This alarm clock was covered on MemeStreams back when it was a prototype. Now its a product you can order!

The alarm clock that runs away and hides when you don't wake up. Clocky gives you one chance to get up. But if you snooze, Clocky will jump off of your nightstand and wheel around your room looking for a place to hide. Clocky is kind of like a misbehaving pet, only he will get up at the right time.

I might have to buy one of these. I often move my alarm clock to different places in my bedroom to break wake-up snooze-hitting habits. This is also small enough to toss into a suitcase when traveling.

Clocky is now available for sale!

HOST: I’m curious, have you ever googled anybody? Do you use Google?

BUSH: Occasionally. One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see — I’ve forgot the name of the program — but you get the satellite, and you can — like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.

The folks who run the Google Earth must be so proud.

Bush uses “the Google”

Saturday night at PhreakNIC I borrowed an audio adaptor from one of the guys who were running the pirate radio station. I was unable to find them to return it. If anyone knows who those guys were, point them in my direction. I can Paypal some money for the adaptor.

I'm _really_ sorry I wasn't able to return it.

PhreakNIC was fun this year, as it is ever year. I'd like to thank all the staff for their hard work running the convention. It's not an easy job, and we all greatly benefit from their hard work.

Hopefully, I will have a chance to make some more comments about the convention later. I'm currently really backed up with work, and somewhat fatigued.

Most of the Industrial Memetics crew was on hand this year giving talks. Acidus gave an enlightening talk about javascript based security problems in Web 2.0 apps, which was by far the best talk on web security I've ever seen. He is currently working on a book on this topic, and we are all looking forward to it. Decius gave a talk entitled "The Year of the Fourth Amendment: 2006", which I wish everyone was able to see. He put a number of the events of the past year into perspective, in the form of a call to action that I'm sure all who were in the room will answer. Neoteric and Abaddon gave another version of their infamous "Why You Suck" talk, which is way more good natured than it sounds, and was in many ways the high point of PhreakNIC this year. It had the highest turnout of any talk and was extremely funny. I gave a talk entitled "Prior Restraint and Information Security Research", in which I went over case studies of security researchers who have gotten into legal trouble for disclosing the product of their research, some past legal president that I felt people should be aware of, and advice about how to communicate with the media and protect yourself if you find yourself in a position to do a risky disclosure.

I've received word that the video from all the talks Saturday was lost due to a technical glitch in the the video recorder, so these may be lost forever. This is sad, but sometimes these things happen..

I had a collection of posters on hand which I hung up in various places in the hotel. I came up with this batch of slogans over two sittings, with the intent to make people laugh, inspire a bit, and instill some curiosity. In short, a blatant branding and propaganda exercise. There were a number of them that by design contained some mildly obscure references. Here are the ones that I got asked questions about the most:

The Peters Projection is an equal-area map projection of the earth, which more accurately represents the planet's land mass than the maps we most often see. For instance, Greenland isn't the same size as Africa, as it appears in most ma... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Industrial Memetics PhreakNIC Propaganda

When people post on any forum, whether it's a serious Mozart discussion forum, Something Awful, or PayMeToHumpThings.net, they usually act in a manner that's presentable to the outside world. Of course they do, because someone else is going to read that and they wouldn't want to look like a fruitcake in front of everybody. But behind that relatively normal exterior there are things they're wondering about and want to know, and they type these things where they think nobody will ever see them, like into search engines for example.

If you're more of a nerd than most, (and let's face it, you're reading Something Awful) you probably heard that a week or two ago AOL mistakenly released 3 months of logs from its AOL Search engine, and now the logs are all over the place online. AOL has already apologized for the error, but they shouldn't because these are some of the most awesome things I've ever seen.

Before we get down to business, let me explain what's happening in these images. One of our forum goons, xGryph, coded up a nice little search tool to let us easily look through the 2 gigabytes of logs. The big number on the left is an anonymous user ID AOL provided so advertisers or researchers or whoever's looking at the logs can track an individual account's search habits. Next to that is the search term used.

This is the most amusing collection of AOL query data I've seen yet.

The Internet Makes You Stupid

The complaint, available here as a PDF, charges Rombom with obstruction of justice and with witness tampering, alleging that in April 2006 Rombom impersonated a federal investigator at the request of a client who had hired him to locate a government informant who was central to the client's money-laundering indictment in 2003.

The charges have nothing to do with HOPE, and sound rather serious, in fact.

FBI Charges HOPE Speaker with Witness Tampering, Obstructing Justice - Security Fix

To investigate 16 of the most prevalent claims made by conspiracy theorists, POPULAR MECHANICS assembled a team of nine researchers and reporters who, together with PM editors, consulted more than 70 professionals in fields that form the core content of this magazine, including aviation, engineering and the military.

In the end, we were able to debunk each of these assertions with hard evidence and a healthy dose of common sense. We learned that a few theories are based on something as innocent as a reporting error on that chaotic day. Others are the byproducts of cynical imaginations that aim to inject suspicion and animosity into public debate. Only by confronting such poisonous claims with irrefutable facts can we understand what really happened on a day that is forever seared into world history.

Good reference for debunking the popular 911 conspiracy theories.

Popular Mechanics - Debunking The 9/11 Myths - Mar. 2005 Cover Story

Welcome to SourceWatch, a collaborative project of the Center for Media and Democracy to produce a directory of the people, organizations and issues shaping the public agenda. SourceWatch's primary focus is on documenting public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests. Over time, SourceWatch has broadened to include others involved in public debates including media outlets, journalists and government agencies. Unlike some other wikis, SourceWatch has a policy of strict referencing, and is overseen by a paid editor.

SourceWatch

MySpace isn't cool, it isn't hip and it isn't trendy. It represents a cyber trojan horse and the media elite's last gasp effort to reclaim control of the Internet and sink it with a stranglehold of regulation, control and censorship.

Since Rupert Murdoch's $580 Million acquisition of MySpace in July 2005, it has come from total obscurity to now being the 8th most visited website in the world, receiving half as many page hits as Google, despite the fact that on first appearance it looks like a 5-year-old's picture scrap and scribble book.

MySpace is the new mobile phone. If you don't have a MySpace account then you belong to some kind of culturally shunned underclass.

What most of the trendy wendy's remain blissfully unaware of is the fact that MySpace is Rupert Murdoch's battle axe for shaping a future Internet environment whereby electronic dissent, whether it be against corporations or government, will not tolerated and freedom of e-speech will cease to exist.

Oh, I love "the conspiracy" perspective on just about anything. This site is chock full of conspiracy theories. I've explained the origin of my love for conspiracy theories many times before, but its always worth repeating. Conspiracy theories get repeated. Its the nature of the game.. It can't be resisted. It all started when I worked at this gourmet tex-mex place in Belmar, New Jersey called Hell's Kitchen. The owner of this truly great establishment could best be described as a "conspiracy theory router". Everything was open game from government police state plots and tales of black helicopters, to UFOs and the second coming of Christ. The back office of the place was stocked with supplies, firearms, and short wave radios. This back office held all the secrets of the universe, including the most closely guarded secret of the ages: what salsa we used. "The end times are here my friend. The shits going down! What do you want on your taco?"

You name it, I heard about it, at length. Too much length usually. It did wonders to fine tune my bullshit detector. It got to the point where I had to do serious and constant research to keep sanity in check. I truly loved every moment of it.

Good conspiracy theories always have a few things in common.. They start off with something completely plausible and (sometimes) reasonable, even if its an incitement of something. By the end, they wind up some place way off the reservation of reality, but go close enough to the edge every so often to keep it all almost somehow plausible. The bullshit detector is forced to align against many angles of incidence. The conspiracy theory must do this while at the same time avoid introducing any new information. The end result of the message must always be "it is inevitable, and we are completely screwed".

At some point in the middle of the... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

MySpace Is The Trojan Horse Of Internet Censorship (Plus, thoughts on conspiracy theories)

Something extremely weird is going on over on Digg.com. Today for the third time in a short period, a story got promoted to the front page where a blogger raises a baseless rumour about Google buying Sun. And as is explained further down, it appears that this is the result of a coordinated effort to fool Digg into promoting the story.

The blog author has no sources, zero credibility and most importantly his reasoning is completely erratic.

Silicon Valley Sleuth: Scoop: Digg is used for Sun stock manipulation