tech@vedella

the rootkit/spyware that's been discovered on various mobile phones: first, Al Franken asking some pointed questions about it (Go, Al! But come on, you're Mr Net Neutrality, anti-corporatism, and you can't figure out why building a Great Firewall of America to "protect copyright" is batshit insane? Seriously?); second, "Google Experience" phones, like the Nexus S, [...]

Here's the trailer for John Carter, the Disney version of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars. The characters and sets look gorgeous. The story is by Andrew Stanton (who also wrote Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, Wall•E, and Toy Story 3). I have high hopes for it, but I don't [...]

Behold: the futuristic glory of Kosovo's central library. Kosovo Public Library (imgur.com)

"Siri is basically an electronic version of a secretary, who schedules appointments and looks things up for you. In fact, Siri behaves much like a retrograde male fantasy of the ever-compliant secretary: discreet, understanding, willing to roll with any demand a man might come up with, teasingly accepting of dirty jokes. Oh yeah, and mainly [...]

Zach Wahls, a sixth-generation Iowan and Eagle Scout, gives incredibly moving, well-spoken testimony to the state legislature on the issue of same-sex marriage, talking about the way that being raised by his two moms made him the impressive fellow he is today, and the material injustice of rules prohibiting same-sex marriage. Update: Derp, it's a [...]

[Video Link] Nerdy white boy makes pancakes while rapping up a storm. FB, Twitter. The video reached more than a million views in less than a day, thanks to the power of Reddit. (via Joe Sabia)

[Video Link] Genki Sudo and World Order, "MACHINE CIVILIZATION." An amazing piece of choreography, link sent to us by David Byrne, via Brian Eno. The Coilhouse folks blogged more details about this work when it first came out in April; it is a response to the March 11 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. You can [...]

Austin's Old Murder House Theater has mounted a rendition of Aliens -- on ice! It's more or less faithful to the original, and it's, well, stupendous: Anyone who has seen Aliens can follow what transpires over the next 70 minutes or so. It's James Cameron's film on fastforward…and caffeine…and possibly cocaine. The show captures the [...]

REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi Brian Stelter has a piece in the New York Times today about language and the Occupy Movement. I was among those interviewed for the article. Within weeks of the first encampment in Zuccotti Park in New York, politicians seized on the phrase. Democrats in Congress began to invoke the “99 percent” to press [...]

Quinn Norton continues her excellent coverage of Occupy sites for Wired, sending back dispatches from Occupy Boston, which has refused to budge and has established a sophisticated alternative city-within-a-city, assisted by hackers from MIT: Wiley mans the Logistics tent, a shade structure with shelves of organized, masking-tape-and-marker-labeled supplies, sitting next to piles of as yet [...]

Holmes sez, "Fight for the Future have a new way to stop the internet censorship bills: a Senate-dialing widget you can embed anywhere. You enter a phone number and zipcode, it calls you back with talking points, and then connects you to your Senator. You can put it in your site, your blog, your Tumblr [...]

4moms has announced its forthcoming Origami stroller, a $850 baby transportation unit that uses wheel-mounted dynamos to charge batteries that power an electronic chair-folding/unfolding system, as well as a pedometer, running lights, a kid-in-seat sensor, and other instrumentations. I've never understood the hostility towards strollers ("Make your kid walk! Carry your kid! Carry your kid [...]

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David from Nottinghack -- the hackspace in Nottingham, England -- writes, "It's been six months since we moved into a 4500 square foot hackspace, in large part thanks to Boing Boing featuring our cause in May. We'd like to extend our heartfelt thanks to you, and to all of the people who generously donated to [...]

Marko Rakar, leader of a kind of Croatian version of Wikileaks, has once again made a stir in Croatia. Previously, Rakar published a database showing rampant voter-fraud (this triggered a constitutional crisis and reform effort). Now, Rakar's latest project is a database of "All the public procurement data for government spending since July 1, 2009, [...]

My favorite local independent record store, aQuarius Records in San Francisco, has just reissued this excellent t-shirt design from the late 1970s! For the new run, they embellished the classic graphic with a slogan from an old advertisement for their shop from that same era: "New Wave music is our specialty." Indeed it is, even [...]

A followup to Monday's story about a representative from the controversial Burzynski Clinic (a cancer clinic that is presently treating a British girl whose family raised £200,000 for her care) sending threatening letters to bloggers who questioned the science behind Burzynski's therapy: First, the Burzynski clinic says it has severed its relationship with Marc Stephens, [...]

[Video Link] John Edgar Park says: You might have heard that congressional debt supercommittee has officially failed its mandate to reduce the federal deficit. As things currently stand, mandatory budget cuts going into effect in 2013 will slash 9% of all federal R&D funding (about $13 billion). The US can't afford to stop investing in [...]

Alan sez, "TechCrunch and others are reporting that a program called "Carrier IQ" that comes pre-installed on Sprint phones has some pretty amazing spyware capabilities, right down to keylogging everything you do on the phone." Note the careful use of the words “record,” “provide,” “inspect,” and “report.” It’s obvious from this video that the application [...]

The Fire Fly has landed! On November 10, “Randy Regier: H. Maxwell Fisher’s Underground Toy Emporium and Spaceship Parking” opened at Jim Kempner Fine Art, 501 West 23rd Street, NYC, where it remains on view through December 23. According to the gallery’s press release, “Jim Kempner Fine Art, in collaboration with Mr. Fisher’s eldest son, [...]