spriteleigh

Beam me up Simon Doohan! Redditor ThatNordicGuy has been busy doing all kinds of face morphs including some featuring the old and new X Men cast members, but the most impressive series he's created are those showing the new and old Star Trek cast members. Here is Simon Pegg and James Doohan together in what is certainly the ultimate Scotty. 

Link Via The Mary Sue

The Electronic Frontier Foundation continues to rack up victories in its Jewel v NSA suit, through which it has been suing the US spy agency over illegal mass-surveillance for nearly a decade (three successive administrations have stalled the suit by invoking official secrecy, a deadlock that was broken thanks to the leaks released by the whistleblower Edward Snowden). The latest news is that Judge Jeffrey White has ordered the government to unseal "any declassified material, like exhibits, declarations, and other ex parte submissions that the government had previously submitted to the court under seal" and refused to entertain the DoJ's appeal. EFF believes that the release will show that the DoJ lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court).

In light of the declassifications inspired by the June leaks, Judge Jeffrey White ordered the government to unseal any declassified material, like exhibits, declarations, and other ex parte submissions that the government had previously submitted to the court under seal.

In response, the government asked that it only release a new declaration. The Department of Justice lawyers reasoned that reviewing the material submitted since the case began in 2008 would be a heavy burden. We objected, noting that recently declassified documents have shown that the government had submitted misleading material to the court overseeing the spying, called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court).

Judge White denied the government's request, noting that the government had the resources to carry out such a review. He also noted that there should be a "fulsome" record for the court, the public, and the plaintiffs to draw from. The judge also set a briefing schedule on the procedural issues that it wanted resolved before turning to the critical question—whether the spying program is legal and constitutional.

After NSA Court Hearing, Government Must Unseal Documents by December 20 [Mark M. Jaycox/Electronic Frontier Foundation]

Twitter and telegrams have a couple of things in common: they both contain short messages, and they are both sent over long distances. And that's where any similarity ends. Telegrams were expensive, and you paid by the letter. To send a telegram, you had to go down to the telegraph office, which took time and planning, and wasn't done all that often. So telegrams contained important information, carefully worded to be short but clear. Twitter is used constantly from the comfort of wherever you are, and you can say as much as you want, as long as it's only 140 characters at a time.

Artist Charles Gute took tweets and presented them as vintage Western Union telegrams in a series called Random Tweets Reformatted as Telegrams, which highlights the differences in the two short-form communication media in a delightfully absurd way. See more of them at the Catherine Clark Gallery. Link -via Nag on the Lake

Patent trolls are mushrooming all over the world, thriving on the billions that they're able to extract from productive companies with their absurd patents and transparent extortion attempts. One of the only defenses society has against these parasites is the rare, clueful judge. Enter Judge William Alsup, who made history in the Oracle v Google shitshow, when his experience actually writing code let him see through Oracle's bizarre arguments and cut to the heart of the argument.

Now Alsup is back in the saddle, hearing a case involving "Network Protection Sciences," a troll who tried to engineer a hearing in the notorious East Texas courtroom that is the most favorable venue for trolling litigation, by renting out a closet in the area as its "offices" and naming the building's real-estate broker as the company's "director of business development." Alsup saw right through this, and required the trolls to explain, in fine detail, the workings of their "Mr. Sham" operation.

THE COURT: You're on the verge of losing this entire motion, and going to the Federal Circuit, with a lot of money against you. So if you want this to live to fight another day, you ought to listen to me for a moment. The best you can hope for is that the jury's going to decide this; but for the jury to decide the sham nature of this closet in Texas, they're going to have to understand why somebody would want to do this. So an expert is somebody you need to have explain it. This is going to be part of your case.

[COUNSEL]: No, Your Honor, it's not.

THE COURT: Well, then, it will be part of their case.

[COUNSEL]: Why is that relevant to the issue of patent infringement?

THE COURT: If we're going to try ownership here, and all of these issues about whether or not this guy was a sham, or not, the jury's got to understand the background of why it was or was not a sham.

[COUNSEL]: Well, Your Honor --

THE COURT: You're not going to be able to skate by, with -- beat this motion, and then get it somehow excluded at trial. For goodness' sakes.

[COUNSEL]: Well, how is it relevant to the issues that are at trial?

THE COURT: You've got to prove ownership. It's your burden.

[COUNSEL]: And you prove ownership by an assignment; not by -- not by showing --

THE COURT: It may not be valid, Counsel.

[COUNSEL]: But that will be resolved.

THE COURT: No, it's not going to be resolved. You're asking that it be resolved by the jury. I heard you say it a moment ago.

[COUNSEL]: No, Your Honor. I'm sorry.

THE COURT: Well, maybe now you're taking it back. It's on the record. I heard it. So on appeal you can make that point; but this jury is going to hear all of this stuff about the closet. And you're going to have to explain why "Mr. Sham" was signing these documents.

Tiny Closet, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from skrewtape's photostream)

(Image: Jon Defreest)

This is just a mock up, but AMC and Chooseco (the publisher of the book series) should definitely seize the opportunity. Are they in the meth business or the money business? Neither. They're in the publishing business.

You can see two more covers at the link.

Link -via Brody Engelhard

(video link) 

Poor Jesse Pinkman. Has any character ever gone through so much misery and abuse in the history of television? This supercut contain Breaking Bad spoilers. It also contains of lot of hurt, so viewer discretion is advised. -via Uproxx

Some suggested weekend reading. Click to enlarge.

David Gilmour is the kind of writer he “doesn’t love enough to teach.”

It’s not that he doesn’t love himself enough, it’s that he doesn’t love Canadian writers enough. He’s not big on women writers or Chinese writers either and doesn’t teach them in his short-fiction course at the University of Toronto (where he is not in the Department of English).

“I teach only the best,” he said in his Sept. 25th interview with Emily Keeler. Unfortunately for his students, Mr. Gilmour has a distinctly narrow view of the literary world. His “world literature” curriculum is limited to his favourite Russians, Tolstoy and Chekhov, Proust and American (but not Canadian) writers.

 I’m not interested in teaching books by women … What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.

So, okay, the guy teaches what he loves, the literature about which he feels passionate. This usually translates into lectures that students appreciate and can recall years later. Except that Mr. Gilmour says, “I’m a natural teacher, I was trained in television for many years. I know how to talk to a camera, therefore I know how to talk to a room of students. It’s the same thing.” Oh.

Mr. Gilmour is of course free to like or dislike any writer. I certainly have strong feelings about a number of writers. Some of those feelings I keep to myself because I couldn’t be bothered to deal with the “you don’t know what you’re talking about” retorts (which reminds me: isn’t it odd that Mr. Gilmour seems naive about the power of the media, after having worked in it for so many years? His quads must be getting quite a workout this week with all the back-peddling he’s doing).

So I keep it to myself that I’ve read Anna Karenina three times and I get less from it each time. Possibly I’m getting shallower with age. (Probably that scene with the doctor and the young virgin girl creeps me out more and more each time). We could argue that Mr. Gilmour is brave enough to be brazen enough to tell it like it is, for him. He is his own man, teaching at a big university without a doctorate (some of us here at Descant can see you sessionals out there reacting and we feel your pain, we really do).

And if his course was retitled (and you know it soon will be!)  “Fiction by Tolstoy, Chekhov, Proust, and Macho American Writers: No Women and No Chinese Writers” would any of this have been an issue? Is the problem simply one of taxonomy? Forgetting, for a moment, that taxonomies are developed by people and taken up and embedded in large institutions. Until they are disrupted.

Speaking of disruption, the (Canadian!) Griffin Poetry Prize winner Christian Bök was outraged enough by Mr. Gilmour’s comments that he proposed on the twittersphere that other similarly outraged citizens of literature put their money where their mouthiness is and donate to CWILA, Canadian Women in the Literary Arts, “an inclusive national literary organization for people who share feminist values and see the importance of strong and active female perspectives within the Canadian literary landscape.” Today they are tongue-in-cheek thanking Mr. Gilmour for raising awareness for their organization which has, since his interview, translated into new members and more donations.

And if CWILA is now benefitting from Mr. Gilmour’s narrow intellectual tastes, let’s be careful about throwing stones. Because, really, in the scope of “world literature” how many books has any one of us read from over the six continents where writers and publishers labour to bring them into existence? (Though the important difference here is that we are not teaching a course on world literature; at least, I’m not). I only “discovered” Nigerian writers in the past few years (and I mostly just picked Nigeria here so I could recommend the oh-so-young Helen Oyeyemi to you! Start with Mr. Fox. You’ll understand immediately why).

We here at Descant are not all of the same opinion on this subject. Some say it’s a tempest in a teapot, the latest bit of media headline-grabbing; others are concerned by the apparent dismissal of all Canadian writers; some feel badly for the guy whom they think was taken out of context. The full transcript is here, so you can judge for yourself.

The least radical response is, Hey, we’re all talking about books and the value of reading broadly, how bad can that be?

Hopefully, for Mr. Gilmour’s sake, his run at the Giller Prize won’t be thwarted by readers who don’t appreciate writers because they are “Canadian.”

Knight Rider to the Future

The dash cams will keep these accident-stagers from getting the payout they were hoping for.(Via World's Best Ever)

Jane from Creative Commons sez, "It has come to our attention that the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and top internet service providers are drafting curriculum to teach kids in California elementary schools that copying is wrong, or as Wired.com puts it, 'Downloading is Mean!'

"This message is way too simple. In this digital age, the most important thing we should be teaching kids is to be creative and take full advantage of all the web has to offer. Copyright, asking permission, open licensing, and all the other legal nuances, should be seen as secondary (and even complementary) to this purpose. We should be starting with the things kids can do versus what they can't do."

In addition to the campaign's overly simple and negative approach, other issues include the complete absence of fair use from the curriculum -- exceptions and limitations to copyright that allow various uses of copyrighted materials for educational, journalistic and other purposes. Wired.com reports, 'Its president, Marsali Hancock, says fair use is not a part of the teaching material because K-6 graders don't have the ability to grasp it.'

Assuming the net generation and their younger counterparts are as dumb as assumed in the above statement, the curriculum still leaves out a crucial and growing part of the Internet landscape -- the commons of free and open materials in the public domain and/or released under open licenses that actually encourage copying, redistribution, revision, and remix! In short, everything this simplified anti-piracy campaign is conveniently leaving out in its copyright curriculum for kids.

There is a more balanced approach to educating kids about copyright that includes the alternatives, and here are some organizations and experienced educators who have developed copyright curricula. The following list of resources are open educational resources (OER), licensed under a CC license that enables free and legal reuse, redistribution and remix. In short, stuff that is free and just fine and even great to copy!

Open curriculum alternatives to MPAA’s new anti-piracy campaign for kids

The MPAA, RIAA, and America's major ISPs have teamed up to produce a stilted, propagandistic copyright curriculum for California's public schools. The material does not mention fair use at all (it's not "age appropriate," apparently) and suggests that you may not build on others' ideas without explicit permission, something that is both legally and morally nonsensical. Here's the sixth grade curriculum [PDF], here's grade five [PDF], and here's grade two [PDF], and grade one [PDF]. The plan is to roll this out across America.

“This thinly disguised corporate propaganda is inaccurate and inappropriate,” says Mitch Stoltz, an intellectual property attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who reviewed the material at WIRED’s request.

“It suggests, falsely, that ideas are property and that building on others’ ideas always requires permission,” Stoltz says. “The overriding message of this curriculum is that students’ time should be consumed not in creating but in worrying about their impact on corporate profits.”

The material was prepared by the California School Library Association and the Internet Keep Safe Coalition in conjunction with the Center For Copyright Infringement, whose board members include executives from the MPAA, RIAA, Verizon, Comcast and AT&T.

Each grade’s material includes a short video, and comes with a worksheet for teachers to use that’s packed with talking points to share with students.

Downloading Is Mean! Content Industry Drafts Anti-Piracy Curriculum for Elementary Schools [David Kravets/Wired]

Philipp sez, "We are two indie developers who just opened the doors to Manyland, a limitless, shared world where you can shape things together with others in any way you want by drawing them... from the bridges you stand on, the houses you see, the plants and oceans, to the body you are walking with. We hope some of you like this and join us. (Note: There's zero "posting to your wall/connecting your friends" stuff for the logins... it's just used to save you registering another account.)"

In the Columbia Journalism Review, Sarah Laskow looks at the empirical research on whether, and how, copyright works. From Christopher Buccafusco et al's experimental work on the motivations for creative work to Paul Heald's work on copyright term-extension, which showed that the negative impact of extending copyright on most works -- as their copyright terms extended, they simply disappeared. Bill Patry's amazing How to Fix Copyright and James Boyle's wonderful The Public Domain both make a case for copyright policy as an "evidence-free zone," and this is a timely reminder of just how true that is.

Part of what empirical research can show is how finer-tuned laws might work better. Not all creative industries work the same way—making a major motion picture requires more up-front investment than writing a poem; computer software might have a shorter shelf-life than a bestselling book. A few people doing this work floated the idea that copyright law should regulate creative industries more like the EPA regulates pollutants or the FDA regulates drugs—case-by-case, with research backing up policy decisions. “Regulatory agencies are capable of looking at products on the market and individual industries and creating regulation that fits them better than a one-size-fits-all law,” says Heald. “We can categorize copyright works into a dozen or so and get a more fine-grained treatment that would benefit everyone.”

But that’s hoping for a lot. First of all, as these researchers acknowledge, their work is in its early stages. They’re showing that not all the assumptions that IP policy has leaned on are necessarily correct, but that doesn’t mean they’ve determined what the actual rules that govern these markets are. “The things we do in our lab are pretty abstract from the real world,” says Buccafusco. “The painters we have from the Art Institute are not identically situated to the people making decisions for MGM.”

Mostly, they’re hoping that, in the next round of copyright lawmaking, they’ll have some evidence to present lawmakers to help them better understand how the laws they’re making work—that the debate will be informed, just a little bit, by empirical, independent research.

Does copyright law work? [Sarah Laskow/Columbia Journalism Review]

(via Techdirt)

By the fabulous Doubleclicks, as part of their new “Weekly Song Wednesday” program. The song seems appropriate these days.

Six actors, Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig, have portrayed James Bond in feature films (David Niven also played Bond in Casino Royale in 1967, but many consider that film "unofficial").

Redditor g_noodle combined Bond portraits of the six actors into two "transition" Bonds, with the three "early" Bonds (Connery, Moore, Lazenby) on the left and the three "recent" Bonds (Dalton, Brosnan, and Craig) on the right. Then those two images were combined to achieve a final combination, which looks like an actor who would be considered perfect for the role.

Who does it look like to you? Clive Owen? George Clooney? Mel Gibson? I still see Sean Connery and Roger Moore in this picture. The various steps in the process are shown in a series at imgur. Link -via reddit

"Each year, EFF's Pioneer Awards ceremony gives the digital civil liberties community a chance to honor the work of those who have bettered our world through remarkable innovation, activism, journalism, or leadership," writes the EFF's Richard Esguerra. This year's awards honored James Love, Aaron Swartz, and Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, and included a powerful keynote by professor Lawrence Lessig and from Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, the partner of the late, young Mr. Swartz.

"Amidst the grave challenges faced by our friends and fellow travelers," writes Esguerra, "The Pioneer Awards ceremony often grants a unique moment for celebrating the genuine joy of fighting for what's right. But this year's event also invoked tense and challenging emotions that underscored the urgency of our times."

Read the full recap, and listen to audio or watch the video: Taking a Stand at the 2013 Pioneer Awards Ceremony | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Starbug, the Chaos Computer Club hacker who broke the fingerprint biometric security on the Iphone, has given an interview [German] to CT Magazine detailing the hack, and released a new video showing how he did it.

In the end it, remove the fingerprint in a realistic usage scenarios directly from an iPhone succeeded. Here, a scanner with 2400 DPI was used. Subsequently, this fingerprint is digitally enhanced in order to print on a transparent film (1200 dpi), which was then used as a mask for exposing a printed circuit board. Protected by the black areas in front of the UV light structures do not harden and can then be etched away. This yields a form that serves as a template for creating artificial fingerprints. This is done by spraying with graphite, which is then applied wood glue is then used as a skin-like support material. The video shows that the iPhone is accepted as the created fingerprint harmless dummy.

None of the methods used is new. About to create the procedure, fingerprint forms with etched circuit boards, Tsutomu Matsumoto in 2002 documented . The equipment and materials used are quite simply accessible for ambitious hobbyists. Thus, the cracking of the fingerprint lock should indeed exceed the capabilities of a conventional pickpocket, a targeted attack by a tech savvy attacker will touch ID but no insurmountable obstacles in the way.

Der iPhone-Fingerabdruck-Hack [Jürgen Schmidt/CT]

The iPhone fingerprint hack [Google Translate]

(Thanks, Alex!)

Zack sends us "A look at some wild and often highly-collectible knockoffs, including several things you can't unsee, and a piece that combines Thomas the Tank Engine with giant 'combiner' Transformer sets such as Devastator. I want two of those."

Bootlegs. Counterfeits. Knockoffs. They’re the bane of any toy manufacturer, but a source of pure delight to the jaded collector. Their affordability, availability, and aesthetic all intersect into what might be the perfect toy. I know, that’s a crazy statement. “Perfect” is a pretty subjective term, it turns out; however, I’m going make the case for bootlegs, knockoffs, whatever you wanna call ‘em. We’re gonna look, laugh, and maybe learn somethin’ before we’re done. Hold onto your Pop Rocks, kids, we’re goin’ in!

The Wild World of Bootleg Toys (Thanks, Zack!)

(Video Link)

To propose marriage to Rebecca, Joe Wakim compiled a film trailer using scenes from movies, most of them superhero movies. Watch him steal an engagement ring from Spider-Man and prepare for action at Superman's Fortress of Solitude.

I can't wait to watch the sequel!

-via When Geeks Wed

We've written about Pablo Stanley of Stanley Colors blog before on Neatorama, but the man is on a roll! Great job, Pablo! In this new panel, he illustrated one of the most iconic songs ever recorded, Imagine by John Lennon.

It's probably impossible not to read the cartoon and have the song not pop into your head. It's now probably going to get stuck in your head for the rest of the day, but hey, at least it's a catchy tune!

Sing it with me, "Imagine there's no heaven ..." (Love this song? Did you know that the lyric and concept came from Lennon's wife Yoko Ono? But Lennon said that, "in those days I was more selfish, more macho and omitted to mention her contribution." Read more about Imagine in this article by Eddie Deezen, "Imagine: John Lennon's Signature Song.")

If you wonder who the guy named "Milk" in the fourth from last panel, that's San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, who was the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in the United States in 1977. Milk was assassinated in 1978, just 11 months after taking office.

The woman named Anna in the third from last panel is Russian journalist, writer, and human rights activist named Anna Politkovskaya. She reported about the Chechen conflict and published several books critical of the current Russian government. In 2006, Politkovskaya was shot and killed in her apartment complex. Her murder remained unsolved until today.

The meaning of Imagine is a hotly debated topic, but Pablo noted in his blog, "This is NOT an anti-religion/atheist propaganda comic. The comic and the song (at least as I understand it) [try] to communicate that no matter your faith, we should all share the world in peace ... As silly as that sounds."

View the original comic over at Stanley's website.

(YouTube link)

The Indian comedy collective India Bakchod produced this black humor PSA to highlight the attitudes of many involved in rape cases.

Every sexual assault case in India inspires a string of stupid and hateful remarks against women. This is our response to those remarks.

The video features Bollywood stars Gursimran Khamba, Rohan Joshi, Tanmay Bhat, and Ashish Shakya. -via Metafilter

(Video Link)

Two years ago, I mentioned that the Husky Jackal Theater in Nashville re-wrote the script for the movie Terminator 2 using only lines from the works of William Shakespeare. The creative team has completed the project. This video shows scenes from the glorious result.

Link (warning: auto-sound) -via Kuriositas

Elite Elite by Atomic Rocket

Upgrade your manner and upgrade your life, but first, upgrade your wardrobe with this Elite Elite T-shirt by T-shirt artist Atomic Rocket.

Check out Atomic Rocket on Facebook then visit his NeatoShop page for more geeky awesome designs! Your purchase helps support indie artists as well as this blog.

InVADER Zolo	Super Sonic Bros.	Not So Serious	Live Long Forcefully

View more designs by Atomic Rocket | More Funny T-shirts | New T-Shirts

Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop, earn generous royalties, and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!