spriteleigh

PacLabyrinth - via Shokxone Studio's deviantART - via The Verge

Josh Gilbert of Shok Xone Studios mashed up Jim Henson's 1986 movie Labyrinth with Pac-Man to come up with this bit of genius: the PacLabyrinth poster. The tunnel of hands is a particularly nice touch!

Josh's poster is one of 200 posters from 100 groundbreaking artists being featured in a new book Alternative Movie Posters: Film Art from the Underground by Matthew Chojnaki.

From The Verge:

Matthew Chojnacki's latest book features exactly 200 movie posters, celebrating everything from Tron and Blade Runner to The Da Vinci Code and Bambi. But they aren't the kind of posters you see lining the walls of a movie theatre. "The only criteria was that the poster couldn't have been used in an official theatrical run of the film," Chojnacki says of the book, Alternative Movie Posters: Film Art from the Underground. "And it had to kick ass."

The posters come from more than 100 artists and designers, and range from fan art to magazine illustrations and promo pieces for theaters. Two hundred may sound like a big number, but it's a heavily curated list — Chojnacki spent a year combing through more than 10,000 pieces in order to find those that were ultimately featured in the book. "I wanted to include a wide range of artistic styles, film genres, and countries of origin," he explains. Alternative Movie Posters artists hail from 20 different countries around the world.

Managing a pet project or a job with multiple moving parts requires more than a checklist. Earlier in the week, we asked you for the best tools for the job, then we highlighted the five best personal project management tools in our Hive Five. Now we're back to highlight the winner of our poll.

Read more...

"Lego Thriller" by Annette Jung, Talking Animals Animation Studio.

As a huge fan of Asian cars, I'd be happy to drive a Hulk. But the Loki would almost certainly be fun to drive, even if it would also be a little hard to control. 

This clever eight part series of car company/Avengers mashup posters was designed by South Carolina artist Christian Peterson. You can purchase a copy of the print to decorate your walls at his Etsy shop, though I know most guys would be happy to buy the Black Widow because so many of them would simply love to take Scarlet Johansson on a joyride.

Via Design Taxi

(vimeo link)

You will feel a pang of recognition as you watch the process of filling a progress bar. This is what I will think of next time a YouTube video loads with fits and starts, but at least this animation by French artist Vincent Broquaire doesn't break down completely and never start again like some videos. That may be because it's on vimeo, which at least has some consistency in its loading progression. But I shouldn't complain: if I downloaded software or anything more complicated than the short videos or simple text I work with every day, it could be a lot worse.  -via Metafilter

(YouTube link)

A few weeks ago, Jon Negroni offered a theory that tied all Pixar movies together in one unifying story. Now, the same has happened for Tom Hanks movies. Well, not all Tom Hanks movies -there's no women's baseball team or death row prison guard- but the biggest ones, including Captain Phillips, which opens this weekend. Actually, they missed a fine opportunity to put the mermaid from Splash in the ocean scenes, but I guess Hanks was awful young in that movie. In any case, I'd go see this movie. -via The Daily Dot

The University of Toronto's School of Business has advised its faculty to avoid assigning articles from the Harvard Business Review to their students. Though the U of T library has a digital subscription to the Review, Harvard has put it -- and other schools -- on notice that they will be billed separately if they are caught assigning, suggesting, or referring to HBR articles in classrooms. That's because the license agreement for academic HBR subscriptions forbids using HBR in coursework, and Harvard is now enforcing those terms, and hoping to extract rent from universities where the profs assume, foolishly, that just because a scholarly journal is in their library on a paid-up subscription, they can tell the students to go and read it.

Harvard Business Review Notice of Use Restrictions, May 2009 Harvard Business Review and Harvard Business Publishing Newsletter content on EBSCOhost is licensed for the private individual use of authorized EBSCOhost users. It is not intended for use as assigned course material in academic institutions nor as corporate learning or training materials in businesses. Academic licensees may not use this content in electronic reserves, electronic course packs, persistent linking from syllabi or by any other means of incorporating the content into course resources. Business licensees may not host this content on learning management systems or use persistent linking or other means to incorporate the content into learning management systems. Harvard Business Publishing will be pleased to grant permission to make this content available through such means. For rates and permission, contact permissions@harvardbusiness.org.

Harvard Business School Publishing crosses the ‘evil’ academic line

Christopher Chabris, psychology professor and author, on the occasion of Malcom Gladwell's latest book: "I say good for you to everyone who doesn't take Gladwell seriously. But the reason I take him seriously is because I take him and his publisher at their word. On their face, many of the assertions and conclusions in Gladwell's books are clearly meant to describe lawful regularities about the way human mental life and the human social world work. And this has always been the case with his writing." [blog.chabris.com]

As someone who used to play roller derby, I can tell you, those girls are tough. That being said, I don't think all but the best skater could hold their own against Batgirl and even the greatest blocker in the world would fly across the rink with even the tiniest bump by She-Hulk.

Of course, I would pay all kinds of money to see a roller derby match between Marvel and DC heroines -though it is hard to imagine any rink could actually withstand the brutality their match ups would inevitably result in.

These adorable derby dames were created by delightful geek artist Kevin Bolk.

Via Geek Tyrant

What happens when someone goes on Twitter to express disappointment over discovering his Velveeta cup came waaaayyyyyy too empty? If that person is Chris Torres, the creator of Nyan Cat, and Velveeta just happens to get wind of the Tweet, then pure magic can happen in the form of cheesy goodness.

That is, they sent him a package to make up for their blunder that included not only five blocks of original Velveeta, but also a one-of-a-kind tee showing a modified Nyan Cat with bread and drippy cheese replacing Nyan's classic Pop Tart and rainbow. 

Aside from showing that they have great customer service, Velveeta really impressed everyone simply by showing off their appreciation for great memes and that's what really matters in a processed cheese food company.

New York's Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, has subpoenaed AirBnB for user data on all active hosts in New York City "as part of an investigation into the website stemming from a 2010 law that makes it illegal to use such sites to rent out your own apartment," reports NYDN. "The site has 225,000 users in the city, but only data from those who rent out their place is being sought," they report. [HT: @csoghoian]

BBC current affairs shows have long been about their own adversarial tone, and there's something to be thankful in that: Britain's media culture forces politicians to subject themselves to grillings in a way that just doesn't happen much in America. But the fearless, no-nonsense style is often so affected that it relies upon the anxiety and obedience of interview subjects. When one comes along who knows what the deal is, the hosts are left to "yes, but" their way through trivial and poorly-prepared interview scripts.

A perfect example unfolded on BBC Newsnight yesterday, where The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald faced off against an interviewer, Kirsty Wark, so hopeless that she didn't even know the good questions to attack him with.

Randall Munroe of xkcd is as exasperated as we are about infographics. Why make an image when it's so much more user-friendly to put your information in text with links? You can always add nice pictures and graphs. -via Laughing Squid

Glitché is the evil twin of all those old-film, toy-lens, Instagram-style apps. Pick a photo, then glitch it all to Hell with broken NTSC emulation, weird 3D pixelation and heightmap extrusion effects, and delicious MPEG-style compression errors. For a $1 upgrade, the free app lets you save animated GIFs, too. [via Joel Johnson, below]

Chris Sherlock has filed a bug against Firefox in Mozilla's bugzilla bug-tracker, entitled "Pledge never to implement HTML5 DRM." It's an interesting way of using the open/transparent development protest to allow Web developers to voice their opinion on the World Wide Web's terrible, awful decision to standardize DRM for browsers. As the W3C's overseer for HTML5 has written, the only reason for DRM in HTML5 is to prevent legal innovation, not to stop piracy.

So what has happened? In short, they broke our soul. How can "protected content" have any part in an Open Web Platform?

Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) form the basis for a whole bunch of silliness, from proposals to prevent us viewing JavaScript source, to not being able to view text because of a font specification.

The EFF have been vocal in their concerns. In an article they published on October 2nd, they make the following points:

"A Web where you cannot cut and paste text; where your browser can't "Save As..." an image; where the "allowed" uses of saved files are monitored beyond the browser; where JavaScript is sealed away in opaque tombs; and maybe even where we can no longer effectively "View Source" on some sites, is a very different Web from the one we have today. It's a Web where user agents—browsers—must navigate a nest of enforced duties every time they visit a page. It's a place where the next Tim Berners-Lee or Mozilla, if they were building a new browser from scratch, couldn't just look up the details of all the "Web" technologies. They'd have to negotiate and sign compliance agreements with a raft of DRM providers just to be fully standards-compliant and interoperable. .

Bug 923590 - Pledge never to implement HTML5 DRM

---

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." - Robert A Heinlein, Life-Line

A U.S. Grand Jury today filed an indictment against 13 alleged members of Anonymous, for a series of internet denial-of-service attacks the collective launched in 2010 against ­anti-piracy groups and financial institutions that cooperated with a government request to block the processing of monetary donations to WikiLeaks.

Here is a copy of the indictment. The attacks were referred to at the time as “Operation Payback.”

From the Washington Post:

The indictment returned Thursday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria charges the 13 men with conspiring to intentionally cause damage to protected computers. Prosecutors accused the men of participating in a series of cyberattacks that briefly disrupted Mastercard’s and Visa’s Web sites and also targeted the Web sites of anti-piracy groups across the world.

The 13 alleged hackers are said to have used distributed denial of service attacks, also known as DDoS against the MPAA, the RIAA, anti-filesharing blowhard and KISS singer Gene Simmons, and Hustler magazine, as well as financial institutions that refused to process donations to Wikileaks after reported government requests.

Below, a promotional video for OpPayback released in 2010, at the time of the cyberattacks.

The men charged are identified by federal prosecutors as Dennis Owen Collins, 52, of Toledo; Jeremy Leroy Heller, 23, of Takoma Park; Zhiwei Chen, 21, of Atlanta; Joshua S. Phy, 27, of Gloucester, N.J.; Ryan Russell Gubele, 27, of Seattle; Robert Audubon Whitfield, 27, of Georgetown, Tex.; Anthony Tadros, 22, of Storrs Mansfield, Conn.; Geoffrey Kenneth Commander, 65, of Hancock, N.H.; Phillip Garrett Simpson, 28, of Tucson; Austen L. Stamm, 26, of Beloit, Kan.; Timothy Robert McClain, 26, of Clemson, S.C.; Wade Carl Williams, 27, of Missoula, Mont.; and Thomas J. Bell, 28, of Rockland, Mass.

Copyright and Creation, a policy brief from a collection of respected scholars at the rock-ribbed London School of Economics, argues that the evidence shows that piracy isn't causing any grave harm to the entertainment industry, and that anti-piracy measures like the three-strikes provision in Britain's Digital Economy Act don't work. They call on lawmakers to take an evidence-led approach to Internet and copyright law, and to consider the interests of the public and not just big entertainment companies looking for legal backstops to their profit-maximisation strategies.

“Contrary to the industry claims, the music industry is not in terminal decline, but still holding ground and showing healthy profits. Revenues from digital sales, subscription services, streaming and live performances compensate for the decline in revenues from the sale of CDs or records,” says Bart Cammaerts, LSE Senior Lecturer and one of the report’s authors.

The report shows that the entertainment industries are actually doing quite well. The digital gaming industry is thriving, the publishing sector is stable, and the U.S. film industry is breaking record after record.

“Despite the Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) claim that online piracy is devastating the movie industry, Hollywood achieved record-breaking global box office revenues of $35 billion in 2012, a 6% increase over 2011,” the report reads.

Even the music industry is doing relatively well. Revenue from concerts, publishing and digital sales has increased significantly since the early 2000s and while recorded music revenues show a decline, there is little evidence that piracy is the lead cause.

“The music industry may be stagnating, but the drastic decline in revenues warned of by the lobby associations of record labels is not in evidence,” the report concludes.

Piracy Isn’t Killing The Entertainment Industry, Scholars Show [Ernesto/TorrentFreak]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Cindy Cohn and Trevor Timm look at the NSA's Bullrun program, through which the US and UK governments have spent $250M/year sabotaging computer security. Cindy is the lawyer who argued the Bernstein case, which legalized civilian access to strong cryptography -- in other words, it's her work that gave us all the ability to communicate securely online. And so she's very well-situated to comment on what it means to learn that the NSA has deliberately weakened the security that ensures the integrity of the banking system, aviation control, embedded systems in everything from cars to implanted defibrillators, as well as network infrastructure, desktop computers, cloud servers, laptops, phones, tablets, TVs, and other devices.

Thankfully, the recent disclosures have led to at least some change. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the government agency in charge of one of the cryptographic standards the NSA has alleged to have secretly weakened, has reopened public comment on its standard and has even gone as far as to recommend people do not use it anymore.

And we’re beginning to see the international computer security community come to grips with this disturbing news.

But we must do more. 

* We must rebuild the broad coalition that fought the first crypto wars, including investors, businesses, civil liberties groups, scientists and ordinary people. 

* We must expose the vulnerabilities that have been secreted into our technologies. We must expose them and we must demand that they be fixed.

* We must ask standards bodies, companies and individual developers to pledge, publicly and unequivocally, to reject efforts to build backdoors or insert known vulnerabilities into their products—and create transparency so that they can't secretly cooperate with these efforts in the future.

* We must build our own tools, and support the tools that already exist that are independently verifiable as secure (most prominently, open source tools). 

* We must support efforts in Congress to rein in the NSA and bring it back under the rule of law, and we must make sure those efforts ensure that our technologies are safe.

* And we must not succumb to privacy nihilism.

But the public debate must start from a fundamental principle: The NSA has been making us less safe and it must stop.  Now. 

The NSA is Making Us All Less Safe

John Steele is one of the shadowy figures behind the notorious porno-copyright-trolls Prenda Law, about whom we've written rather a lot, as they are a colorful bunch of grifters. Steele had previously been accused of stealing the identity of Alan Cooper, the caretaker of one of his properties, making him the CEO of one of the shell companies behind which Prenda hides.

But that identity theft is hardly as damning as the latest revelation: Steele's mother-in-law has accused him of forging signatures in the course of Prenda's dirty business.

Cooper was questioned about March 18, 2011, the date he supposedly gave Lutz permission to sign his name. Cooper said he didn't remember anything about that date, but he knew he never gave Lutz such permission.

"What evidence do you have that you are identified as CEO of AF Holdings?" asked Hansmeier. Cooper didn't know. Someone had texted him and told that him his identity was stolen, and that he should contact a lawyer. Hansmeier pressed on that point, apparently seeking evidence that some Prenda lawyer he'd been up against had recruited Cooper as a client.

But the answer was something Hansmeier couldn't have predicted. As Hansmeier pressed, Cooper admitted he didn't want to answer. It could hurt the person if the name was revealed, Cooper said. The judge told him to answer, and he did: the texts came from a woman named Kim Eckenrode (spelling uncertain). She was John Steele's mother-in-law. It was Eckenrode who told him his identity was being used; it was she who told him he needed a lawyer.

Cooper was then examined by his own lawyer, who promptly admitted the Eckenrode text message into evidence. The exact message wasn't clear, but it told Cooper that Steele was using his signature, "works with porn companies based in Nevis," and sues downloaders for profit. It recommended an attorney, who ultimately led Cooper to Godfried.

At this point, Steele exhaled loudly.

Prenda’s John Steele: Accused of identity theft by his own mother-in-law

Dave Cirilli of Rally.org says, "Lavabit founder Ladar Levison recently launched an online fundraising campaign on Rally.org to help pay for legal expenses during his his Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals fight. He's already received over 24K in donations in the last 24 hours. Ladar is also using his page to update supporters on his latest legal developments and Lavabit news."

Man oh man, Mr. Mann. I didn't know if it was possible to adore the unfathomably prolific Jonathan "Song a Day" Mann any more, but yes, yes it is. Song a Day #1728, "Destroy all Patent Trolls." Lyrics:

When you're little you're told stories
Of trolls under bridges
They smell really bad
Eat children and pigeons
And their role as a troll
Is to make you pay a toll
And if you don't pay it
They might crush you and eat your soul

Did the troll build the bridge?
Naw, he's just a bully
He set up shop there
When he saw opportunity
The system was set up
So that he could use his brute
Force to make you do
What he wanted you to do

And that is why we say
Here in the modern day
That companies like Lodsys
Are trolls all the way
Patent trolls extort
Large companies and tiny
And when you call them trolls
They're offended and they're whiny

They don't build anything
They are lifeless soulless creatures
They glom on to creative folk
And suck away like leeches
They're a perfect symbol of our time
Their smell could not be ranker
They represent our current state
Along with investment bankers

So I say destroy
Destroy

If you're not making anything
Except paper work
If it's real people making things
That you hurt
If your office is a broom closet
Somewhere in the state of texas
We'll all line up in a row
To punch you in your solar plexus

Destroy

Follow Jonathan: YewToobz, a href="http://twitter.com/songadaymann">Twitters, Facebük, SoundCloud, mailing list, Google+, podcast.

Chart: Keith Collins, Jennifer Daniel and Karen Yourish/The New York Times

So. The government of the United States of America, the world's largest superpower, has shut down due to political bickering between the Republicans and the Democrats largely over Obamacare.

You didn't need us to tell you that. That much you already know.

The topic, as you'd expect, is everywhere on the news and Internet. But we'd like to know how this government shutdown - the first in 17 years (the last one was back in 1995 and 1996 when Newt Gingrich-led Congress feuded with President Clinton) - affected you. Government shutdowns are quite rare, and the last time it happened it wasn't as doom-and-gloom as people thought it would be.

But that doesn't mean that the shutdown does not have terrible effects on some people. How about for you? Does the US government shutdown affect you badly? In what ways?

POLL: Does the US Government Shutdown Affect You?

• Yes
• No
• I Don't Know! Just Show me the answers!

Want to read the first research published from NASA's Mars Curiosity expedition? That'll be $20, per paper, for a one-day pass. Or, at least, that's how much it would cost you to read those reports through Science, the journal that published them. Last Thursday, Michael Eisen, a biologist who founded the open-access journal Public Library of Science, put up a blog post in which he released free pdfs for all five of NASA's Curiosity papers. Meanwhile, Mother Jones has a profile on Eisen, which goes more in-depth into his campaign to make taxpayer-funded research more easily available to the taxpayers, themselves.

We've been a huge fan of Nick Bertke AKA Pogo here on Neatorama since we featured his remix of Alice in Wonderland way back in 2008. Since then, he's released remixes and samplings of Mary Poppins, Snow White, Scooby-Doo, The Wizard of Oz, Monsters Inc., The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, A.I., and many more (most of them featured here on Neatorama).

Last summer, Bertke released his first "about Pogo" video clip, in which he explained how he did what he does so well. In that clip, Pogo explained what he looked for when he selected audio clips to mix. Watch the wizard at work:

YouTube Clip - via Gizmodo

In the past couple of weeks, Pogo released a few new clips that you can enjoy below:

This one is fantastic and is becoming one of my all-time favorites Pogo mix, the Muppet Mash.

Think that Pogo can mix only music from cartoons, TV series and movies? Think again: he can make anything musically enjoyable, including home appliances. Here's what all home appliance commercials should be like!

You've got to listen to them all ... especially this Pokemon mix Catchatronic:

And a classic, Disney's Snow White remix Wishery - first mixed by Pogo back in 2010, is performed live (re-watch it just to see him dance!)