spriteleigh

Electronic Frontier Foundation legal director Cindy Cohn has published an original take on the Bradley Manning prosecution at the EFF's blog. In it, she recounts how government prosecutors portrayed the 25 year old former Army intelligence specialist as uniquely menacing because of his knowledge of computers and digital tools. In other words, exploiting the judge's lack of familiarity with technology. Cohn describes this as "Hacker madness."

[T]he decision today continues a trend of government prosecutions that use familiarity with digital tools and knowledge of computers as a scare tactic and a basis for obtaining grossly disproportionate and unfair punishments, strategies enabled by broad, vague laws like the CFAA and the Espionage Act. Let's call this the “hacker madness” strategy. Using it, the prosecution portrays actions taken by someone using a computer as more dangerous or scary than they actually are by highlighting the digital tools used to a nontechnical or even technophobic judge.

Bradley Manning Verdict and the Dangerous “Hacker Madness” Prosecution Strategy [eff.org, via Trevor Timm]

Link: Boing Boing's Bradley Manning trial coverage archives.

Pvt. Bradley Manning was found not guilty of aiding the enemy today, but convicted of multiple counts of violating the Espionage Act.

Twenty to thirty supporters, wearing black tee shirts emblazoned with the word "Truth", were in the courtroom alongside eight reporters. There were no outbursts as the verdict was read.

The verdict was read by Justice Col. Denise Lind at 1 p.m. EST, who presided over Manning's trial and deliberated over the weekend after closing arguments wrapped late last week. The sentencing phase will begin tomorrow morning at 9:30 a.m. EST.

Manning did not look surprised, and I saw a smile on his face, briefly, after the verdict. His attorney appeared resigned, as if he had expected it.

Pvt. Manning, accused of leaking a massive trove of classified information to Wikileaks, spent the last three years in custody awaiting his day in court. Described as a whistleblower or traitor, depending on whom you ask, his disclosures--including some 750,000 pages of documents and a video of civilian killings in Iraq--were calculated to expose wrongdoing by the U.S. Government.

"I believed if the public was aware of the data, it would start a public debate of the wars," Manning said in a statement given at the trial.

Prosecutors, however, accused him of being a "fame-hungry traitor" and forcing the withdrawal of ambassadors from diplomatically sensitive regions.

Manning reported trying to provide the information first to U.S. newspapers, but he reported that a Washington Post reporter brushed him off and that the New York Times simply ignored it. Both newspapers--like many others--gave the revelations significant coverage after they were published by Wikileaks, the clearing house for leaks.

He was turned in by Adrian Lamo, a correspondent to whom he disclosed his activites in a series of internet chats. Manning, 25, born in Crescent, Oklahoma, was arrested in May, 2010, while serving in Iraq.

Journalists at Fort Meade were not permitted to report the verdict directly from the courtroom, or to leave the courtroom until permitted by the judge.

More to follow.

— Xeni Jardin and Rob Beschizza

Den Lennie posted a video to Vimeo that compared the Rotolight Anova to a competing product, the Kino Flo Celeb, and found the Rotolight product inferior. Rotolight responded by filing a perjurious, fraudulent DMCA takedown notice with Vimeo (who, to its shame, honored it), claiming that the review violated Rotolight's trademark. This is pure copyfraud: first, because the DMCA is only available as a remedy for copyright infringement (not trademark infringement) and second, because product reviews are not trademark infringements, full stop.

Using a Copyright Infringement claim to shut down the opposition (Thanks, Dave!)

MIT's report on its involvement in the prosecution of Aaron Swartz (PDF) has been published. The report does not apportion any blame to the university for Swartz's prosecution, stating the the university operated as a "neutral party."

Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Aaron's partner, vigorously disputes the report's findings, calling it a whitewash, pointing out that MIT provided significant aid to the federal prosecutors who chased Aaron over downloading technical aritcles (which he was entitled to see) from its network, but refused to supply the same documents to the defense team, who desperately needed them. This makes MIT's claim of "neutrality" ring false.

Further, Larry Lessig has posted some preliminary thoughts on MIT's position, pointing out that it turned on a question of authorized or unauthorized access, and that the report says MIT never told the prosecutors that Aaron's access was "unauthorized," suggesting that the prosecutors knew they had no case.

MIT’s behavior throughout the case was reprehensible, and this report is quite frankly a whitewash.

Here are the facts: This report claims that MIT was “neutral” — but MIT’s lawyers gave prosecutors total access to witnesses and evidence, while refusing access to Aaron’s lawyers to the exact same witnesses and evidence. That’s not neutral. The fact is that all MIT had to do was say publicly, “We don’t want this prosecution to go forward” – and Steve Heymann and Carmen Ortiz would have had no case. We have an institution to contrast MIT with – JSTOR, who came out immediately and publicly against the prosecution. Aaron would be alive today if MIT had acted as JSTOR did. MIT had a moral imperative to do so.

And even now, MIT is still stonewalling. Wired reporter Kevin Poulsen FOIA’d the Secret Service’s files on Aaron’s case, and judge ordered them to be released. The only reason they haven’t been is because MIT has filed an objection. If MIT is at all serious about implementing any reforms to stop this kind of tragedy from happening again, it must stop objecting to the release of information about the case."

TarenSK | MIT report is a whitewash. My statement in response.

(Image: Aaron Swartz memorial graffiti by Brooklyn Graffiti artist BAMN, Almonroth/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA)

At Nautilus, Jonathan Katz applies a systems-level perspective to the problem of food aid. Every year, the United States spends billions (although much less than it used to) sending shipments of food to countries where people are going hungry. The problem: That aid doesn't solve their hunger as a long-term thing, it just creates a stop-gap measure — and we do it in a way that costs more than it would likely cost to support programs that actually help those people change their lives. Why? Katz argues that it's because food aid evolved more for the benefit of American companies than the long-term benefit of feeding people.

Adventure Time

King of the Hill

The Smurfs

Redditor TanBurn imagined Link from The Legend of Zelda as a character in several cartoons, including Family Guy, The Simpsons, Archer, The Power Puff Girls, Samurai Jack and Bob's Burgers. You can view them all at the gallery link below. It's dangerous to go alone, so bring a few cartoon pals with you on your journey.

Discussion Thread and Gallery -via Nerd Approved

(YouTube link)

Weird Al Yankovic's song "Albuquerque" is the longest song he ever released. It's an epic account of a trip to the New Mexico city. Now it has an awesome video, made from strangely apt clips of the TV show Breaking Bad. The visual imagery makes the song seem shorter than it is, and certainly highlights the insanity of the AMC show. -via Metafilter

Dr. Stacy Makhnevich was a NYC dentist (billing herself as the "Classical Singer Dentist of New York") who made use of a bizarre form provided by a company called "Medical Justice." Her patients were expected to sign this form, through which they assigned copyright in all their reviews of the dental practice and the doctor to the doctor herself, enabling her to use copyright notices to censor any criticism of her that appeared online. Robert Lee was an unhappy patient who posted a one-star Yelp review in 2010, and subsequently ended up embroiled in litigation against Makhnevich -- a lawsuit that would have likely settled the question of the legality of Medical Justice's adhesion contracts.

But Medical Justice left Makhnevich to fight the claim on her own, and she has subsequently disappeared. It seems she is no longer practicing dentistry, and her lawyers can't locate her and have asked to shut down the case.

“Defendant Makhnevich has closed its business in New York, has closed its offices, and has not made herself available to respond to this matter,” wrote Makhnevich’s lawyers on June 25. At that time, they hadn’t communicated with Makhnevich in three months, and that communication had been through her assistant.

“We brought this lawsuit to make sure she stopped and to point out to other dentists that they couldn't do this,” said Levy in an interview with Ars. “We thought Medical Justice would step in to defend her. Instead, they walked away from it and left her holding the bag. And now she’s left her lawyers holding the bag.”

Levy is seeking to get Lee back the money he was overcharged and to have notice sent to Makhnevich’s other patients that the contracts they signed don’t prevent them from writing reviews. He’s also seeking to get legal fees paid for; it cost $3,000 to serve Makhnevich, he noted.

Dentist who used copyright to silence her patients is on the run [Joe Mullin/Ars Technica]

(Image: Reeve 12265, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 27337026@N03's photostream)

1. Serve the public trust
2. Protect the innocent
3. Uphold the law
4. (Classified)

Cop Selfies [via Metafilter]

(YouTube link)

Cats operate under the assumption that it never hurts to ask for what you want. And what these cats want is a nice head scratch. -via Tastefully Offensive

The Canadian Conservative Party has sent out direct-mail flyers boasting about the party's track record on initiatives to help people with disabilities. The flyer has some of the text rendered in fake Braille -- a picture of raised dots that are not, themselves, raised at all.

Nicolas snapped a photo of the flyer and put it on Twitter this week, saying the “mailer about accessibility has a PICTURE of Braille on it. How very sensitive and supportive.”

Some of Nicolas’s friends in Winnipeg told her the flyer was also sent around Elmwood-Transcona, riding of Conservative MP Lawrence Toet. It also surfaced in Peterborough, home to MP Dean Del Mastro, and in Ottawa West-Nepean, home riding of Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird.

“It’s shocking to me that a party that big, and that well-funded, could be putting out something so ignorant,” Nicolas said in an email to the Star.

Jim Tokos, a vice-president at the Canadian Council of the Blind, said he found the flyers simply “baffling” — especially since the whole purpose of the pamphlet was to boast about how much the Conservatives were doing to make life easier for disabled people in Canada.

Conservative flyers on disabled initiatives contain fake Braille [Susan Delacourt/Toronto Star]

(Thanks, Cliff!)

You may remember that two weeks ago, an Asiana airliner crashed in San Francisco. Local news station KTVU gave the flight crew fake and obscene names. It was a public relations disaster for the station and led to the firing of at least 3 employees.

Last week, a Southwest airliner crashed in New York City. Thankfully, there were no fatalities. According to Slothed, a Korean news program mocked KTVU by giving the airliner's pilots and passengers fake names:

It looks like a Korean news agency is having some fun at KTVU’s expense. After the landing gear failure of the Southwest flight at LGA they showed this graphic with American pilot names “Captain Kent Parker Wright”, “Co-Captain Wyatt Wooden Workman”.

They even went as far as making up fake names for people to interview. Flight instructor “Heywood U. Flye-Moore” and skeptical passenger “Macy Lawyers”.

Please note that at the time that I wrote this post, I could not verify this story through other sources. 

Link -via VA Viper

[Ed: An anonymous reader from the publishing industry wrote in with the following. I have every reason to believe it's true -Cory]

There's something going on at Penguin (interesting to see if it changes now that it's Penguin Random House, though all signs point no) that's so stupid and old school and against all authors that I thought I'd share.

In every contract in publishing, there's language (as you know) that gives an author a certain number of copies of the book, on publication. When ebooks came to play, agents began trying to negotiate for an electronic version of the book too, oftentimes successful. What they /can't/ get from Penguin (and a few other publishers, though notably Penguin) is a final PDF or even a final word doc of the book. Agents are told that Penguin puts work into the layout, edit and design and so agents can't just give that work away to foreign countries for them to use in their editions. That work must be paid for. I semi-buy that argument, though it makes me think two things: 1) Shame on them for getting in the way (as they do sometimes) of a foreign deal and 2) Penguin is contractually obligated to create the book anyway, with all of those pieces.

To deal with this, Penguin (and a few other places), have set it up that you can buy a PDF file for $250-300 to send the book to foreign publishers. That cost is often borne by the author or the agency. Ridiculous. To get around it, agents have tried to approach at negotiation. But, when making a deal in the six figure mark, even at auction, agents still can't get that one little guarantee. We're talking BIG books and BIG agencies, but nope. Won't go into contracts (even though I'm sure there are exceptions, the point stands). What's more, Penguin will laugh off the idea of getting around it by making an author's advance, say, $20,300. Or $250,300.

In the past few years, the issue has changed, grown to something more important and costly. When a book is ready to be marketed, Penguin will print loads of galleys. Great, important, standard. But what they won't do is give out electronic versions of the book. Not DRM and watermarked copies. Not password protected copies. Any exceptions to this rule are usually limited to one or two copies, pre-approved, sent by the editor and not the author or agent. But in this day and age, so so many people want to read electronically, that it's actually a real problem. Here's what happens:

1. Author queries writer friend, bookstore owner, 'big mouth', person author respects, etc. and a few of them are traveling or prefer an e-version, they love their Nooks.
2. Author can either send an old version of the book, the last remaining on author's computer, usually two-four edits old.
3. Author can scan and send a marked proof (second to last edit, typeset, photocopied and sent to Author for approval).
4. Author can miss the opportunity to connect with said contact.
5. Or Author can buy the document for 300 dollars and send it around willy nilly.
6. Practically some agents get around this by just appealing to the editor or the asst., but Penguin specifically has a very firm policy and won't let them go. These manuscripts are sometimes to help set the book up for film/TV, foreign markets, or publicity. ALL good for author/publisher.

All ridiculous that there's an impediment.

What does Penguin think would happen?

1. That the book would get leaked?
   1. Has there ever been a debut novel that has been leaked that has been a problem? I cannot think of one.
   2. A famous case of one that had been leaked is GO THE F TO SLEEP, a picture book (and so possible to read completely in the span of 5 minutes), that went on to be a #1 NYTimes bestseller and sell hundreds of thousands if not over a million copies.
   3. Why isn't it a problem? This is important. It acts as word of mouth, as publicity (and that, mind you, is if it IS leaked, which it probably won't be). Frankly, the measure of success of a book is based on such few relative numbers (ie, 20k is a great number to hit – imagine if movies had only 20k people watching…) that a big leak probably would do good for the publication.
2. That… what? I can't think of anything else. Give away an ending? The first review with spoilers will do that.

Then there's the entire issue about an author not having access to his own work, which is harder to parse.

1. Penguin DOES buy the rights.
2. But the author owns the copyright. It's his/her work.
3. It seems morally dubious to not allow an author to not have a final copy of the book in every form - including electronic form, even if we're talking pre-design. Take away the design and give the author the bare bones. Publishers DO give physical copies, so they seem to agree.

Ultimately, Penguin is stepping on the necks of themselves and their authors. Old thinking, backward thinking. The result of this is either missed opportunity, negative relations between author/editor/publisher, and/or people reading older, lesser versions of works by debut authors who just want to make it and would like their publishers support to have it happen. If we're talking the JK Rowlings of the world, fine – lock up those books and don’t let anyone read them, but that's such a different and obvs. case that it proves the point.

"Our Princess is in Another Castle of the Pyrenees!" based on René Magritte's "Castle of the Pyrenees" (1959)

"Super Brothers!" based on René Magritte's "High Society" (1962)

"Racoonda" based on René Magritte's "Golconda" (1953)

"Bullet Bill Transfixed" based on René Magritte's "Time Transfixed" (1938)

So this is what happens when Super Mario meets René Magritte. Tumblr artist Super Magritte playfully recreates masterpieces from the Belgian surrealist painter in 8-bit style featuring your favorite Super Mario characters. Check it out: Link - via Animal NY

Some people think that Nick Cage is a bad actor, but I found him very convincing as Belle in Beauty and the Beast. These are 2 of 9 altered casting images by BuzzFeed's Jen Lewis. You can view the rest at the link.

Link -via Visual News

The Pentagon has classified the list of groups that the USA believes itself to be at war with. They say that releasing a list of the groups that it considers to itself to be fighting could be used by those groups to boast about the fact that America takes them seriously, and thus drum up recruits. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the most transparent administration in history.

In a major national security speech this spring, President Obama said again and again that the U.S. is at war with “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces.”

So who exactly are those associated forces? It’s a secret.

At a hearing in May, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked the Defense Department to provide him with a current list of Al Qaeda affiliates.

The Pentagon responded – but Levin’s office told ProPublica they aren’t allowed to share it. Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for Levin, would say only that the department’s “answer included the information requested.”

A Pentagon spokesman told ProPublica that revealing such a list could cause “serious damage to national security.”

Who Are We at War With? That’s Classified (via Memex 1.1)

Democratic congressman Alan Grayson is leading a bipartisan group of representatives concerned about "constant misleading information" from the intelligence community. They're holding a hearing Wednesday, at which critics of the National Security Agency's spying programs will speak. One of them is Glenn Greenwald, who will participate remotely from Brazil. I'm sure the NSA will want to listen in on that line.

Complete with epilesy warning. [emojitracker.com via Matt Buchanan]

UK Prime Minister David Cameron (and his thin-skinned, slandering advisor Claire Perry) have been cynically appealing to the Tory's reactionary base by promising to purge the British Internet of porn with a Chinese style, opt-out Great Firewall. Cameron has held out the UK ISP TalkTalk as a paragon in this regard, praising its "Homesafe" blocking product.

Now the BBC reports that Homesafe was built by Huawei, the Chinese IT giant Huawei, founded by Ren Zhengfei, a former officer in China's People's Liberation Army. Huawei has been characterized by senior Western spooks as an arm of the Chinese intelligence service, conducting industrial espionage on its behalf.

A poorly understood feature of censorship software is that it is also surveillance software. In order to stop you from clicking on "bad" things, it must intercept all of your clicks and examine them to make sure they're not on the blacklist.

Initially, TalkTalk told the BBC that it was US security firm Symantec that was responsible for maintaining its blacklist, and that Huawei only provided the hardware, as previously reported.

However, Symantec said that while it had been in a joint venture with Huawei to run Homesafe in its early stages, it had not been involved for over a year.

TalkTalk later confirmed it is Huawei that monitors activity, checking requests against its blacklist of over 65 million web addresses, and denying access if there is a match.

The contents of this list are largely determined by an automated process, but both Huawei and TalkTalk employees are able to add or remove sites independently.

Chinese firm Huawei controls net filter praised by PM

(Image: David Cameron - not Prime Minister yet - in a Broadcasting House lift, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from bowbrick's photostream)

The Department of Justice announced late Thursday that Halliburton Energy Services has accepted criminal responsibility and will plead guilty to destroying evidence related to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Halliburton was charged with one count of destroying evidence relating to whether or not the 2010 well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico was preventable.

The full statement from the Department of Justice is below.

Halliburton Agrees to Plead Guilty to Destruction of Evidence in Connection with Deepwater Horizon Tragedy

Third Corporate Guilty Plea Obtained by the Deepwater Horizon Task Force

Halliburton Energy Services Inc. has agreed to plead guilty to destroying evidence in connection with the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the Department of Justice announced today. A criminal information charging Halliburton with one count of destruction of evidence was filed today in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Louisiana.

Halliburton has signed a cooperation and guilty plea agreement with the government in which Halliburton has agreed to plead guilty and admit its criminal conduct. As part of the plea agreement, Halliburton has further agreed, subject to the court’s approval, to pay the maximum-available statutory fine, to be subject to three years of probation and to continue its cooperation in the government’s ongoing criminal investigation. Separately, Halliburton made a voluntary contribution of $55 million to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation that was not conditioned on the court’s acceptance of its plea agreement.

According to court documents, on April 20, 2010, while stationed at the Macondo well site in the Gulf of Mexico, the Deepwater Horizon rig experienced an uncontrolled blowout and related explosions and fire, which resulted in the deaths of 11 rig workers and the largest oil spill in U.S. history. Following the blowout, Halliburton conducted its own review of various technical aspects of the well’s design and construction. On or about May 3, 2010, Halliburton established an internal working group to examine the Macondo well blowout, including whether the number of centralizers used on the final production casing could have contributed to the blowout. A production casing is a long, heavy metal pipe set across the area of the oil and natural gas reservoir. Centralizers are protruding metal collars affixed at various intervals on the outside of the casing. Use of centralizers can help keep the casing centered in the wellbore away from the surrounding walls as it is lowered and placed in the well. Centralization can be significant to the quality of subsequent cementing around the bottom of the casing. Prior to the blowout, Halliburton had recommended to BP the use of 21 centralizers in the Macondo well. BP opted to use six centralizers instead.

As detailed in the information, in connection with its own internal post-incident examination of the well, in or about May 2010, Halliburton, through its Cementing Technology Director, directed a Senior Program Manager for the Cement Product Line (Program Manager) to run two computer simulations of the Macondo well final cementing job using Halliburton’s Displace 3D simulation program to compare the impact of using six versus 21 centralizers. Displace 3D was a next-generation simulation program that was being developed to model fluid interfaces and their movement through the wellbore and annulus of a well. These simulations indicated that there was little difference between using six and 21 centralizers. Program Manager was directed to, and did, destroy these results.

In or about June 2010, similar evidence was also destroyed in a later incident. Halliburton’s Cementing Technology Director asked another, more experienced, employee (“Employee 1”) to run simulations again comparing six versus 21 centralizers. Employee 1 reached the same conclusion and, like Program Manager before him, was then directed to “get rid of” the simulations.

Efforts to forensically recover the original destroyed Displace 3D computer simulations during ensuing civil litigation and federal criminal investigation by the Deepwater Horizon Task Force were unsuccessful.

In agreeing to plead guilty, Halliburton has accepted criminal responsibility for destroying the aforementioned evidence.

The guilty plea agreement and criminal charge announced today are part of the ongoing criminal investigation by the Deepwater Horizon Task Force into matters related to the April 2010 Gulf oil spill. The Deepwater Horizon Task Force, based in New Orleans, is supervised by Acting Assistant Attorney General Mythili Raman and led by John D. Buretta, who serves as the director of the task force. The task force includes prosecutors from the Criminal Division and the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the Department of Justice; the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana and other U.S. Attorney’s Offices; and investigating agents from: the FBI; Department of the Interior, Office of Inspector General; Environmental Protection Agency, Criminal Investigation Division; Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Inspector General; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Office of Law Enforcement; U.S. Coast Guard; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.

The case is being prosecuted by Deepwater Horizon Task Force Director John D. Buretta, Deputy Directors Derek A. Cohen and Avi Gesser, and task force prosecutors Richard R. Pickens II, Scott M. Cullen, Colin Black and Rohan Virginkar.

An information is merely a charge and a defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Related news, none of which is likely to be particularly good for Halliburton shareholders:

Halliburton is one of multiple companies named in a US Department of Justice fracking antitrust probe.

And defense contractor KBR, a former Halliburton subsidiary previously known as Kellogg Brown & Root, must face claims that its employees took kickbacks while shipping military equipment to Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a ruling by the US 5th Circuit today.

(Image: Deepwater Horizon Offshore Drilling Platform on Fire, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from ideum's photostream)

If you've paid any attention to the Internet over the last few years you're probably aware that real life ducks are not exactly as friendly and personable as the ones in cartoons.

What if children's television reflected the fact that real duck life has more in common with, say, Oz, than Duck Tales? It would probably look a lot like this.

May be NSFW.

Video Link

Matthew says: "Remember Lt. John Pike, the 'pepper spray cop' from UC Davis? He is appealing for worker's compensation, claiming he suffered psychiatric injury from the incident. He has a settlement conference scheduled for August 13. Occupy will be there."

Hate working on weekends? That's because you *can* work on weekends.

Not so in France, where tough labor laws prohibit stores from being open on Sunday. That's why some people are striking ... for the right to work more:

... with France weighed down with economic trouble, a new group of employees from two large hardware store chains is demanding to work more, and it’s pulled its slogan straight from the Obama campaign.

The protestors at a recent protest in Paris chanted, “Yes, Week-End,” in their effort to convince French officials to allow them to work on Sundays.

The French government restricts most stores from opening on Sundays -- a day traditionally reserved for family time in France.

Christopher Werth of American Public Media's Marketplace World has the story: Link

Pronunciation Guide, a long-running, not-widely-viewed YouTube channel that provided guidance on English pronunciation, has turned into a weird sort of mystery. A series of daily videos have appeared in the channel, counting down from 76, and promising that "something is going to happen." The videos are accompanied by clicking noises that have been decoded as a low-rez bitmap that show the bottom part of a man's torso. This Google Doc has detailed analysis.

On CNet, Michelle Starr points to pretty good evidence that this is the start of an alternate reality game by Thomas Bender of Synydyne, who registered PronunciationBook.com the day after the channel went live. If so, it's a pretty amazingly long lead for an ARG; the Pronunciation Guide videos have been running for three years.

It's down to Day 61 at the time of this writing, and each video includes a creepy phrase, repeating "something is going to happen," followed by several seconds of strange clicking noises. Interestingly, going back through the videos, several of these strange phrases appear in his other videos: "I'm trying to tell you something, but you're just not listening" from May of last year, for example.

The clicking sounds at the end of each video have been the subject of much speculation, with many users positing that they are Morse Code. However, other users who have been studying the mystery believe it's something else again; by using spectography to convert the audio files into visual data, they've managed to create an image file that seems to reveal the lower part of a man's torso in the style of the Lord Kitchener "I Need You" army recruitment poster.

Pronunciation YouTube channel turns into a spooky mystery [Michelle Starr/CNet]

(YouTube link)

Nick Bertke celebrated his birthday yesterday by posting his latest remix, made completely from the sounds found in the 1964 Disney movie Mary Poppins. It's not the first time he's remixed that particular movie. -via Viral Viral Videos

The Free Software Foundation is fundraising for Replicant, its fully free and open version of the Android operating system, in which all the restrictively licensed elements have been replaced with functionally equivalent components made from free software. I've just donated -- I love the idea of fully free OSes; they are frequently the best of breed, and even when they lag, they represent huge competitive pressure on proprietary and semi-proprietary vendors to be more free and open.

While most of Android is already free software, device manufacturers distribute the OS with some key nonfree parts. Those parts are in the layer of Android that communicates with the phone or tablet hardware, such as the WiFi and Bluetooth chips. In addition, every commonly available Android device comes pre-loaded with a variety of proprietary applications running on top of the operating system. Replicant seeks to provide all of the same functionality using only free software.

Users of Replicant have a full suite of free software mobile-optimized applications at their fingertips through F-Droid, Replicant's default app repository. F-Droid isn't just for Replicant -- it works on all Android-based systems, and the FSF recommends it as a replacement for Google Play store.

Mobile operating systems distributed by Apple, Microsoft, and Google all require you to use proprietary software. Even one such program in a phone's application space is enough to threaten our freedom and security -- it only takes one open backdoor to gain access. We are proud to support the Replicant project to help users escape the proprietary restrictions imposed by the current major smartphone vendors. There will still be problems remaining to solve, like the proprietary radio firmware and the common practice of locking down phones, but Replicant is a major part of the solution.

Donate to Replicant and support free software on mobile devices (via /.)