Tag: boing-boing

Feds say encryption to foil wiretaps is on the rise

“For the first time, encryption is thwarting government surveillance efforts through court-approved wiretaps,” reports David Kravetz at Wired.com , citing a report by the U.S. agency that oversees federal courts. This report also shows that authorities armed with wiretap orders are encountering increasingly more encryption.        

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Feds say encryption to foil wiretaps is on the rise

RIAA lies about Pandora’s royalty rates

Have you heard a lot of Internetular argle-bargle about Pandora’s crazy-low royalty rates? How they compare unfavorably to satellite rates, and how the company’s trying to cut them? You have? Me too. Turns out (unsurprisingly), it’s RIAA lies. For example, the comparison to satellite streaming rates is pure spin — it compares the rate of sending a song to every person turned into that satellite station to a single person listening to a Pandora stream. It would be pretty surprising if Pandora’s per-listener rates weren’t a fraction of the rates paid by satellite radio for a whole audience. And the business about trying to cut royalties just isn’t true, either: The next issue concerns the publishing side. Historically, Pandora has paid essentially the same rate as all other forms of radio, a rate established unilaterally by the performing rights organizations, ASCAP and BMI, in the late 1990s. In November of last year, following a lengthy negotiation, Pandora agreed with ASCAP to a new rate, an increase over the prior amount, and shook hands with ASCAP management. Not only was our hand-shake agreement rejected by the ASCAP board, but shortly thereafter we were subjected to a steady stream of “withdrawals” by major publishers from ASCAP and BMI seeking to negotiate separate and higher rates with Pandora, and only Pandora. This move caused us to seek the protection of the rate, also recently negotiated, enjoyed by the online radio streams of broadcast radio companies. It’s important to note that these streams represent 96% of the Internet radio listening hours among the top 20 services outside of Pandora (talk about an un-level playing field). We did not enter this period looking for a lower rate – we agreed to a higher rate. But in a sad irony, the actions of a few small, but powerful publishers seeking to gain advantage for themselves has caused all songwriters’ royalties to go down. Any characterization of Pandora as being out to cut publishing rates flies in the face of the facts. Pandora and Royalties ( via Techdirt )        

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RIAA lies about Pandora’s royalty rates

Schools and the cloud: will schools allow students to be profiled and advertised to in the course of their school-day?

Kate sez, “Technology companies are moving rapidly to get tools like email and document creation services into schools. This link to a recent survey of schools in the UK shows that use of such technology is expected to bring significant educational and social benefits. However, it also reveals that schools have deep concerns that providers of these services will mine student emails, documents or web browsing behaviour to build profiles for commercial purposes, such as serving advertisements. When data mining is done for profit, the relationship between the data miner and the consumer is simply a market transaction. As long as both parties are free to choose whether and when they wish to engage in such transactions, there is no reason to forbid them or place undue obstacles in their path. However, when children are using certain services at school and can neither consent to, control or even properly understand the data mining that is taking place, a clear line against such practices must be drawn, particularly when their data will be used by businesses to make a profit.” UK School Opinions of Cloud Services and Student Privacy [PDF] ( Thanks, Kate ! )        

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Schools and the cloud: will schools allow students to be profiled and advertised to in the course of their school-day?

First vatburger is ready to eat

After spending $250,000 worth of anonymously donated money, Mark Post from Maastricht University is ready to go public with his first vat-grown hamburger, which will be cooked and eaten at an event in London this week. Though they claim that it’s healthier than regular meat, one question not answered in the article is the Omega 3/6 balance — crappy, corn-fed, factory-farmed meet is full of Omega 6s and avoided by many eaters; the grass-fed, free-range stuff is higher in Omega 3s. Yet growing meat in the laboratory has proved difficult and devilishly expensive. Dr. Post, who knows as much about the subject as anybody, has repeatedly postponed the hamburger cook-off, which was originally expected to take place in November. His burger consists of about 20,000 thin strips of cultured muscle tissue. Dr. Post, who has conducted some informal taste tests, said that even without any fat, the tissue “tastes reasonably good.” For the London event he plans to add only salt and pepper. But the meat is produced with materials — including fetal calf serum, used as a medium in which to grow the cells — that eventually would have to be replaced by similar materials of non-animal origin. And the burger was created at phenomenal cost — 250,000 euros, or about $325,000, provided by a donor who so far has remained anonymous. Large-scale manufacturing of cultured meat that could sit side-by-side with conventional meat in a supermarket and compete with it in price is at the very least a long way off.“This is still an early-stage technology,” said Neil Stephens, a social scientist at Cardiff University in Wales who has long studied the development of what is also sometimes referred to as “shmeat.” “There’s still a huge number of things they need to learn.” There are also questions of safety — though Dr. Post and others say cultured meat should be as safe as, or safer than, conventional meat, and might even be made to be healthier — and of the consumer appeal of a product that may bear little resemblance to a thick, juicy steak. Engineering the $325,000 Burger [Henry Fountain/New York Times] ( via /. )        

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First vatburger is ready to eat

Buildings built by bacteria

Over at Fast Company, our pal Chris Arkenberg wrote about how advances in synthetic biology and biomimicry could someday transform how we build our built environments: Innovations emerging across the disciplines of additive manufacturing, synthetic biology, swarm robotics, and architecture suggest a future scenario when buildings may be designed using libraries of biological templates and constructed with biosynthetic materials able to sense and adapt to their conditions. Construction itself may be handled by bacterial printers and swarms of mechanical assemblers. Tools like Project Cyborg make possible a deeper exploration of biomimicry through the precise manipulation of matter. David Benjamin and his Columbia Living Architecture Lab explore ways to integrate biology into architecture. Their recent work investigates bacterial manufacturing–the genetic modification of bacteria to create durable materials. Envisioning a future where bacterial colonies are designed to print novel materials at scale, they see buildings wrapped in seamless, responsive, bio-electronic envelopes. ” Cities Of The Future, Built By Drones, Bacteria, And 3-D Printers ”        

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Buildings built by bacteria

Gorgeous, psychedelic photos of Portuguese man-of-wars

Aaron Ansarov picks up live Portuguese man-of-wars from the Delray Beach, FL, photographs them on a light-table and returns them to the beach. The photos are then mirror-imaged and post-processed into a gorgeous collection of psychedelic nature photos. You can buy some amazing prints of his work. Psychedelic Portuguese Man-of-War Photos Prove God Is a Stoner [Jakob Schiller/Wired]        

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Gorgeous, psychedelic photos of Portuguese man-of-wars

World’s largest tunnel boring machine lands in Seattle

Known affectionately as Bertha, this tunnel boring machine has the widest diameter of any boring machine ever built; 57.5 feet. It’s being used to dig a highway tunnel under downtown Seattle and it just arrived there today after being shipped from Japan. I feel this warrants your attention for two reasons: 1) If you live near Seattle, you can actually go get a look at this massive beast before it starts chewing its way through the city. If you like looking at giant machines (or know someone who does) now’s your chance. She’s coming into the Port of Seattle, Terminal 46, as you read this and there will be ample opportunities to get a look as the pieces are assembled and moved into the nearby launch pit. The Washington State Department of Transportation has suggestions on places to go to get a good view . 2) If, for some reason, you were looking for a new way to lose massive amounts of time on YouTube, Bertha (and boring machines, in general) can help with that. Here’s a cutaway animation explaining how boring machines work . Here’s a video of Big Becky, another boring machine, breaking through to the other side of a tunnel at Niagara Falls, Canada . (In fact, boring machine breakthrough videos are, in and of themselves, a mesmerizing genre.) And in this video, you can watch the massively long line of support equipment go by in the wake of a boring machine .

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World’s largest tunnel boring machine lands in Seattle

ATM skimming comes to non-ATM payment terminals in train stations, etc

ATM skimming isn’t limited to ATMs! There are lots of terminals that ask you to swipe your card and/or enter a PIN, and many of them are less well-armored and -policed than actual cashpoints. Skimmers have been found on train-ticket machines, parking meters and other payment terminals. Once a crook has got your card number and sign-on data, they can use that to raid a your account at an ATM. Brian Krebs has a look at some of these devices, including a full-on fascia for a cheapie ATM discovered in latinamerica. The organization also is tracking a skimming trend reported by three countries (mainly in Latin America) in which thieves are fabricating fake ATM fascias and placing them over genuine ATMs, like the one pictured below. After entering their PIN, cardholders see an ‘out-of-order’ message. EAST said the fake fascias include working screens so that this type of message can be displayed. The card details are compromised by a skimming device hidden inside the fake fascia, and the PINs are captured via the built-in keypad, which overlays the real keypad underneath. This reminds me a little of the evolution of payphones — the armadillos of the device world! — and the look-alike COCOTS (customer-owned coin-operated telephones) that presented very soft targets if you could scry through their camouflage. Cash Claws, Fake Fascias & Tampered Tickets

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ATM skimming comes to non-ATM payment terminals in train stations, etc

Newegg nails ridiculous “shopping cart” patent

At Ars Technica , Joe Mullin recounts the tale of a shameless patent troll and its recent loss in court to online retailer Newegg : “Soverain isn’t in the e-commerce business; it’s in the higher-margin business of filing patent lawsuits against e-commerce companies. And it’s been quite successful until now. The company’s plan to extract a patent tax of about one percent of revenue from a huge swath of online retailers was snuffed out last week by Newegg and its lawyers, who won an appeal ruling that invalidates the three patents Soverain used to spark a vast patent war.”

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Newegg nails ridiculous “shopping cart” patent