the seasoning in a meal. (...) This Time Machine is intended to show how much we rely on culture. So let artists bang it out without fear of being sued.

In The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis [PDF], published in Science, researchers try to understand why Google Flu (which uses search history to predict flu outbreaks) performed so well at first but has not done well since. One culprit: people don't know what the flu is, so their search for "flu" doesn't necessarily mean they have flu. More telling, though, is that Google can't let outsiders see their data or replicate their findings, meaning that they can't get the critical review that might help them spot problems before years of failure. (via Hacker News)