Cartoon producer Fred Seibert posted this fun and informative sixteen-page manual with tips for drawing Finn & Jake from Pendleton Ward’s Adventure Time series. Ward is one of the best character designers around! (Via Super Punch )
Etsy seller Wearableplanter has a wide range of 3D printed planters: rings, jewelry — even bicycle vases! They’re intended for use with succulents, small flowers, and sprouts. They’re watertight and translucent, and you can see the roots through the material. A Wearable Planter ( via Wil Wheaton )
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Wearable planters: 3D printed translucent jewelry, with plants!
A Snowden leak accompanying today’s story on the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations group (TAO) details the NSA’s toolbox of exploits , developed by an NSA group called ANT (Advanced or Access Network Technology). ANT’s catalog runs to 50 pages, and lists electronic break-in tools, wiretaps, and other spook toys. For example, the catalog offers FEEDTROUGH, an exploit kit for Juniper Networks’ firewalls; gimmicked monitor cables that leak video-signals; BIOS-based malware that compromises the computer even before the operating system is loaded; and compromised firmware for hard drives from Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung. Many of the exploited products are made by American companies, and hundreds of millions of everyday people are at risk from the unpatched vulnerabilities that the NSA has discovered in their products. The ANT division doesn’t just manufacture surveillance hardware. It also develops software for special tasks. The ANT developers have a clear preference for planting their malicious code in so-called BIOS, software located on a computer’s motherboard that is the first thing to load when a computer is turned on. This has a number of valuable advantages: an infected PC or server appears to be functioning normally, so the infection remains invisible to virus protection and other security programs. And even if the hard drive of an infected computer has been completely erased and a new operating system is installed, the ANT malware can continue to function and ensures that new spyware can once again be loaded onto what is presumed to be a clean computer. The ANT developers call this “Persistence” and believe this approach has provided them with the possibility of permanent access. Another program attacks the firmware in hard drives manufactured by Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung, all of which, with the exception of latter, are American companies. Here, too, it appears the US intelligence agency is compromising the technology and products of American companies. Shopping for Spy Gear: Catalog Advertises NSA Toolbox [Jacob Appelbaum, Judith Horchert and Christian Stöcker/Spiegel]
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NSA has a 50-page catalog of exploits for software, hardware, and firmware
Patrick writes, “After more than 125 years and countless crappy incarnations on film, A federal judge has issued a declarative judgment stating that Holmes, Watson, 221B Baker Street, the dastardly Professor Moriarty and other elements included in the 50 Holmes works Arthur Conan Doyle published before Jan. 1, 1923, are no longer covered by United States copyright law and can be freely used by creators without paying any licensing fee to the Conan Doyle estate.” The estate are notorious bullies, and have relied upon bizarre legal theories to extract funds from people who use the Sherlock canon characters in new works, even though those characters come from stories that are largely in the public domain. “They’ve heard about the way the estate is going around bullying people,” said Darlene Cypser, a lawyer in Denver and the author of a self-published trilogy about the young Holmes, for which the estate initially demanded a licensing fee. (She declined to pay, she said.) “This has been coming for some time. I’m glad Les decided to take it up.” Several other authors and publishers of Holmes-based work reported receiving somewhat friendlier versions of a threatening letter cited in Mr. Klinger’s complaint. In the letter Mr. Lellenberg suggested that the estate regularly worked with “Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and similar retailers” to “weed out unlicensed uses of Sherlock Holmes,” and would not hesitate to do so with Mr. Klinger’s volume as well. Mr. Klinger did pay a fee for a similar collection in 2011 at the insistence of his earlier publisher, but this time said he is calling the estate’s bluff. “It’s the ultimate case of the emperor having no clothes,” said Jonathan Kirsch, a publishing lawyer who represents him. “Everyone is making the decision to pay for permission they don’t need to avoid the costs and risks of litigation.” Suit Says Sherlock Belongs to the Ages [Jennifer Schuessler/NYT] ( Thanks, Patrick ! ) ( Image: A Study in Scarlet (Beeton’s Christmas Annual) , a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from 43021516@N06’s photostream )
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Sherlock and co are finally in the public domain
Utility companies across America are fighting solar , imposing high fees on homeowners who install their own solar panels to feed back into the grid. This one was predictable from a long, long way out — energy companies being that special horror-burrito made from a core of hot, chewy greed wrapped in a fluffy blanket of regulatory protection, fixed in their belief that they have the right to profit from all power used, whether or not their supply it. Bruce Sterling once proposed that Americans should be encouraged to drive much larger trucks, big enough to house monster fuel-cells that are kept supplied with hydrogen by decentralized windmill and solar installations — when they are receiving more power than is immediately needed, they use the surplus to electrolyze water and store the hydrogen in any handy nearby monster-trucks’ cells. When the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining, you just plug your house into your enormous American-Dream-mobile — no need for a two-way grid. This solution wasn’t just great because it aligned the core American value of driving really large cars with environmental protection, but also because it was less vulnerable to sabotage from hydrocarbon-addicted energy companies. HECO, despite criticism from Hawaii’s solar industry, denies the moratorium is anything more than an honest effort to address the technical challenges of integrating the solar flooding onto its grid. The slowdown comes in a state where 9 percent of the utility’s residential customers on Oahu are already generating most of their power from the sun and where connections have doubled yearly since 2008. In California, where solar already powers the equivalent of 626,000 homes, utilities continue to aggressively push for grid fees that would add about $120 a year to rooftop users’ bills and, solar advocates say, slow down solar adoptions. Similar skirmishes have broken out in as many as a dozen of the 43 states that have adopted net-metering policies as part of their push to promote renewable energy. In Colorado, Xcel Energy Inc. has proposed cutting the payments it makes for excess power generated by customers by about half, because it says higher payouts result in an unfair subsidy to solar users. Utilities Feeling Rooftop Solar Heat Start Fighting Back [Mark Chediak, Christopher Martin and Ken Wells/Bloomberg] ( via /. ) ( Image: Solar Panels All Done! , a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from clownfish’s photostream )
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Utility companies go to war against solar
The ACLU has spent years in court trying to get a look at a top-secret FBI interrogation manual that referred to the CIA’s notorious KUBARK torture manual. The FBI released a heavily redacted version at one point — so redacted as to be useless for determining whether its recommendations were constitutional. However, it turns out that the FBI agent who wrote the manual sent a copy to the Library of Congress in order to register a copyright in it — in his name! (Government documents are not copyrightable, but even if they were, the copyright would vest with the agent’s employer, not the agent himself). A Mother Jones reporter discovered the unredacted manual at the Library of Congress last week, and tipped off the ACLU about it. Anyone can inspect the manual on request. Go see for yourself! The 70-plus-page manual ended up in the Library of Congress, thanks to its author, an FBI official who made an unexplainable mistake. This FBI supervisory special agent, who once worked as a unit chief in the FBI’s counterterrorism division, registered a copyright for the manual in 2010 and deposited a copy with the US Copyright Office, where members of the public can inspect it upon request. What’s particularly strange about this episode is that government documents cannot be copyrighted. “A document that has not been released does not even need a copyright,” says Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists. “Who is going to plagiarize from it? Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t violate the copyright because you don’t have the document. It isn’t available.” “The whole thing is a comedy of errors,” he adds. “It sounds like gross incompetence and ignorance.” Julian Sanchez, a fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute who has studied copyright policy, was harsher: “Do they not cover this in orientation? [Sensitive] documents should not be placed in public repositories—and, by the way, aren’t copyrightable. How do you even get a clearance without knowing this stuff?” You’ll Never Guess Where This FBI Agent Left a Secret Interrogation Manual [Nick Baumann/Mother Jones] ( via Techdirt ) ( Image: FBI , a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from 10542402@N06’s photostream )
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FBI agent tries to copyright super-secret torture manual, inadvertently makes it public
In this talk from Maker Faire New York, Bunnie Huang of Chibitronics gives an amazing run-down of the on-the-ground reality of having electronics manufactured in Shenzhen, China. It’s a wild 30 minutes, covering everything from choosing a supplier to coping with squat toilets and the special horrors awaiting vegetarians in the Pearl River Delta. There are some dropouts at the start of the video that you’ll need to scroll past, but it’s well worth the hassle. Getting it Made: Stories from Shenzhen ( via Make )
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Bunnie Huang explains the nuts-and-bolts of getting stuff made in Shenzhen
Male employees are suing Archie Comics’ CEO Nancy Silberkleit for gender discrimination. Her alleged workplace behavior, reported in the New York Daily News , is bizarre: – refuses to call male employees by their names and instead refers to all of them as “Penis.” – frequently yells “Penis! Penis! Penis!” in staff meetings. – invites Hell’s Angels into the office to intimidate employees. – frequently inquires about the location of a handgun and 750 rounds of ammunition she believes her late husband kept in the office. – stalking employees and their families “Silberkleit contends that the case should be tossed out because white males are not ‘a protected class.'” (Thanks, chellberty!)
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Archie comics CEO being sued for calling employees "penis"
Android privacy just got a lot better. The 4.3 version of Google’s mobile operating system now has hooks that allow you to override the permissions requested by the apps you install. So if you download a flashlight app that wants to harvest your location and phone ID , you can install it, and then use an app like AppOps Launcher to tell Android to withhold the information. Peter Ecklersley, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has written up a good explanation of how this works , and he attributes the decision to competitive pressure from Ios, which allows users to deny location data to apps, even if they “require” it during the installation process. I think that’s right, but not the whole story: Android has also always labored under competitive pressure from its free/open forks, like Cyanogenmod. In the days when Android didn’t allow tethering (as a sop to the mobile carriers, who are the gatekeepers to new phones for many people), Cyanogenmod signed up large numbers of users, simply by adding this functionality . Google added tethering to Android within a couple of versions. Some versions of Cyanogenmod have had the option tell your phone to lie to apps about its identity, location, and other sensitive information — a way to get around the “all or nothing” installation process whereby your the apps you install non-negotiably demand your “permission” to plunder this information. I’m not surprised to see the same feature moving into the main branch of Android. This dynamic is fascinating to me: Google has to balance all kinds of priorities in rolling out features and “anti-features” (no tethering, non-negotiable permissions) in Android, in order to please customers, carriers and developers. Free/open forks like Cyanogenmod really only need to please themselves and their users, and don’t have to worry so much about these other pressures (though now that Cyanogenmod is a commercial operation , they’ll probably need to start playing nice with carriers). But because Android competes with Cyanogenmod and the other open versions, Google can’t afford to ignore the featureset that makes them better than the official version. It’s a unique, and extremely beneficial outflow of the hybrid free/commercial Android ecosystem. In the early days, that model was at an improvement on its major competitor, Apple’s iOS, which didn’t even have a permissions model. But after various privacy scandals, Apple started forcing apps to ask for permission to collect data: first location and then other categories, like address books and photos. So for the past two years, the iPhone’s app privacy options have been miles ahead of Android’s. This changed with the release of Android 4.3, which added awesome new OS features to enhance privacy protection. You can unlock this functionality by installing a tool like App Ops Launcher. When you run it, you can easily control most of the privacy-threatening permissions your apps have tried to obtain. Want to install Shazam without having it track your location? Easy. Want to install SideCar without letting it read your address book? Done.2 Despite being overdue and not quite complete, App Ops Launcher is a huge advance in Android privacy. Its availability means Android 4.3+ a necessity for anyone who wants to use the OS while limiting how intrusive those apps can be. The Android team at Google deserves praise for giving users more control of the data that others can snatch from their pockets. Awesome Privacy Tools in Android 4.3+
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Android gives you the ability to deny your sensitive data to apps
Kembrew writes, “I saw your post in Boing Boing today about Pee-Wee, and coincidentally, I just published a piece on Pee-wee’s Christmas Special . I think it’s the first time Paul Reubens has been interviewed about the upcoming remastered Pee-wee’s Playhouse DVDs that will come out next year.” I previously invoked the term “eye-popping” to describe Pee-wee’s Playhouse, but starting next year, viewers will run the risk of having their eyeballs permanently dislodged from their sockets. “The Christmas Special is going to come out, along with the entire Playhouse series, on Blu-ray,” Reubens tells me. “It’s being remastered now.” “The show was never seen on film,” he says. “The show was shot on film and transferred to tape and edited on tape, and all the effects were done on tape. Then the entire show was put on another tape to broadcast, so there are three or four generations of quality that are lost on every episode. So we went back to the original film elements, and the company I’m working with has recreated every edit in every single show, and recreated all the effects from all the original elements—which we were lucky to have kept.” “It looks unbelievable. It’s so extreme, people are going to freak out when they see it,” Reubens adds. “The detail and clarity and color is amazing.” This means that Gary Panter’s set design, the stop motion animation and other details will come alive in psychedelic high definition. It’s the kids show equivalent of being upgraded from cough syrup to mescaline. Pee-wee’s (remastered) Christmas Adventure: An interview with Paul Reubens [Kembrew McLeod/Little Village]
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Pee-Wee Herman talks about the remastered Christmas Special and Playhouse episodes