A pension fund with a large stake in IBM is suing the company for colluding with the NSA and lobbying for the right to spy on Chinese customers. The Louisiana Sheriffs' Pension & Relief Fund claims that the company's behavior resulted in a $12.9 billion drop in its market cap.

IBM lobbied Congress hard to pass a law letting it share personal data of customers in China and elsewhere with the U.S. National Security Agency, in a bid to protect its intellectual property rights, according to a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

The plaintiff in the complaint, Louisiana Sheriffs' Pension & Relief Fund, said this threatened IBM hardware sales in China, particularly given a program known as Prism that let the NSA spy on that country through technology companies such as IBM...

...IBM shares fell 6.4 percent on October 17, wiping out $12.9 billion of the Armonk, New York-based company's market value.

Lawsuit accuses IBM of hiding China risks amid NSA spy scandal [Jonathan Stempel/Reuters] (via /.)

(Video Link)

There seems to be something about Elf that makes people love it or hate it. You can count me among the many who love the movie and I certainly enjoy this 8-Bit Cinema take on the film.

If you haven't seen it yet, perhaps this 120 second take on the film can help you decide whether or not you actually would like the storyline. Of course, this animation does lack the delightful humor of Will Ferrell, which is exactly what makes the movie so fantastic.

Via Laughing Squid

(YouTube link)

Oh no! It's another Christmas movie mashup! This time we get an action film, as Santa Claus is identified as a terrorist and becomes the subject of an international manhunt. It had me on the edge of my seat! -via Tastefully Offensive

Boston Dynamics, the company that develops new robots for DARPA and other military clients, has been acquired by Google. Now the biggest entity on the internet owns Atlas, Cheetah, PetMan, Big Dog, AlphaDog, WildCat, Sand Flea, RHex, and other terrifying robots.

Google confirmed on Friday that it had completed the acquisition of Boston Dynamics, an engineering company that has designed mobile research robots for the Pentagon. The company, based in Waltham, Mass., has gained an international reputation for machines that walk with an uncanny sense of balance and even — cheetahlike — run faster than the fastest humans.

It is the eighth robotics company that Google has acquired in the last half-year. Executives at the Internet giant are circumspect about what exactly they plan to do with their robot collection. But Boston Dynamics and its animal kingdom-themed machines bring significant cachet to Google’s robotic efforts, which are being led by Andy Rubin, the Google executive who spearheaded the development of Android, the world’s most widely used smartphone software.

Obviously Google is betting on automation as the wave of the future. What more evidence do we need that the company will soon will use its many robots to take over the world? Read more at the New York Times. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Boston Dynamics)

(Video Link)

Vines have taken the interwebs by storm, and people can’t seem to get enough of these nifty ten second looping videos. Ten seconds, it seems, is the perfect amount of time to deliver a setup and a punchline, or share a slice of your life with the world.

With all those bloated five minute long videos out there wasting our time, it’s nice to know that we can have a dose of adorableness even when we’re too busy to stay glued to our screens. Please enjoy this compilation of the Best Dog Vines of 2013, and if you want to stay true to the medium watch them in ten second increments.

Via Tastefully Offensive

(YouTube link)

This year-end mashup contains clips from 300 movies released in 2013. There were that many in one year? Yep, there's a list of them at a dedicated Tumblr page. No wonder we need multiplexes to show them all! Do you know how many new movies you saw in 2013? I am ashamed to say that I know. I saw two. Quite a few of these are on my "like to see" list, when they come up on TV.

The British Library has uploaded one million public domain scans from 17th-19th century books to Flickr! They're embarking on an ambitious programme to crowdsource novel uses and navigation tools for the huge corpus. Already, the manifest of image descriptions is available through Github. This is a remarkable, public spirited, archival project, and the British Library is to be loudly applauded for it!

We plan to launch a crowdsourcing application at the beginning of next year, to help describe what the images portray. Our intention is to use this data to train automated classifiers that will run against the whole of the content. The data from this will be as openly licensed as is sensible (given the nature of crowdsourcing) and the code, as always, will be under an open licence.

The manifests of images, with descriptions of the works that they were taken from, are available on github and are also released under a public-domain 'licence'. This set of metadata being on github should indicate that we fully intend people to work with it, to adapt it, and to push back improvements that should help others work with this release.

There are very few datasets of this nature free for any use and by putting it online we hope to stimulate and support research concerning printed illustrations, maps and other material not currently studied. Given that the images are derived from just 65,000 volumes and that the library holds many millions of items.

If you need help or would like to collaborate with us, please contact us on email, or twitter (or me personally, on any technical aspects)

A million first steps

We are excited to announce the release of The Immortal Augustus Gladstone, a feature film written and directed by Robyn Miller (co-creator of the Myst and Riven videogames), and the soundtrack to the movie, also composed by Robyn. This is Boing Boing's first movie, and if you are wondering why Boing Boing would be involved in a movie, the above video will answer that question. (tldr; we loved it!)

It's now on sale as a DRM-free MP4 file for just $5.59, and the soundtrack is also for sale for $6.99.

(YouTube link)

Bah! Humbug. There's one Scrooge in every crowd who hates the entire holiday season. But all of us have our moments when the pressure to be jolly and festive, not to mention the stress of cooking and shopping and attending functions and hosting guests and decorating and wrapping and trying to make CHristmas great for everyone else just wears us down. In movies, you are more likely to hear people just come out and say it, which they do in this supercut from Slackstory. -via Blame It On The Voices

Robbo sez, "In order to receive their negotiated raises and any holiday bonus, Parliament Hill staffers are being required to sign a lifetime confidentiality agreement, with hefty penalties for any breach, designed to thwart whistleblowers. So much for transparency in government."

(Not?) Coincidentally, the Harper government is embroiled in a potentially fatal scandal involving the Prime Minister's Office conspiring to cover up hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of expenses fraud by prominent Tory senators, and the only reason the PM is still in office is that none of his staffers have directly fingered him (yet?).

Hill journalists were sent a grainy photo of the new agreement last week from "Nanker Phelge," a pseudonymous email account that appears to have been set up by a Hill staffer unhappy over the change in policy.

"At a time when some parliamentarians are moving to create a more open and transparent Parliament, the [House of Commons'] Board of Internal Economy is putting measures in place to ensure parliamentary staff can't be whistleblowers on their employers," the email said.

The author highlights several provisions, including the lifetime application of the contract and the fact that any breach can result in immediate termination without pay or notice, as well as a new requirement to disclose all outside work, including volunteer gigs.

Hill staff asked to sign lifetime confidentiality agreements [Yahoo News/CBC Newswire]

(Thanks, Robbo!)

The National Library of Norway has struck a deal to digitize all of its Norwegian books and make them available online to anyone coming from a Norwegian IP address. This is great work, and a model for other countries. (It probably helped that Norway's publishers enjoy a laudable program of subsidies and incentives, including funding to translate foreign titles into Neu Norsk).

(YouTube link)

To continue their quest to get folks to buy gooshy noms for their cats, Friskies has released a full-length song about cats and Christmas. The music video stars Oskar the blind cat, Grumpy Cat, Colonel Meow, and other internet celebricats. The song is available for download at iTunes.

To maintain the company's dignity at least a little, they use the term "wet cat food" instead of "gooshy noms." Friskies is donating one can of gooshy noms to pet shelters for each YouTube view up to 500,000. Of course, that means they were already prepared to donate a half-million cans, and the count will reach that easily before the end of the week. -via Viral Viral Videos  

In the New York Times today, Dave Itzkoff reports on the latest wrinkle in the copyright battle between SF tech-toy company GoldieBlox and beloved hip-hop band The Beastie Boys. As reported here on Boing Boing in previous weeks, GoldieBlox used the Beasties' song "Girls" in a viral video that was an ad for its toys. The Beasties objected, though they claim they didn't threaten per se--and GoldieBlox pre-emptively sued the band. Then GoldieBlox kind of backed down. Now, the Beasties have filed a counterclaim.

In court papers filed on Tuesday, lawyers for the Beastie Boys said that a popular online video that was created by the toy company, GoldieBlox, and contained an alternate version of the band’s song “Girls,” constituted “copyright infringement and is not fair use,” turning the band’s music into “a ‘jingle’ to sell GoldieBlox’s products.”

(Video Link)

Whether it's Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter or another game in the genre, a new player has a lot to learn. I never got into the genre because there's such a steep learning curve. Your opponent knows all of the special moves and combinations, how to hit them and when. The noob is still trying to figure out what the A and B buttons do.

Freddie Wong, the great independent filmmaker whose work we've featured extensively, makes fun of the genre by acting out two characters and their corresponding players.

Be sure to check out our exclusive interview with Mr. Wong here.

Richard from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "EFF's Power Up Your Donation matching campaign starts today. Anyone who donates to the campaign in the next week will have their gift matched from a pool of challenge grants. If you've appreciated EFF's legal challenges to NSA surveillance, battling patent and copyright trolls, opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and fighting for fair use, now's a great time to become a EFF member!"

Donate to EFF and double your impact

Esquire's profile of Glenn Greenwald, the American-born, Brazilian-based journalist at the center of the Snowden leaks, is a terrific, insightful piece that uses Greenwald's own reflections on power, bravery, secrecy and justice speak for themselves: "I think the real Obama reveres institutional authority. He believes that it might need to be a little more efficient, but he has zero interest in undermining the powerful, permanent factions that have run Washington."

If you work for MSNBC or for CNN or whatever, you’re basically nothing more than an employee of a large corporation, and in order to thrive in large corporations, the attitude you need is somebody who gives power what it wants rather than looking to subvert it or to be antiauthoritarian. Antiauthoritarians don’t succeed in large corporations. They get expelled by them.

I think the real Obama reveres institutional authority. He believes that it might need to be a little more efficient, but he has zero interest in undermining the powerful, permanent factions that have run Washington...

...We’re social beings, we need interaction with other human beings, but we also crave privacy. It’s why we put locks on our bedroom and bathroom doors or why we use passwords on our e-mail accounts or use anonymity on the Internet. So I think we have an instinctive understanding about why privacy is so crucial to us, but it takes some work to really ingest in a visceral way why it is as important as anything else.

Even if we’re not doing anything wrong, there are certain things we want to do that we don’t think can withstand the scrutinizing eye of other people. And those are often the most important things that we do. The things we do when other people are watching are things that are conformist, obedient, normal, and unnotable.

Glenn Greenwald: What I've Learned [Tom Junod/Esquire]

(via MeFi)

(Image: Glenn Greenwald, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from gageskidmore's photostream)

Glitch in the Afterlife

Stewart Butterfield tells how a few million dollars worth of art, created for a beloved massively-multiplayer game, ended up in the public domain after its death.

Working on the now-defunct massively multiplayer game Glitch meant daily conversations — most of them quite earnest and a few of them even heated — on topics such as what a bubble tuner should do (aside from "tuning" the bubbles one harvests from a bubble tree) or which alchemical compounds should be required to produce a Powder of Startling Fecundity.

We were creating a world that was deliberately preposterous, one where "that seems implausible" was considered as a statement of praise. Players would go about donating to shrines in order to gain favor with one of the Eleven Giants in whose shared imagination the whole world existed, so that they could speed up the rate at which they were learning skills like "Bureaucratic Arts" or "Soil Appreciation". After several years of effort, the game actually got fairly fun.

Cosma, Lem & Spriggan, three of the Eleven Giants in whose imagination the world of Glitch existed

In the end, however, it got fun too late. It didn't help that we were on the wrong side of a big technological shift, building around Flash as a client technology right before people started shifting their "discretionary computer time" from laptops to phones and tablets where the game couldn’t run. It eventually became clear that the game was never going to be a sustainable business. So in November of 2012, it was shut down.

Samples of some of the thousands of images created by players using the in-game "snapshotting" skill.

The shutdown was very sad. Thankfully, the decision happened with enough time to give players refunds for their purchases and launch a campaign to get new (and mostly better) jobs for the team.

But there were a lot of broken hearts out there, as there is any time the medium for an online community ceases to exist. There was also a deep sense of loss, shared by the players and the developers, for all the creative effort that went into constructing the world.

Concept art for player’s rag-doll like butlers who would stand outside their homes to interact with passing visitors.

A spritesheet showing individual frames of the dance animation for one possible butler customization

The team that gave life to the game's concepts were hugely talented. The expression of this world was both vast in scale —a huge variety of locations designed in a bewildering number of artistic styles— and minutely detailed, with hundreds of items, many individually animated and highly customizable.

Samples of a few of the landscape styles from the world of Glitch

But with the game offline and the art assets locked up in proprietary formats on private servers, the whole thing was effectively gone. The idea that all of that effort and creativity being forever inaccessible seemed more than a shame: it seemed almost criminal. One way to help mend those broken hearts was to get it back out into the world.

And so it was an easy decision to to contribute the art (along with all the writing, and nearly all of the code) to the public domain. The logistics took a while, but in November 2013, the formal announcement was made and all of the packaged-up assets and code were published on the Glitch site.

There are more than ten thousand items, millions of frames of animation and tens of thousands of lines of code to control them. It includes the whole avatar system, the world’s flora (from bubble trees to egg plants) and fauna (from metal-eating tree sloths to milkable butterflies), hundreds of unique characters (from the mythic Giants and the Rook to everyday vendors and street spirits), thousands of items (tools, resources, furniture), the complete housing and tower building systems and many thousands of environmental art assets used to create a massive world with dozens of styles.

A player, having just completed a puzzle quest stands outside the Rube’s house.

By giving up our ownership and any rights associated with all these designs, images, characters, drawings, animations, systems, and code, we hope more people will be more easily able to create new works with them. (The initial release was targeted towards developers; the hope is that they will repurpose the assets in ways that will lower the technical barriers so they can be enjoyed, appreciated, or re-used by more people.)

It doesn't matter to us if those new works are commercial or artistic or educational. It doesn't matter if the Glitch art is just the basis for inspiring something else or if it is reproduced exactly. It doesn't matter if we like the results or not. Anyone can use any of it for whatever purpose they want without any restrictions.

Some of the different health and production states for a mature gas plant.

That measure of freedom is important to us because when you come down to it, as a species, culture is all we’ve got. The more of it we make, the better. The freer the materials the easier it is for people to make new things.

Glitch was not a significant cultural milestone in its own right, but we hope that it has an outsize impact in its ability to foster the creation of more art and the expression of more creativity.

So please: help yourself. Go and make something beautiful.

Glitch was created by Tiny Speck. After shutting Glitch down, the company began work on Slack, a tool for team communication that was built on the systems used in developing Glitch.

Slack is currently in ‘preview release’ and is being used by high-performing teams like Soundcloud, Rdio, Buzzfeed, Medium & Lonely Planet. It will launch early next year.

COMMENTS AND DISCUSSION

BOING BOING'S 2013 GIFT GUIDE

(YouTube link)

YouTube invited its biggest stars, and the folks who made the year's biggest videos, to join in their annual year-end "rewind" video. Get ready for a collage of the the people, images, memes, and music of 2013. You'll see Neatorama favorites Freddie Wong, Rhett & Link, and MysteryGuitarMan, along with Jimmy Fallon, Macklemore, Cookie Monster, and other celebrities. There's a list of them at the YouTube page. The soundtrack is a half-dozen songs that are memes of 2013 themselves, mixed by DJ Earworm. Trying to name al the references in this mashup would be an interesting exercise, but first -just watch and enjoy it for what it is: a time capsule of YouTube in 2013.

(YouTube link)

Steve Irwin talks about how wonderful his job is and how passionate he is about wildlife. He always did, but this time it's set to music! Melodysheep, who gave us the Symphony of Science videos, gives Irwin the AutoTune treatment in this tribute video. We miss you, Steve. -via Laughing Squid

The Pirate Bay's .sx was seized this morning, and the site has relocated to thepiratebay.ac. The .AC top-level domain is controlled by Ascension Islands, a UK territory, and a Pirate Bay spokesperson announced that the change was only temporary, with another new domain (.pe, in Peru) in the wings. This is the fifth time that The Pirate Bay had its domain seized in 2013.

The Pirate Bay, meanwhile, continues to be accessible through the new .AC domain, although only briefly since the ccTLD is UK controlled.

“The AC domain is directly connected to the UK, so it’s just a quick stop there,” a Pirate Bay insider told us. After solving some technical issues the infamous torrent site plans to move to the Peruvian .PE ccTLD.

ThePirateBay.pe will be the fifth domain name for The Pirate Bay in 2013.

Fearing a domain seizure by the Swedish authorities The Pirate Bay quickly switched to a Greenland-based domain in April, later hopping to Iceland, and eventually landing .SX domains as other problems became apparent.

The Pirate Bay hopes for a longer stay at the PE domain, but the site’s operators still have a few dozen domain names backed up if required.

The Pirate Bay Moves to .AC After Domain Name Seizure [Ernesto/Torrenfreak]

A group of writers from around the world, including Nobel laureates, have signed onto a petition calling on the world's governments to limit online surveillance. I was honored to be asked to be among the initial signatories, in good company with the likes of Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, Günter Grass, Pico Ayer, Will Self, Irvine Welsh, Jeanette Winterson, Lionel Shriver, Paul Auster, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Lethem, and many, many others. The petition is now open for your signature in support of a set of simple, important core principles:

WE DEMAND THE RIGHT for all people to determine, as democratic citizens, to what extent their personal data may be legally collected, stored and processed, and by whom; to obtain information on where their data is stored and how it is being used; to obtain the deletion of their data if it has been illegally collected and stored.

WE CALL ON ALL STATES AND CORPORATIONS to respect these rights.

WE CALL ON ALL CITIZENS to stand up and defend these rights.

WE CALL ON THE UNITED NATIONS to acknowledge the central importance of protecting civil rights in the digital age, and to create an International Bill of Digital Rights.

WE CALL ON GOVERNMENTS to sign and adhere to such a convention.

A Stand for Democracy in the Digital Age

The latest (unstable) build of Cyanogenmod (a free/open version of Android) incorporates a secure, encrypted SMS program called TextSecure, which was created by Open WhisperSystems. Open WhisperSystems's chief engineer is the respected cryptographer and privacy advocate Moxie Marlinspike, and the source for the Cyanogenmod integration is open and available for inspection and scrutiny. The new encrypted SMS is designed to be integrated with whatever SMS app you use on your phone, and allows for extremely private, interception- and surveillance-resistant messaging over the normally insecure SMS. It requires that both parties be using TextSecure, of course -- if you send a TextSecure message to someone without secure messaging, the message will fall back to unencrypted text.

By leveraging this for our TextSecure implementation, we can extend the encrypted messaging functionality to nearly any SMS application you decide to use. Your messages to other CM or TextSecure users (regardless of iOS or Android) will automatically be encrypted and secured. In the event your receiving party isn’t on CM or using TextSecure, the implementation will silently fall back to a normal SMS message (unencrypted).

Today, we are launching our version initially into the CM 10.2 nightly stream to test the server load and make sure things are working at scale. Once things are dialed in, we’ll also enable this for CM 11 builds moving forward.

The source for this code is also being made public, and similar to what we did with CMAccount, we welcome outside audits of the cryptography.

WhisperPush: Secure Messaging Integration

Joly writes, "Sauropod specialist Mike Taylor notes growing concern among scientists about the heavy-handed takedown practices of academic publishing company Elsevier, including serving DMCA notices on contributing authors who also self-publish their papers. (Thanks, Joly!)

The Guardian not only has a new responsive design coming, and they've made the source available under an open-source license. Just in time to learn to code!

Hey, folks! It’s time for the counteract a bigot fund drive tally.

For those just joining in: Earlier in the year, I noticed that a bigot named Theodore Beale (aka “Vox Day”) regularly used my name, or nicknames representing me (“McRapey” is a favorite), to whip up readers on his Web sites. Well, there’s nothing I could do about that, and to be honest I think it’s just fine that a bigot has decided that I am the embodiment of everything he isn’t. But I decided if this fellow was going to get mileage off of using my name, I should get mileage off of him using it as well.

So I pledged that every time this odious twit invoked me on one of his Web sites, I’d put $5 into a pot, and at the end of the year, donate that amount to organizations that fight racism, sexism, homophobia and (as this fellow is also one a proponent of “game”) sexual assault, up to $1,000. Others asked if they could play along, and I said of course, and so these other folks also pledged to donate a money to these (or other, similar) organizations. When all was said and done, over $60,000 was pledged. A friend of mine volunteered to track Mr. Beale’s sites for invocation, which saved me from having to do it myself (I was nevertheless aware of him whenever I did ego searches, and it warmed my heart to imagine money going into coffers).

We’re now at the end of the year — or close enough to it that people are asking what they tally is so they can plan and make their donations. So I asked my friend for a tally of references Mr. Beale has made to me on two of his sites: his primary one, and the one he has concerned with “game.” With that tally I could then estimate how many more times he’ll mention me by the end of the year.

Here’s what we have: From January 1 through today, Mr. Beale has mentioned me by name (or by nickname) on those two sites 145 times. This is defined as references in blog posts; other references — references in comments, persistent sidebar links, or comments by others weren’t counted, nor were Twitter or other social media posts. If you want to do the math, that means Mr. Beale invoked me on his blogs on average once every 2.366 days. Which is rather a lot! There are 22 days left in the year, which means if Mr. Beale follows his average, he’ll mention me nine more times before the ball drops in Times Square. So, for my purposes, I am using 154 times as the official tally number.

I had pledged $5 per reference up to $1,000, which (again with the math) means that Mr. Beale would have had to reference me 200 times over the year for the full payout. 154 times turns out to be 77% of that.

So: If you made a pledge to support the Counteract a Bigot fund drive earlier this year, please donate at least 77% of your pledge amount to the organizations you pledged to fund. 

I say at least because, of course, I encourage you to donate the full amount of your pledge if you can. I will be doing so, I have just done so, as well as adding in another $250 to my pledge as thanks to the friend who kept track of Mr. Beale’s sites so I didn’t have to. But even if everyone sticks to just 77% of their full pledge amount, we’ll still have donated at least $46,000 dollars to charities and organizations dedicated to fighting bigotry and/or sexual assault in its various forms. And that ain’t bad.

As for Mr. Beale, well. He’s Dunning-Kruger’s favorite son. As such he’s incapable of imagining himself in anything other than a victory condition, so I’m sure he’ll imagine one here, too. Let him. The rest of us know better. If you doubt it, think to what purposes he’s used my name in the last year, and to what purposes we’ve used it. Which is the better use becomes pretty clear when you do.

With that in mind: Thank you to everyone who pledged along with me for this thing. I am genuinely humbled that so many of you joined in. I can’t actually express how amazed I was by the response. I am forever grateful.

Now, all I ask is that you follow through. You’ve made a pledge. It’s time to keep it.

(PS: Please feel free to share this entry with others. And if you hadn’t previously pledged but feel like joining in, well, it’s never too late!)

Welcome to the first episode in an on-going series about Augustus Gladstone, created from footage not used in the motion picture The Immortal Augustus Gladstone, Boing Boing's first movie, written and directed by Myst co-creator Robyn Miller!

Pre-order the movie as a DRM-free download for $4.40.

(YouTube link)

Not just the best movies of 2013 -all of them! Sleepy Skunk used 258 movie trailers from 2013 to make this year-end trailer mashup. I didn't know there were that many movies in one year! you'll find a list of the movies used here. The editing is lovely, but the overall effect is that this video highlights how very much all movie trailers tend to follow the same formula. Maybe that's why I didn't know there were that many different films this year. -via Blame It On The Voices

See also: Sleepy Skunk's movie trailer mashup 2012

22:14 The mouth of strange women is a deep and wonderful property of computation. [kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com]