spriteleigh

Glitch was a wonderful work of art, but a troubled game, and its death was lamented by many. All the game's artwork and code, however, now enters the public domain--as good an outcome as could be hoped-for. How about a story-led, single-player reboot, eh?

News of Toronto Mayor Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford's official cunnilingus policy has reached the Taiwanese news video animation people, and they've risen to the occasion with predictable insanity. The mayor-on-beaver moments are really the best here, I think.

Hate that smarmy, too-good-to-be-real Christmas episode of World War I? Annoyed by the lazy montage scene that took us from the first airplane to the Moon in just 66 years? Think "rocks fall, all the dinosaurs die" was just a total cop-out? Here's a fun Reddit thread you will appreciate, pointed out to me by Karen James.

(YouTube link)

The latest mashup by FAROFF (previously at Neatorama) throws everything into the stew. You'll hear a mix of songs by James Brown, Gorillaz, The Doors, Queen, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder, AC/DC, and Torpedo Boyz. And the Pink Panther Theme, for good measure. What's really impressive is the medley of guitar riffs toward the end, in which you can recognize a song by a single note or two. -via Buzzfeed

Everyone has at least a couple sites they frequent where they really only care about a subset of the news that is produced. SpecificFeeds lets you get just the news you want by applying advanced filters to an RSS feed before it's sent to you.

Read more...

A few months ago, I posted about a copyright troll calling itself On Press Inc., which issued legal threats whenever someone tweets “If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak.” The troll has now issued dozens of DMCA takedown notice to Google, ordering it to wipe my article--and many more at sites such as Techdirt and Popehat--from its records. Google laughed it out of the house.

Even as a marketing campaign for the poet it makes little sense; with the DMCA abuse, the trolling tilts into illegality in its own right. I can't help but wonder if there's a sad story behind it all, someone obsessed with trying to control the viral spread of that trite line and incapable of comprehending why they can't, or why it is unreasonable even to try.

For example, check out the weird YouTube video you get googling the line:

I love the way he reads it like a drill sergeant, slaps the book back on its stand, then barks "THIS POEM OR ANY OTHER POEMS IN THIS BOOK CANNOT BE REPLICATED IN ANY MEDIA WHATSOEVER." It's gotta be a hoax. It's just so bizarre.

You can't buy a battery for the new Renault Zoe. Instead, you have to rent it. And if you stop making payments, the battery's DRM will prevent you from recharging it. It's part of a larger product strategy through which the Zoe collects huge amounts of data on your driving and ships it all back to the manufacturer.

Just what the world needed: a car you're not allowed to own, and which you can't use anymore if you lose your job and can't pay the monthly battery rental fee. And if Renault's battery provider goes out of business, your Renault is bricked.

DRM in Cars Will Drive Consumers Crazy

Wikileaks has published the Internet Chapter of the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership, a global trade-deal negotiated between corporate leaders and government reps without any democratic oversight (the US Trade Rep wouldn't share TPP drafts with Congress, and now it is headed for fast-tracking into law). TorrentFreak has parsed out the text, and compares it to SOPA, the brutal US copyright law that collapsed in the face of massive public protest. The treaty is reportedly at a "negotiated stalemate" thanks to the US Trade Rep, who has refused to bend on treaty provisions that other nations objected to.

Many topics are covered in the chapter including DRM and other ‘technical measures’, extended copyright terms, increased penalties for infringement and ISP liability, the latter with a proposal for “adopting and reasonably implementing a policy that provides for termination in appropriate circumstances of the accounts of repeat infringers.”

Reception to the leaked agreement has so far been highly critical. Knowledge Ecology International notes that the TPP IPR chapter not only proposes the granting of more patents, expansion of rightsholder privileges and increased penalties for infringement, but also plans the creation of intellectual property rights on data.

“The TPP text shrinks the space for exceptions in all types of intellectual property rights. Negotiated in secret, the proposed text is bad for access to knowledge, bad for access to medicine, and profoundly bad for innovation,” KEI concludes.

Burcu Kilic, an intellectual property lawyer with Public Citizen, says that some of the proposals in the text evoke memories of the controversial SOPA legislation in the United States.

“The WikiLeaks text also features Hollywood and recording industry inspired proposals – think about the SOPA debacle – to limit Internet freedom and access to educational materials, to force Internet providers to act as copyright enforcers and to cut off people’s Internet access,” Kilic says.

Secret Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) [Wikileaks]

First Leaked TPP Chapter Evokes Memories of SOPA [Andy/TorrentFreak]

Jesse Brown from the Canadaland podcast ">RSS) writes: "CBC News has made a bad error in judgment. They sold news coverage to the Harper government, who were seeking publicity for a shipwreck salvaging expedition which, in a federal Minister's words, is an effort to "enhance" Canada's sovereignty claims in the Arctic. The government is embroiled in a land claim dispute with Russia; both nations covet the massive oil and gas deposits that are thought to reside beneath the the Arctic Ocean. The CBC covered the government's (fruitless) salvage expedition with fawning stories across its platforms: there's a dedicated news website and a two-part documentary that aired on The National, CBC's flagship newscast. CBC Chief Correspondent Peter Mansbridge himself reported live from the Arctic on a Parks Canada boat, at no time informing viewers that the subjects of his story had paid for his presence."

You can read the confidential contract (unearthed through an anonymous Access to Information request) here, and the CBC's evasively-worded denial here.

"We do not get paid to provide coverage. Ever." -CBC News Editor in Chief Jennifer McGuire

"CBC will provide news coverage on various platforms" -invoice for services provided by CBC to the government in exchange for $65,000 (p.147)

The CBC's secret deal with the Harper government

(Thanks, Jesse!)

Edward Sharp-Paul's An Opinion Piece On A Controversial Topic is some pretty awesome meta ("I was inspired to write this piece by Currently Fashionable Polemicist, who summarised the Issue better than I could when they said 'oversimplification that makes me feel smart'. I have a strong opinion on this Issue, and my sharing it with you at this time is in no way attributable to opportunism on my part."). But it really leaps into full-flight when you hit the comments ("Do not understand why you wrote about this Issue, when this other Issue exists.").

In case you think that I have taken a knee-jerk stance without giving the Issue due consideration, I used The Google to do some research while I was writing this Opinion Piece. I’m sure you’ll agree that a single reference to the findings of Ideologically-Driven, Ethically-Dubious Lobby Group With Questionable Funding Practices is very interesting, and adds a veneer of rigour to this whole piece. Furthermore, when you take those findings and draw wild conclusions, you will understand why I’m shoehorning in a reference to a bitter media spat from quite a while ago that I’m quite clearly still upset about.

I also have a deeply personal and sad experience, which I will bring up here to invalidate your objections — even though it doesn’t inform my argument or actually have anything much to do with the Issue at all. This deeply personal and sad experience of mine means that you are a horrible person if you raise any objections. If you too have a deeply personal and sad experience pertaining to the Issue, I will adopt a tone of sympathy. If you disagree with me, I will affect sympathy while implying that you are feeble-minded for allowing your feelings to cloud your judgement.

An Opinion Piece On A Controversial Topic (via Dan Hon)

Now that Twitter has gone public and is trading for $41 a share today, people are starting to think about how much value each of its users are generating for the company. Twitter as a whole is valued at  $24.9 billion! Do you think you may have contributed to that with your witty Tweets? TIME has a calculator, which takes into account how many followers a user has, how many Tweets they generate, how old the account is, and some other factors, like an "ignore" rate of 75%. I entered my personal account, which is not very active. I figured it might be worth somewhere in the vicinity of zero.

What? I don't Tweet that much! Then I remembered I signed up for a service that Tweets every time I post something on my personal blog. That accounts for most of those Tweets. Still, the value I add to Twitter pales in comparison to some of the Twitter accounts I follow, such as these entertainers.

And these science bloggers.

If you want to calculate the value of your own Twitter account, you can just enter the account name into the calculator at TIME Newsfeed. If you want to buy stock in Twitter, that will take real money.

(Photo: Sebastian Montalvo)

Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is a rapidly growing sport in the United States. And it’s not just for adults. More than 3 million kids as young as 5 years old have participated, too. The kids engage in full-contact fighting with minimal protective gear—just thin gloves and mouthguards. Sebastian Montalvo, a photographer and journalist in New York City, toured children’s MMA events and captured images of them. You can view a slideshow of them here.

I did a bit of capoeira and boxing back in college. The latter was far, far more practical than the former. When my daughters are old enough, I’ll encourage them to study some sort of practical martial art. MMA seems to resemble realistic brawling, so it may be a good choice.

-via Nag on the Lake

WashPo's Max Fisher reports on Toronto's crack-smoking Mayor Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford, using the conventions of the western press when it reports on poor countries. Here's part of the lede: "In a country where dissent is limited by traditional mores, the transgression has sparked rare public outrage and raised concerns about the stability of the Canadian regime."

Canada's political system is a complex and often inscrutable web of legislative bodies, executive offices and deeply entrenched local officials like Ford. Though it is nominally democratic, analysts warn that elections here can be "volatile."

The country's government is officially overseen by an ancient monarchy located thousands of miles away. The system's contradictions are a reminder that, though colonialism ended long ago in most of the world, this colony has yet to fully throw off its European overlords.

Worsening fears of instability, Toronto is mere hours from the strife-torn province of Quebec, which has been marked by decades of political unrest and separatist movements.

Canadian regime roiled by provincial scandal, sparking fears of instability

A new video of Toronto Mayor Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford has surfaced. For a change, the mayor is not smoking crack in this video. Instead, he's incredibly drunk, and vowing to graphically murder his critics, while swearing in a way that is surprising for its creativity and imaginativeness, if not its sobriety.

In this profanity-laden, 77-second video, Ford is seen pacing about the dining room of a house, threatening death to an unnamed enemy, ranting and gesticulating wildly. A person off camera, who is encouraging Ford’s behaviour, tells him to wait until “after the byelection,” an apparent reference to the byelection Ford wanted the city to hold to replace departed deputy mayor Doug Holyday.

The reference to the by-election puts the timing of the video sometime in August.

The need to replace deputy mayor Holyday came on August 1 when he became a provincial legislator. City council voted on August 26 to choose his successor by appointment instead of the $250,000 byelection Ford said was the more democratic choice.

Similar to the crack video the Star witnessed in May, Ford’s words switch rapidly from being easily heard to incomprehensible.

“I am a sick motherf--ker, dude,” says Ford, rolling up the cuffs of his collared shift up to his elbow. “Like no one’s gonna f--k around with me.”

At points in the video, Ford is incoherent and unintelligible. He appears to say that unidentified critics call him and his brothers “birds.”

Rob Ford caught in video rant [Kevin Donovan, David Bruser and Jesse McLean/The Star]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed 22 declarations in First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA. The briefs are from a wide variety of groups -- environmentalists, gun-rights activists, religious groups, human-rights workers, drug-policy advocates -- who all have one thing in common: "hey each depend on the First Amendment's guarantee of free association. EFF argues that if the government vacuums up the records of every phone call—who made the call, who received the call, when and how long the parties spoke—then people will be afraid to join or engage with organizations that may have dissenting views on political issues of the day."

"The plaintiffs, like countless other associations across the country, have suffered real and concrete harm because they have lost the ability to assure their constituents that the fact of their telephone communications between them will be kept confidential from the federal government," EFF Senior Staff Attorney David Greene said. "This has caused constituents to reduce their calling. This is exactly the type of chilling effect on the freedom of association that the First Amendment forbids."

In Wednesday's motion, EFF asks the US District Court for the Northern District of California to review the undisputed evidence at hand and rule that the NSA's "Associational Tracking Program" is not only unconstitutional, but not authorized under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT ACT, the law the government has so far used to justify its surveillance.

EFF Files 22 Firsthand Accounts of How NSA Surveillance Chilled the Right to Association

Max Mosley, former Formula 1 chief and son of Britain's most famous fascist politician, is seemingly addicted to the Streisand Effect: for years he's been trying to wipe something about him from the collective media consciousness, thereby ensuring that it is never far from it.

A French court on Wednesday ruled that Google must remove from its search results photos of a former Formula One racing chief participating in an orgy. Max Mosley, one-time president of the International Automobile Federation, sued Google in 2011, requesting that the company automatically filter links to a 2008 British newspaper report that included photos and a video of Mosley participating in a Nazi-themed sex party.

Google must now filter out nine images of the event from its search results in France.

Good luck to you, Mr. Mosley.

Next Media Animation -- the crazy Taiwanese news video people -- have revisited the Mayor Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford crack-smoking scandal (here's the previous one). This time, it's the news that Ford's polls are up on his admission that he smoked crack.

Rob Ford crack admission raises popularity! Toronto is crazy

Four Swedish movie theaters have started publishing gender scores for the movies they exhibit, based on the films' ability to pass the Bechdel Test ("must have at least two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man"). A surprising number of movies fail this test. The initiative is supported by the Swedish Film Institute, a government agency that represents a major source of funding for Swedish film, and one of the region's cable operators is devoting a Sunday to movies that pass the test, which comes from Alison Bechdel's excellent comic, Dykes to Watch Out For.

"The entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, all Star Wars movies, The Social Network, Pulp Fiction and all but one of the Harry Potter movies fail this test," said Ellen Tejle, the director of Bio Rio, an art-house cinema in Stockholm's trendy Södermalm district.

Bio Rio is one of four Swedish cinemas that launched the new rating last month to draw attention to how few movies pass the Bechdel test. Most filmgoers have reacted positively to the initiative. "For some people it has been an eye-opener," said Tejle.

Beliefs about women's roles in society are influenced by the fact that movie watchers rarely see "a female superhero or a female professor or person who makes it through exciting challenges and masters them", Tejle said, noting that the rating doesn't say anything about the quality of the film. "The goal is to see more female stories and perspectives on cinema screens," he added.

Swedish cinemas take aim at gender bias with Bechdel test rating [AP]

(via MeFi)

(Image: Alison Bechdel/Dykes to Watch Out For)

(YouTube link)

So many movies feature two cops, or one cop and a partner of some sort, who are totally mismatched and therefore present an opportunity for comedy dialogue. Even in a serious crime film, this gives the movie a chance to lighten the mood while chasing down the worst criminals on the planet. I bet you've seen most of these movies, but in case you don't recognize some of them, there's a list at Slackstory. NSFW language. -Thanks, Nick!

As the story of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford continues to unravel, everyone's pulling out their dirt on old Mayor Laughable Bumblefuck. Vice has a detailed email chain between Ford's communications director and a hacker for hire who was allegedly hired to delete the video of Hizzoner smoking crack and making racist and homophobic remarks from a cloud storage provider that may have belonged to a local gang, who were allegedly blackmailing him.

I kinda liked it better that way.

There's no doubt that Albus Dumbledore is an intelligent wizard, but did you know that you can turn a bit of wisdom from Plato into a quote that sounds like it came from one of J.K. Rowling just by adding the word "Harry?" That's what Kristen discovered and it's hard to argue with her evidence:

"Death is not the worst that can happen to men, Harry."

"He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it, Harry."

"He was a wise man who invented beer, Harry."

And that's only a small selection of the ones she came up with.

Via BoingBoing

We happened to swing by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's office the same day the digital rights organization filed a challenge to Personal Audio's podcast patent suits. Thankfully, Julie Samuels (a Senior Staff Attorney and Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents for the EFF) and her dog Daley took the time to meet with us.

RiYL: RSS | iTunes | Download this episode | Listen on Stitcher

Interested in sponsoring one of Boing Boing's podcasts? Visit Podlexing!

(Video Link)

You've seen the wonderful blooper reel from the filming of the first Star Wars movie. Now you can see it mashed up with the narration from the first Star Wars trailer. Slackstory blended the two perfectly into a tale of courage and stupidity. It's great, but I'd rather see a remake of Episode IV with every character is played by a Gungan.

-via Geekosystem

Jesselyn Radack is a civil liberties attorney with the Government Accountability Project who has been in contact with Edward Snowden. In an ABC News interview, she reported that other NSA insiders have been inspired by Snowden's bravery and sacrifice and have come forward with further revelations about the organization's excess, criminality and lawlessness. She says that the Obama administration's war on whistleblowers has backfired, squandering the administration's credibility with its own operatives and inspiring them to speak out.

“I think the government hopes to chill speech by employees in the national security and intelligence fields, especially those at the NSA and CIA, but the unintended consequence is [that] more and more whistleblowers are coming through the doors of the Government Accountability Project (GAP),” said Jesselyn Radack, referring to the organization where she works as the National Security and Human Rights Director. “I think courage is contagious, and we see more and more people from the NSA coming through our door after Snowden made these revelations.”

Radack, an attorney who has met with and been in communication with Snowden, said “a handful” of people in the intelligence community have come forward since this summer when several major international newspapers began writing about the NSA’s classified foreign and domestic surveillance programs – stories based on thousands of secret NSA documents allegedly stolen by Snowden, a former NSA contractor.

More NSA Leakers Followed Snowden’s Footsteps, Whistleblower Lawyer Says [Brian Ross and Rhonda Schwartz/ABC]

(via Naked Capitalism)

Back in August, Toronto Mayor Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford was caught smoking crack. Now he's been caught lying about smoking crack -- and smearing his critics with still more lies, and his fixer/drug dealer has been charged with extortion in the attempt to suppress the evidence.

So, naturally, his approval rating is up.

The old city of Toronto -- a political boundary that was abolished by Conservative premier Mike Harris in 1998 -- still hates Ford; he barely registers there. But the city's surrounding suburban sprawl is has a large cohort of foolish people who are only too delighted to cram their lying, drunken, stoned, incompetent top choice down the city's throat.

Toronto doesn't have the government it deserves: it has the government its worst neighbours deserve.

The poll found that 44 per cent of voters approve of the job Rob Ford is doing as mayor, while an Oct. 28 poll found that just 39 per cent approved.

“That may sound counterintuitive. It could be a sampling, margin-of-error thing, or it could be just some sympathy,” said Lorne Bozinoff, president of Forum Research. “If you saw him during that media scrum yesterday, it might have generated some sympathy.”

Ford has been bolstered by a seemingly unshakeable core group of supporters known colloquially as the Ford Nation. Ford’s high approval rating comes despite an “unbelievable” awareness of the video scandal, with 98 per cent of respondents saying they were aware of the news.

Mayor Rob Ford's approval rating ticks upward with news of crack video [Tim Alamenciak/Toronto Star]

(Image: Robbo Mills)