Someone on Presidential hopeful John McCain’s staff is going to be in trouble today. They used a well known template to create his Myspace page. The template was designed by Newsvine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson (original template is here). Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files.

McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.

Davidson decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning as retribution.

John McCain’s MySpace Page “Enhanced”

This spring the Las Vegas McCarren International Airport will set up large plasma screens with a motion- tracking component that lets advertisers bring pedestrians into their commercials. When you walk past a car ad, for example, the vehicle might move at the same speed you're walking. When you turn to look at the driver, he'll turn to look at you, and you'll be staring into an image of your own face.

Motion Capture Technology hits the streets

Hey girls, here is your chance to be just like Rogue from X-men...

No-Contact Jacket

The ability to safely and covertly gain access to denied or hostile areas and perform useful tasks provides critical advantages to warfighters over a broad spectrum of military operations. An effective and logistically attractive means for gaining entry to denied areas is to deploy an unmanned platform, such as a robot. However, often the only available points of entry are small openings in buildings, walls, under doors, etc. In these cases, a robot must be soft enough to squeeze or traverse through small openings, yet large enough to carry an operationally meaningful payload. Current robotic platforms are constructed primarily from hard materials and, while capable of locomotion with embedded payloads, cannot change their physical dimensions to rapidly traverse arbitrary size/shape openings whose dimensions are much smaller than the robot itself and are not known a-priori.

In response to this challenge, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is seeking innovative proposals to develop Chemical Robots (ChemBots): soft, flexible, mobile objects that can identify and maneuver through openings smaller than their static structural dimensions; reconstitute size, shape, and functionality after traversal; carry meaningful payloads; and perform tasks. ChemBots represent the convergence of soft materials chemistry and robotics to create a fundamentally new class of soft meso-scale robots.

DOD wants shape shifting robots

The 'rsstroom reader' is a bathroom gadget that prints news feeds onto your your toilet paper. By means of wireless connectivity, it features Wi-Fi Connectivity, USB 2.0, and RSS 2.0/Atom compatibility.

Now you can read MemeStreams on the toilet AND you can show us what you think of our content at the same time!

Finally Something Useful To Do With Dubya Bush Speeches

The governor of Utah signed a nonbinding resolution on Tuesday that calls on the US Congress to do something about the rising tide of Internet pornography, preferably using technology to stick it in a ghetto where those who don't want to see it don't have to do so. The resolution, which passed both houses of the Utah legislature, was backed by CP80 ("Clean port 80"), a group founded and headed by Ralph Yarro. CP80's plan to cleanse the Internet isn't the only controversy that Yarro's involved in, though; he also happens to chair the board of directors for SCO.

OK, its official. SCO doesn't just hate linux. They hate the entire Internet.

"The Internet is not a force of nature, it's a man-made creation. It can be changed and evolved to better serve us all," said Yarro in a statement after the signing of the resolution. "There is no reason why we should tolerate an Internet that allows children to easily access pornography."

Someone has been reading Lessig... And getting exactly the wrong point. What, exactly, is the problem with filtering software?

CP80's solution would apply to the US only, of course, and their plan for dealing with international pornographers (who are unlikely to move to another port dictated by the US) is a simple but draconian one: consumers would ask ISPs to "simply block all IP addresses originating from a non-compliant country." Problem solved!

Instead of clamoring for legislation that forces anyone who says the word fuck to move to a different TCP port why don't they just ask pornographers to include an HTML meta tag on their pages. Not authoritarian enough? Doesn't generate revenue for our financial backers by creating a government mandated market for their software systems? Its just not any fun if its Constitutional? Sure, you won't get 100% compliance, but you're not going to get that anyway.

This page really erks me.

The Internet Community Port Act (ICPA) protects your right to publish, view AND block content deemed inappropriate to minors - a choice that you do not have on the Internet today.

You can install Internet filtering software.

ICPA supports the use of widely accepted social and legal standards, such as MPAA, RIAA, ESRP, FCC, the legal definitions for obscenity, indecency and harmful to minors, or any other community-defined standards.

In other words, anyone who says the word fuck would have to move to a different TCP port. Its very important that children don't hear the word fuck, because it harms them developmentally, as opposed to the word shucks, which is just a word. Did I mention that Unicorns are real?

Categorization Is Not Censorship

If categorization were censorship then phone books, libraries, street signs and all oth... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

SCO Chariman wants Congress to make port 80 porn-free

My mailbox is being filled with IETF announcements for the upcoming meeting in Prague. I see internet draft after internet draft making proposals that are going to cause implementation errors, security holes, and ultimately service outages.

Take for example the prime candidate protocol for VOIP - SIP... SIP is far too complex.

Consider how long it has taken to deploy IPv6 - a technology that celebrated its 10th anniversary a few years ago. And IPv6 has the luxury of being an alternative to IPv4 rather than a transparently compatible upgrade. Consider how much longer it will take to deploy VOIP protocol redesigns when the old protocol is embedded in telephones around the world?

I have great concern that our approach to the internet resembles a high pillar of round stones piled on top of other round stones - we should not be surprised when it begins to wobble and then falls to the ground.

Are We Slowly Losing Control of the Internet?

Acidus's Stripe Snoop was discussed by Mark Frauenfelder on the Colbert Report!

MAKE: Blog: Welcome heroes!

k wrote:

Decius wrote:

Acidus wrote:
Vista: You are coming to a sad realization, cancel or allow?
PC: ... ... allow.

Hi, I'm a Mac, and I don't have any security problems because I don't have any customers. No one bothers to write exploits for me. I'm so lonely... So lonely.... Stupid PCs...

[ This same old battle? Shame on you. Maybe we should start wrangling over linux distros now. ;) -k]

Shame on me?! They started it! I seriously don't think Apple should be taking shots at Vista security in their ads. The reason that Mac users don't experience security problems really is because their userbase is too small to be of interest to organized crime. Apple doesn't understand how to deal with these kinds of problems; their security engineering is terrible. Microsoft has invested a huge amount of resources into this and presently they are way, way more sophisticated at it. Its really amateurish for Apple to sit on the sidelines and throw stones. If you're curious about Apple security read this presentation.

RE: Mac Ads: Vista Security

The Department of Homeland Security is paying Rutgers $3 million to oversee development of computing methods that could monitor suspicious social networks and opinions found in news stories, Web blogs and other Web information to identify indicators of potential terrorist activity.

The software and algorithms could rapidly detect social networks among groups by identifying who is talking to whom on public blogs and message boards, researchers said. Computers could ideally pick out entities trying to conceal themselves under different aliases.

It would also be able to sift through massive amounts of text and decipher opinions - such as anti-American sentiment - that would otherwise be difficult to do manually.

Nicholas Belkin, a University professor who studied in the field of Information Retrieval Systems, said "It could be used to identify members of groups who want to form a demonstration or oppose a particular event or government policy."

Big brother is reading your blog.

Government research to track online networking