tech@vedella

Someone in the Chicago Board of Trade dropped this printed rant on top of “Occupy Chicago” protesters this Wednesday, as demonstrators and union workers gathered in the city's financial center: We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t [...]

SOPA, the House version of the US Senate's PROTECT-IP Bill, might be the worst-ever copyright proposal in US legislative history. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has begun a series of articles examining the bill in depth, explaining just how insane it is. Here's part one: If an IP rightsholder (vaguely defined – could be Justin Bieber [...]

Zombie Apocalypse is a new movie written by BB pal and SyFy digital honcho Craig Engler -- it premieres tonight on SyFy: The film takes place months after a zombie plague has wiped out 90 percent of the American population and follows a small group of survivors who are fighting their way across the country [...]

Justin Bieber's lawyers might object to the FreeBieber campaign, but Justin himself has called for Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who sponsored the anti-streaming legislation that would criminalize uploading videos of yourself singing copyrighted songs, to be "locked up -- put away in cuffs." In the interview, Bieber said that he had no objection to fans [...]

ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is a punishing, secretly negotiated copyright treaty that could send ordinary people to jail for copyright infringement. The EU will soon vote on it. Here's a video for Europeans who want to learn more before their representatives vote to criminalize them, their children and their neighbours. On the occasion of [...]

Microsoft-owned Skype has launched a campaign to shut down programmers who use reverse-engineering to understand its protocol and make interoperable products. Their PR agency calls this "nefarious attempts to subvert Skype's experience." Unfortunately for Skype and Microsoft, "experience" is not something the law protects -- after all, if a Skype user wants to talk to [...]

[Video Link] Best "Bad Lip Reading" yet, I'd say.  Herman Cain sings God Bless America Cain Train: Herman Cain campaign ad by Tim Heidecker Visualizing Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan to redistribute wealth from the ... "Lord Cain," by Tim Heidecker (music) Yet another weird Herman Cain campaign ad: "He Carried Yellow ... Herman Cain sings [...]

Kobun Chino Otogawa, Steve Jobs' Zen teacher. Courtesy kobun-sama.org. At PLOS, Steve Silberman goes in depth into the influence that Steve's Buddhist teachers had on Apple's mission and its products. "I found myself in a unique position to write it, since I knew Jobs' teacher Kobun Chino, and studied at Zen Center around the same [...]

"I’m all for leaking when it’s organized."—White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley. (ProPublica)

KQED has a live stream of Michael Moore speaking to "Occupy Oakland", right now. And North Oakland Now is live-tweeting soundbites while he speaks, as is East Bay Express.

"I knew I had to see what was happening for myself. Since there was a chance I would be arrested, or worse, I took off my watch and emptied my wallet of most of its cash—I carried only a single ID and a credit card (the latter in case I had to make bail)."—Mike Godwin [...]

Over at Wired News, Quinn Norton has a comprehensive Occupy Wall Street roundup: #occupysd, #occupynashville arrested, and Tahrir Square marches with #occupyoakland. And separately: the Oakland police crackdown Tuesday night, which injured a number of protesters, including a Marine vet? "The police forces’ violent tactics worked only temporarily," Quinn writes, "And [they] have, for the [...]

A U.S. company that makes Internet "filtering" systems admits that Syria has been using at least 13 of its devices to censor Web activity there. This news comes as the Syrian government cracks down on its citizens and silences their online activities. Blue Coat Systems Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., says it shipped the Internet "filtering" [...]

Boing Boing reader Ed Marsh (pirxx@mac.com) created this homage to "The Wizard of Oz," and to the Occupy Wall Street movement. What did they want, after all? A heart. A home. Courage.

People keep talking about Saif Gaddafi's artwork, but it is useless without pictures. Here are a few of the paintings ascribed to him in press reports. Many are sadly but necessarily shot at oblique angles to make them more interesting. Whenever they've been exhibited, critics have been very unkind to Mr. Gaddafi. It's true that [...]

“Thanks to our overwhelming no-show of numbers, 49,000 shots haven’t been fired at OWS yet.”—Essayist Greg Tate, who is black, musing that a "blacker" Occupy Wall Street movement would have meant more widespread police brutality. This from Alice Speri's NYT piece on race and #OWS.

Herman Cain speaks at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition's Presidential Forum in Des Moines, Iowa October 22, 2011. REUTERS/Brian C. Frank. Because Herman Cain's actual campaign ads just aren't weird enough: "Lord Cain," an opus by Tim Heidecker (of Tim and Eric fame), as promised. Download: MP3, Ogg, and other options here. You should [...]

A kick-ass op-ed by Dahlia Lithwick smashes the myth that the Occupy movement doesn't have a message: "Mark your calendars: The corporate media died when it announced it was too sophisticated to understand simple declarative sentences. While the mainstream media expresses puzzlement and fear at these incomprehensible 'protesters' with their oddly well-worded 'signs,' the rest [...]

Here is the excellent title sequence for Roberts Robots, a 1973-1974 UK comedy television series about an inventor of androids and his mechanical creations. (via Toys and Techniques)

From FluffPo (the blog of bad Huffington Post behavior), here's the HuffPo bingo board.