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Its weird the things that inspire us. For me… after all this time… it ends up being a japanese beatboxing kid. Yes its been forever since I last updated. I hope you haven’t been checking for new posts every day! I’ve been super busy and IA has been going through some serious technical difficulties. Enough excuses. Hopefully I’ll have some more time to post during the summer. Also, check out this other video with the same kid.

• BloodDingo sends me a ton of great links and I’ve built up quite the list:
  • Meat Purfume from Burger King
  • Some funny and odd clips of Obama swearing while reading his book
  • Spyders on Drugs.
  • Everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy
  • World First DJ Battle

• Speaking of Obama, did you know that Michelle and Barack like to fist?
• Selma sent me a link to the Onion’s (which, in video form, has gotten even better in my opinion) story on Sony’s newest technology.
• Kickin’ the cute meter up to high: Kids eating lemon. Thanks Aech.
• If you have yet to see Chad Vader. Now’s the time.
• Another video that rated high on the weird things to inspire me: a kid on drugs after a dentist visit.
• Wimp gives you 10 very good very poorly described videos each day. The videos make it worth checking it out daily. Thanks Cam.
• Everything you wanted to know about canada.
• What if pot was legal?
• Amazing beatboxing harmonica player
• A video entitled “Dave asks about the homepage“. From the staff at vimeo.
• Golf Club Fail
• Tire Win
• The Fast and the Bi-curious
• New Sasha Baron Cohen movie trailer

Hath hell frozen over? The RIAA (Recording Industry of America) will now pursue a “graduated response” to infringements which basically boil down to a Notice and Notice system (which is similar to what we have in Canada). This means that there won’t be any further out of the blue lawsuits. Those being sued will no doubt have plenty of warning that they are infringing.

• Meanwhile, the canadian recording industry wants to impose a tax on ISPs for music. Obviously a bad idea and here’s why.
• An update on whats going on with the recent CRTC hearings and Canadian copyright in general.
• The free-to-download Nine Inch Nails album (I posted ages ago on IA) tops Amazon’s mp3 sales chart.
• The US FCC nixes Big Media’s attempted control of the analog outputs on devices. Big Media wanted to be able to turn off analog out whenever they wanted meaning that they’d have total control over what you do with your own media and hardware.
• The WIPO (World International Property Organiztion) in a stunningly useful move is looking at how it can help 3rd world countries to reduce their environmental impact.
• The dreaded ACTA meetings (secretive Big Content and government meetings about global copyright) in Paris have concluded and the conclusion is: nothing. At least until March 09.
• As you’ve probably heard, iTunes Plus is now (basically) DRM Free. Hell Ya! Now all we need is CD quality downloads for all tracks and I’ll start buying my tracks from Apple for sure.
• A judge in the US has ruled that breathalizer source code must be made evidence in a court case between a drunk driving defendant and the state.
• EFF and FreeYouriPhone.org launch a site to try and get a DMCA exclusion for the iPhone so that they can hack it and install what they want.
• Finally, an Anti-File-Sharing Group in the US intends to pay ISPs to police their users. These guys have way too much money on their hands.

How Canadian ISPs throttle bandwidth is a look at who, how and what Canadian ISPs are throttling (and not telling you about). This my friends is why we need net neutrality.

• Speaking of throttling, why do we need to throttle if new Cable Modems have hit 300Mbps in speed. Uh oh telcos you’re in trouble because your whimpy phone lines can’t handle all that bandwidth.
• This is a pretty crazy technology from Adobe called Zeotrope - . The idea is being able to compare and view the history of data on webpages. Sounds boring but the applications are astounding!
• Google Zeitgeist 2008 is bigger and better (and broken down by country now).
• You can now page through old magazines Google Book Search. Old Playboy here I come!
• Obama’s pick for FCC chairman (much like most of his other picks) looks to be well chosen
• Finally, a cool site called Jinni that recommends movies based on the ones you like. Unfortunately it requires you to login and it also has a limited number of movies (for some weird reason).

• An interesting piece on the inexact science of carbon neutrality.
• The environmental impact of Google searches is stunningly high… apparently IT contributes just as much to global warming as the aircraft industry..?!
• Going Solar, 6 months later is the third part (first and second parts) of a story of the owner of the ExtremeTech website who decided to document his experience putting solar panels on his house.
• IT waste is fixing to be a -huge- problem for our planet. So its great to hear that both Sharp and Toshiba have initiated recycling programs. This should be mandatory for any technology sold in Canada.
• Speaking of e-waste, what does EnergyStar compliance really mean? Is it working? Apparently its just making you feel better about your purchase!

• A company has bought a Nova Scotia nuclear shelter to build a data warehouse. Canada does have fairly strict privacy laws buts its certainly not the most ideal country in the world for a data warehouse… but I guess it depends what you’re planning on storing there.
• Yahoo (probably in a move to save themselves from going out of business) has decided on a (much lower than Google) 90-day personal information retention scheme for there users collected data.
• A peek at what information US homeland security keeps on its citizens. IA reader and posted Rumplekilskin went through a similar process and obtained all his government records from the Canadian government.
• A new UK policy steps up efforts by police to hack home PCs.
• The US Intelligence Court (in a rare public opinion) has judged that federal wiretapping in the US was and is legal. Thank you secretive court for ruling that the president was right on this one. Sounds totally sketchy.

The biggest news of the past little while from a hardware perspective is that hackers have (once again) unlocked the iPhone 3G. Bigger news for those that already have an iPhone is Appulo a store where you can download anything from the iPhone store for free.

In other news:

• Wireless USB has nearly infinite potential, its almost shocking that we don’t already have it. In a sense its Bluetooth… but lets face it… bluetooth sucks. Possibly its Wifi… but wifi is expensive (relatively) and consumes lots of power. Unfortauntely Wireless USB maybe on its way to the grave as Intel has announced its abandoing the technology.

Ya ya… I know, almost 2 full months without an update! Thats just wrong. With all this hope and change in the air its been hard for me to get motivated to write on IA! Just kidding. I’ve been working like a demon recently and just haven’t found the time to compile all the news I’ve been collecting. So buckle-up, this is going to be a big update.

• First up, an awesome clip from the 1976 Battle of the Network Stars, its ridiculously politically incorrect and includes lots of 70s TV actors including: Howard Cosell, Gape Kaplan, Telly Savalas, Ferra Faucet and lots of other C-grade stars you barely remember. I love Gabe Kaplan: Welcome Back was the bomb yo! Plus he’s a great poker player, generally entertaining guy and he has the wickedest ‘fro in this clip. It has it all: smoking after a relay race, sexual misconduct, jokes about nazis killing jews… its great stuff!
• We’ve all wanted to throw a shoe at George Bush. Now you can! Without getting throwin’ in Gitmo… and you can score points at the same time!
• BloodyDingo sent me this highlight clip of Unnecessary Censorship from Jimmy Kimmel
• Tha Dingo also sent the trailer for Year One with Jack Black and George Michael aka Michael Cera.
• Just like Fox News, I gotta start on the Obama bashing as soon as possible. This headline was pulled from CNN within minutes of being posted: “Obamas Juggle Inaugural Balls“.
• Selma sent me a link to the Daily Puppy. Only about 10,000 times cuter than you think.
• For those Vancouverites out there, Selma also sent this useful and well organized site of Vancouver Hiking Trails.
• Last and most definitely least, Gerard told me about a cookbook that was posted to the open-contribution cookbook site Lulu.com, its caleld Natural Harvest. Warning, this one is going to stay with you for a while… and not in a good way.

The news in the world of ecology has been especially grim lately. Our world is getting hotter and more polluted and with the current economic gongshow, it seems like no one is spending much time considering what our ongoing consumption is doing to the planet:

• Apparently Geoengineering the environment possible… but is this a good idea?
• The continental ice shelf has split, ice loss 10x expected amount this summer.
• After my lengthy discussion of cloud seeding in a previous post, a 1,500 ship fleet proposed to cloud seed as a way of dealing with global warming.
• A Canadian scientists build CO2 scrubbing machine for cars... details sketchy
• Researchers have found a rainforest fungus that “naturally makes a mix of hydrocarbons that bears a striking resemblance to diesel”.
• Recent reports suggest that more than one third of amphibians dying out from global warming and other environmental reasons.
• The acid content of the oceans is worse than previous thought and only getting even worse(er).
• To round this post off on a cheery note, the chemical pollution found in water is slowly destroying masculinity. Soon Hillary will get her chance to rule!

For all of your tactical voters out there, the lack of popular vote killed Green Party “In Tuesday’s federal election, the Conservatives logged 37.6 percent of the popular vote ahead of the Liberals with 26.2 percent, Elections Canada reported. The socialist New Democratic Party logged 18.2 percent support and, although it only ran in Quebec, the separatist Bloc Quebecois garnered 10 percent of the vote. The Green Party attracted 6.8 percent of the popular vote but didn’t manage to secure a seat in the 308-seat House.”

• The EFF is challenging constitutionality of recent Telecom Immunity bill
• Right before the US election many cases of voting machines switching votes from Obama to McCain were found. When will this gongshow end?!
• News came out after the US election that both McCain and Obama’s campaigns were hacked
• After being beaten to a pulp over their private planes, GM has asked the FAA to block public tracking of their private jet.

Probably the biggest news I’ve read in quite some time, the Global Network Initiative is a joint venture between the major network companies to find common ground on dealing with questionable countries like China. A good idea in general but it’ll be interested to see if it can actually contain the greed of these mutlinational corporations as they increasingly deal with China for just about everything. Ars has a good summary of the whole situation.

In related China news, China has extends press freedoms after Olympics. However, the Chinese government is now photographing all internet cafe users.

• The CRTC says it is not endorsing bandwidth throttling by letting Bell continue its bandwidth throttling.Umm ok.
• A BC Court rules that linking to infringing content does not constitute republication which means that I can link to whatever torrents I want from the site and everything is good. (which is great!)

• W has signed a the Genetic Non-discrimination Act into law. Probably one of maybe two or three things that he’s done that I actually agree with…
• A panacea for fuel creation, a silocon valley startup called LS9 has managed to get bacteria to output biofuel. The big question is can it scale-up to the demand and is it commercially viable.
• A leading evolutionary biologist suggests that lack of older (+35) fathers has ground human evolution to a halt.
• Can cells control their own evolution? Evidence from Princeton suggests that they can.
• Data from the first 10 volunteers from the Personal Genenome Project have been sequenced and are available for all who have the time and energy to look at it.

• BC’s ISO Hunt has preemptively sued the recording industry to prevent shutdown. Haven’t heard anything about this since the initial suit, it’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out.
• The Canadian Conservative’s platform includes pledge to push through copyright reform. Now that they are in (all be it tenuous) power, we’ll see if they can get this through parliament or not.
• Unknown to most people the major governments of the world are secretly working on a global copyright treaty called ACTA and Michael Geist has Canada wishlist.
• A Calgary man first to be charged for videotapping in a movie theatre, charged (the shockingly low amount of) $1500.
• Finally, Michael Geist has launched a new movie on copyright in Canada called “Why Copyright?“. Good stuff.

• Hackers have made their own RFID version of Elvis’ Passport. So the RFID enabled passports have already been hacked. Nice.
• Very little media discussion of this but domestic satellite spying has gone into effect in the US. Cough… Police State… Cough.
• Speaking of satellites, Google’s GeoEye-1 satellite launched so they can provide high definition map and geospatial data to the masses.
• Sony PS3’s new terms of service mean that Sony will be collecting and owning everything you do on the PS3.
• EPIC and the ALCU have won a small victory in being able to see 10 documents that were previously held secret regarding the US wiretapping fiasco. Some of these documents show that US government tracking users without phone companies help.
• In the wake of the US plummeting into a police-like state, Canada has backpedaled on data sharing of Canadian’s personal information with the US.
• Finally, the NSA is building a massive datacenter in San Antonio with the hope of data-mining from the vast wealth of unsecured data floating around the net.

• Google begins extracting the text out of all the documents they have scanned recently to provide textual versions of all the books on Google Books. Crazy!
• The BBC answered a question that I’ve had for ages: How do spammers make money?
• Haven Co (the floating data haven) appears to be offline… perhaps permanently.
• You’ve heard about all the pirating going on off the coast of africa recently… well check out the Google mashup Pirate Map that shows you all the currently highjacked planes / boats.
• Facebook has recently released Facebook Connect which allows you to share your personal information from Facebook with third party developers. Sounds like the worst privacy fiasco ever to me… but also pretty useful for some. Facebook has implemented fairly strict privacy rules around the data. Not exactly the killer app thats going to (finally) pull me into Facebook.
• EZTV is a bit torrent tracker that does an excellent job of filtering crappy torrents and only showing you the real-deal known good torrents in both regular def and high-def formats.  Hook it up to uTorrents RSS feeder and get your shows automatically downloaded to your computer before you even know they’re released!

This topic doesn’t get nearly enough love on IA so some of these articles might be a little on the oldies side. Hopefully you haven’t seen them before.

• New radioactive material can provide light for up to 12 years without power.
• The Top 10 scientific discoveries of 2007
• Both Russian and US scientists are apparently close to cloning a mammoth. Other prehistoric animals are also being looked at
• The IgNoble awards for the wackiest achievements in science for the last year have been given away.Highlights include dog fleas being better jumpers than cat flees and that the more expensive the placebo the better they seem to work.
• Finally to round this all out, the 7 Greatest Scientific hoaxes of all time.

• This is -way- late by now but still funny enough to post, the McCain / Obama dance off
• If you haven’t seen it already, the Waaaaasssuuup 2008 update. Great stuff.
• The top 14 James Bond gagdets… apparently the new movie doesn’t really have any gadgets… sad. Obviously the jetpack is pimpin’ my other favourites: the golden gun and the 1963 motorola beeper. Hot!
• This has been all over the internet but in case you haven’t seen it, the Staten Island Zoo Giraffes skit from SNL.
• A wacky article from slashdot on how to cloak an object at a distance.
• Bloodydingo found this great reel from the Price is Right with the best boobie highlights. Priceless.
• A new StarTrek is coming and its a prequel. Check out the trailer if you’re a trekkie.
• Finally, the Simpson’s mocked Apple on a recent epi and Selma found the video.

The news has been slower than your grandma making a left turn across a four lane highway… There have been some interesting stories but not enough to warrant any big postings.

Obviously the big news for today is the beginning of the end of the worst era of our lives: the Baby Bush Years. Obviously if Obama wins there is a greater chance for real change in the US (and thus the world). But even if somehow McCain gets in (although it’ll be a terrible thing for the US)… its gotta be better than it is right now.

Happy Bush Trimming Everyone!

White Space is the frequency spectrum being freed up but the upcoming switch to all-digital TV. As you might have noticed in recent IA posts, I think spectrum is a big deal. Available spectrum ultimately decides who has the freedom to distribute ideas and culture. As the world becomes more globalized and the internet becomes even more ubiquitous, the ability to stream culture and ideas wirelessly over large distances is huge. WiMax will not that technology because its been sold as an ISP solution to networking not a consumer solution. What the world really needs is 1km range Wifi… allowing the users to create the net instead of ISPs. Both Google and Bill Gates are now heavily lobbying for white space and white space based devices. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to this story.

Update: Apparently the FCC has unanimously approved white space devices!

• Ever wanted to get into a site that required a password but didn’t want to bother signing up? Its worth checking out Bug Me Not to see there is a working password there. Its an open password site… unfortunately lots of the passwords don’t work.
• By the same people who brought you Bug Me Not, its Retail Me Not which tracks down coupons codes for online retailers.
• PC Magagzine has published an article entitled the cybercrime hall of fame. Pretty interesting read.
• A new project by Google called Gears allows you to position your just like GPS but using WiFi signals only.
• Long-time contributer Rumplekillskin sent me a link to the Diggnation podcast, apparently its is about digg.com and he touts it as an american version of IA.
• Rumple also sent me a lin kto the Who Owns Ideas podcast from CBC which is super informative and easy to listen to.

Volcom sent me a link to the Zeitgeist movie the other day. I hadn’t even heard of it before… I watched the two hour long (but freely available on Google Video) movie and it blew my fragile little mind. Its a three part “documentary”, part 1 debunks Christianity, part 2 looks at 9/11 conspiracies and part 3 looks at the US financial system. There are so many claims and so much stuff that I hadn’t heard about (plus a distinct lack of sources for the claims on the movie’s website) before in this movie that I started doing some research into the claims: Web Skeptic and Conspiracy Science both had detailed breakdowns of the claims and how “true” they really are:

• Part 1
• Part 2 
• Part 3a, Part 3b,  Part 3c

They have a general conclusion which I agree with: the movie has -lots- of factual errors but that the movie has some interesting and inflammatory ideas.

Personally, I think the 9/11 stuff was the most shocking to me. I’d pretty much written of the LooseChange site as crackpot but this video made me re-think things… especially now that we have a better perspective on what happened after 9/11. Have a look at Wikipedia’s 9/11 Conspiracies Section for a less ‘out-there’ perspective.

The same guy who did the first movie (in 2007) has released a second one called Zeitgeist: Addendum which is another 2 hours long. I’m only 25 minutes in but it addresses the big debt problems in the US right now and looks at a topic which has been capturing my attention for the past few weeks, the idea of Money As Debt and how the current financial markets work.

• Remember a few weeks ago I was wondering about the number of satellites in orbit around the earth? Well (of course) Google was asking and answering the same question. They’ve now added every satellite to Google Earth and they are all tracked in realtime. Very cool.
• The first planet found in our galaxy that is obitting a sun-like star has been found. Planet orbitting a sun-like star found although its 11 times farther out than Neptune… and has some unique and never-before-seen attributes.
• A molecule known to be critical for the start of life has been indentified in extra-solar-system.
• Apparently the Japense have started work on space elevator!
• Finally, something outside the observable universe is exerting force on the universe itself. Astrophysists are unable to explain the force so far. Have we finally found god in the machine?