spriteleigh

When the USA decided to retroactively extend the term of copyright, it deprived itself of free, open access to important cultural treasures that new creators could build upon as creators have done since time immemorial. (more…)

This quiet genius from "SardineWhiskers" returns the sinister potential to Nintendo's love of midcentury charm. Make musak grim again!

Marvel is launching a website that allows visitors to create their own comics using the company's pantheon of famous characters. They insist, however, that certain topics not be addressed: social issues, death, farts, and so forth. You wonder: if the trap is so obvious, why walk into it?

Here are some highlights from the very long list of no-no’s:
“Content that could frighten or upset young children or the parents of young children.”
Prescription drugs or over-the-counter medication, vitamins, and dietary supplements.
Contraceptives
“Suggestive or revealing images,” including “bare midriffs”
“Sensationalism,” which is not defined but elucidated with the examples “killer bees, gossip, aliens, scandal, etc.”
“Obscenity, bad or offensive language” or “proxies for bad or offensive language.” E.g. no “X@#%!”
“Noises related to bodily functions.”
No politics, including “alternative lifestyle advocacies”
Death
“Misleading language”
“A copy or parody of current or past Marvel advertising creative”
Any “controversial topics,” including “social issues”
Double entendres
Any amusement parks that aren’t Disney amusement parks
Any movie studios that aren’t “affiliated with Marvel”
Guns

I can't wait to play with this.

https://twitter.com/alexdecampi/status/946554968504438798

Alice Maz was part of a small group of players who came to have near-total mastery over the internal economy of a popular Minecraft; Maz describes how her early fascination with the mechanics of complex multiplayer games carried over into an interest in economics and games, and that let her become a virtuoso player, and brilliant thinker, about games and economics. (more…)

My end-of-the-year roundup the year in DRM for EFF's Deeplinks blog hits seven lowlights, from the catastrophic (the W3C greenlighting DRM for the web) to the idiotic (North Korea's DRM-encrusted tablets) and beyond. (more…)

Winston Churchill was an American best-selling novelist of the early 20th century. He is nowadays overshadowed, even as a writer, by a certain cigar-toting British statesman of the same name, with whom he was acquainted, but not related.

Here's the CSPD list of works that should have entered the public domain this year, but didn't thanks to congressional servicing of Disney.

Last year, the Mirai botnet harnessed a legion of badly secured internet of things devices and turned them into a denial of service superweapon that brought down critical pieces of internet infrastructure (and even a country), and now its creators have entered guilty pleas to a Computer Fraud and Abuse Act federal case, and explained that they created the whole thing to knock down Minecraft servers that competed with their nascent Minecraft hosting business. (more…)

CIPPIC is the University of Ottawa's Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, Canada's public interest digital rights advocates. CIPPIC champions the public interest in Canada's law and technology debates. We bring our legal experience and expertise to bear in Canada's most important battles in copyright, privacy, surveillance, and internet regulation.

CIPPIC is in its fifteenth year standing guard for Canadians' digital rights, and our team of public interest technology lawyers need your support. For the past fifteen years, CIPPIC has been advocating for Canadians' digital rights before Parliament, before the courts, and before privacy and telecommunications regulators:

* In 2004, CIPPICcs intervention in the music labels' file-sharing lawsuits in the Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal led to the inclusion of crucial privacy protections. The labels ultimately dropped the lawsuits.

* In 2008, CIPPIC's complaint to Canada's Privacy Commissioner about Facebook led to sweeping changes in how Facebook treats your information, and prompted action by privacy regulators around the globe.

* CIPPIC is a champion of net neutrality, arguing before the Canada's regulators in 2009 (net neutrality for ISPs), 2010 (net neutrality for mobile phones), 2011 (fair 'Usage Based Billing' practices) and 2016-17 (differential pricing - charging different prices for different types of Internet traffic).

* In 2015, CIPPIC partnered with with Citizen Lab to publish a headline-making report on Canadian law enforcement's use of 'IMSI-catchers' - an eavesdropping tool for intercepting mobile phone traffic and tracking the location of mobile phone users.

* In 2017, we intervened in a half dozen court cases addressing issues that ranged from asking whether police should have power to search your mobile phone contents on arrest to inquiring into Canadian courts' powers to make orders with sweeping international effects.

* CIPPIC has argued for the public interest in the Supreme Court of Canada over a dozen times in the past decade, starting with an an intervention arguing for consumer e-contracting rights in 2007's Dell Computer Corp. v. Union des consommateurs, 2007 SCC 34, and continuing with an application to intervene in The Queen v. Philip Morris International, Inc., where we will argue for transparency and accountability in the government's use of big data and algorithmic decision-making.

As we look forward to our next fifteen years, we don't see Canada's tech policy challenges getting any easier. We are fighting for privacy protections and balanced copyright in international trade negotiations (NAFTA 2.0 and the resurrected TPP), we are seeing challenges to balanced copyright in the courts (appeals on parody and fair dealing decisions and class actions targeting file-sharers), and we are advocating for Canadian's rights as the Canadian law enforcement and security establishment continues to adopt new legal a nd technological tools - with scary implications for privacy and liberty - in the name of security.

We also see new issues for Canadians' digital rights on the horizon: we have already done work on autonomous cars and 'smart cities', and are looking at the implications for Canadians' rights as we move to embrace big data, the internet of things, and artificial intelligence tools. There has never been a greater need for CIPPIC's experience and expertise in championing Canadians' digital rights in tech law policy-making.

As you consider your annual giving recipients this year, consider giving to CIPPIC to help us fight for your digital rights. Giving to CIPPIC offers some special advantages:

* Get a charitable receipt! Housed within the University of Ottawa, your donation to CIPPIC qualifies as a charitable donation.

* Each dollar you donate on November 28, Giving Tuesday, will be matched 50 cents to the dollar to a maximum of $500 per donor for the first $150,000 donated to the University of Ottawa.

It is said that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Fortunately, Canadians have CIPPIC to help in standing guard.

Last month, James "New Aesthetic" Bridle published an influential essay exploring the prolific and disturbing video-spam that had come to dominate Youtube Kids, in which seemingly algorithmically generated videos endlessly recombined a handful of Disney characters and assorted others engaged in violent, abusive and even psychosexual conduct, over a soundtrack of a few repeated public-domain kids' songs, with all sorts of trickery designed to uprank them in Youtube's play-next, recommendation and search results -- keyword stuffing, duration-stretching and more. (more…)

It works surprisingly well, giving every scene so enhanced the superficial intensity of a church-mandated declaration of love.

"Clouds?"

Now I'll be spending all day seeing what other divine nightmares await in the kingdom of KoTH YouTube poop.

The "replay sessions" captured by surveillance-oriented "analytics" companies like Fullstory allow their customers -- "Walgreens, Zocdoc, Shopify, CareerBuilder, SeatGeek, Wix.com, Digital Ocean, DonorsChoose.org, and more" -- to watch everything you do when you're on their webpages -- every move of the mouse, every keystroke (even keystrokes you delete before submitting), and more, all attached to your real name, stored indefinitely, and shared widely with many, many "partners." (more…)

Creator of the Cherpumple (and other retro-fabulous foods) Charles Phoenix has a new book that celebrates "classic & kitschy American life & style." It's titled Addicted to Americana and it looks amazing!

Here's a look inside the book (click on image to embiggen):

The book is available for $22.32 on Amazon.

Charles is also on a book signing and comedy slide show tour (mostly in California). If you've never seen him perform, please do yourself a favor and get thee to one of his shows. They are a hoot.

It's been 15 years since Sony used the DMCA to shut down the community that had sprung up to extend the functionality of its Aibo robot dogs, threatening people with lawsuits and jailtime for modifying their dogs' operating systems. (more…)

Reddit embarked on a purge of violence-advocating content today, the targets generally being Nazis and their friends, but also at least one animal abuse subreddit and one targeting white people.

The newly banned and removed pages include r/NationalSocialism, r/Nazi, r/whitesarecriminals and r/far_right.

Reddit's new policy says: "Do not post content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people."

On the latest Webby Podcast, my pal and Webbys exec director David-Michel Davies has a rollicking and provocative conversation with the great activist lawyer Lawrence Lessig. In 2014, Lessig won the Webby Awards' Lifetime Achievement Award and damn he deserved it. Listen:

As any author will tell you, the way to become a better writer is to do it every single day. To help promote your daily writing habit, BlankPage provides a clean environment that tracks your progress over time. This app is currently being offered in the Boing Boing Store for $24.99.

Since writing well demands focus, it can be tough to stay on task when your interface is cluttered with unnecessary formatting options. BlankPage keeps it minimal: only the title, content, and the current word count are on display while you work. Each piece you write can be treated as a standalone article, or freely arranged into a larger work.

BlankPage also lets you set goals for how much you would like to get done during each session, and gives motivational messages to keep you on task while working on big or small projects.

You can get lifetime access to BlankPage from the Boing Boing Store now for $24.99.

Denuvo is billed as the video game industry's "best in class" DRM, charging games publishers a premium to prevent people from playing their games without paying for them. In years gone by, Denuvo DRM would remain intact for as long as a month before cracks were widely disseminated. (more…)

The Canadian Communications Security Establishment -- the most secretive of Canada's spy agencies -- has released the sourcecode for Assemblyline, a "Swiss Army Knife for malware analysis" that rolls up several malware analysis tools into a single unit, which can scan files for known malware and also assign a score to files indicating the likeliness that the file has a previously unseen form of malware. (more…)

Have you ever struggled to tell whether warm fluid in a bowl is soup or some other liquid dish? Perhaps you were wondering whether bisque is a soup or not, or whether a really runny stew qualifies as a soup?

Bisque is soup but classifying runny stew is totally up to you, and deciding whether something is soup or not will only ever come in handy when you play Something Something Soup Something, a free browser game by Italian philosopher and game designer Stefano Gualeni.

In Something Something Soup Something the players are tasked with figuring out whether a bowl of random stuff deserves to be called soup:

It takes place in a future where humans have mastered the science of teleportation. Instead of using it to eliminate scarcity or instantly transport Martin Shkreli to a distant black hole, they’ve taken to teleporting goods produced by underpaid aliens from distant planets. Goods like soup.
Problem is, aliens don’t have the best grip on how human digestive systems work, and the concept of “soup” isn’t really a thing in their society. You play as a certified human Soup Technician, and it’s up to you to figure out which dishes they send over do and do not constitute soup.

-Via Kotaku

A gentleman jailed for his part in a $5.4m scam wanted Google to remove links to news stories about the wheeze. His cunning plan to get them to do it – file a DMCA takedown notice claiming copyright in his own name and criminal record – perhaps offers a clue about why he got caught in the first place.

From the FBI's press release:

According to a plea agreement filed in this case, Henrik Sardariani obtained more than $5 million in loans after, among other things, falsifying numerous documents. In order to obtain one of the loans, Henrik Sardariani fraudulently used a house as collateral and falsely claimed to be the president of the company that owned the property. To support the claim that he controlled the company, Henrik Sardariani created false corporate records that were presented to the lender.

Henrik Sardariani also admitted that he created fraudulent property records to make it appear that prior loans had been paid off and that, therefore, new loans would be fully secured by unencumbered property. The fraudulent reconveyances bore forged and fraudulent signatures of notaries public, as well as fraudulent stamps of the notaries public.

Update: Shooting the Messenger writes that there are at least three of these DMCA takedowns filed by people involved in this particular case.

Last June, Portugal enacted Law No. 36/2017 which bans putting DRM on public domain media or government works, and allows the public to break DRM that interferes with their rights in copyright, including private copying, accessibility adaptation, archiving, reporting and commentary and more. (more…)

The Week catches up on a few years' worth of "minor to major" edits to well-known sad or dark songs, upsetting the mood to happy or humorous effect. Embedded here is The Godfather theme, which when modified sounds rather like the theme tune to the arcadian British show Last of the Summer Wine, about old Yorkshiremen enjoying their endless retirements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyVq85xrTCY

Someone should make that sound tragic and sinister instead, a sort of "Last of the Middlesborough Vodka."

Also:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ppoRHBtwCY&feature=youtu.be&t=2m27s

Did you know that it is illegal to photograph the Eiffel Tower at night? Taking pictures of the Paris landmark is perfectly fine during the day, but not at night. Or, to be realistic, you can't take photos of the tower at night and use them for commercial purposes. The reasoning is bound up in weird copyright laws.

(YouTube link)

It never occurred to me that a building could be copyrighted. Sure, I understand that you can't just design and build a building by copying some other architect's work, but taking a picture should be okay. And it is, in most places. But not France.  -via Laughing Squid

Under US copyright law, creators who have signed away their copyrights for the "full duration of copyright" can still get their rights back from publishers under something called the "Termination of Transfer," which is a hellishly complex and technical copyright provision that is almost never used, since it requires that creators wait decades and then successfully navigate all that complexity (even knowing how many years you have to wait is complicated!). (more…)

Russsian YouTuber Alex Ulitin has rigged a way for people all over the world to interact with his cat in real time. By using certain commands, anyone can feed or play with his orange tabby using YouTube's live chat.

To note: if you want feed the cat, you'll need donate a few bucks:

Any superchat donation – feed the cat. Maybe I will have to raise the threshold to be sure that we don't just put a ton of food on the floor)

No guarantee that cat comes though xD Usually he will.

Here's the live stream. Click through to play along. The commands are in the description text: https://youtu.be/CGIF2mB5nUw

I hung out for a while to check it out. The cat didn't come out to play on my watch, though (once) it did come out to eat.

(reddit)