Month: August 2012

By Mike Masnick, Techdirt. – August 21, 2012 at 06:45PM

It’s that time of the year again when SXSW does its annual “panelpicker” effort. I’m on one of the proposed panels, put together by Engine Advocacy, discussing the new era of tech advocacy by looking at the political landscape after the 2012 elections and how startups, entrepreneurs, open innovation advocates and the tech community can better engage in the political process to avoid disasters being pushed by legacy incumbents. The panel will include myself, Mike McGeary from Engine, Elizabeth Stark from both Stanford and StartX and Mark Colwell from Senator Jerry Moran’s office. If you’re reading this, you know who I am, and those other three were all important players in helping to stop SOPA earlier this year. Feel free to vote and hopefully our panel will get picked.

There are, as always, plenty of other great panels to check out as well. I haven’t had a chance to go through them all, but here are a few others that would be great, if you’re looking for ones to vote for:

• A panel on copyright and disruptive technologies involving three true experts on the subject: Andrew Bridges, Margot Kaminski and Wendy Seltzer.
• A discussion between two of the key Congressional staffers who (from opposite ends of the political spectrum) helped team up to defeat SOPA: Jayme White from Senator Wyden’s office and Laurent Crenshaw from Rep. Issa’s office, talking about Congress and the internet, and how to prevent future SOPAs from happening.
• A discussion asking if the internet has become America’s “third party” starring some more of the key folks who led the fight against SOPA (including both Colwell and Crenshaw already mentioned, but also Maura Corbett and Marvin Ammori).
• Rob Pegoraro talking about why the media doesn’t understand tech policy issues very well.
• A panel on the future of internet rights.
• This one, the title says it all: It’s Reddit’s World. We Just Live In It.
• Gary Shapiro on “ninja innovation”
• In Defense of Mashups looks interesting in that, among others, it would have Eric from Padmapper on the panel, and he’s currently being sued by Craigslist for “mashing up” Craigslist with maps to make Craigslist more useful.
• I learned a while back that when the Bomb Squad/Public Enemy’s Hank Shocklee speaks, you should listen, so vote for his panel (also with Julie Samuels at EFF, Michael Petricone at CEA and Paul Geller from Grooveshark) on making free content work for fans and for artists.
• Similarly, former rockstar, now brilliant business strategist Dave Allen is always worth following, especially when he’ll be on a panel with Brian Zisk talking about music tech startups.
• Soundcloud and Wattpad together, talking about the rise of collaborative content creation? Count me in.
• Nick Grossman has some very cool ideas about connected innovation, and he wants to talk about a bunch of them at SXSW.
• Here’s an interesting one on learning from China in terms of how imitation can help you innovate too.

There are lots, lots more, but these were a few that caught my eye.

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By Goli Mohammadi, MAKE – August 22, 2012 at 06:00PM

Ah, floppy drives! No need to stack them in landfills when you can hack them to make sweet, sweet music, like the Imperial March and Daft Punk’s “Derezzed”. The latest, another hot track from MrSolidSnake745, is taking me straight back to 1984. Check out his drives belt out the Ghostbusters theme song.

(Thanks Trish!)

Filed under: Hacks, Music, Recycle

By Zachary Knight, Techdirt. – August 22, 2012 at 05:03PM

Sadly, we talk way too often about police arresting people for doing nothing other than taking a picture or filming them. The police officers being filmed and photographed make these arrests using various excuses, but frequently the charges get dropped for lack of merit. The reason charges rarely stick when an officer is filmed is because filming police, or anyone in a public space, is not illegal. Some people may not like it, but it is a fact.

The New York Times is waking up to this fact that photography is not a crime. In an interview with Mickey H. Osterreicher, general counselor for the National Press Photographers Association, they get down to the nitty gritty of the legalities surrounding this age old tradition. They also talk a bit about just why such arrests are happening more frequently.

Since 9/11, there’s been an incredible number of incidents where photographers are being interfered with and arrested for doing nothing other than taking pictures or recording video in public places.

It’s not just news photographers who should be concerned with this. I think every citizen should be concerned. Tourists taking pictures are being told by police, security guards and sometimes other citizens, “Sorry, you can’t take a picture here.” When asked why, they say, “Well, don’t you remember 9/11?”

I haven’t really thought of criminalizing photography as something to do with 9/11 before. I know that a lot of our rights have been eroded since that day, but the photography aspect never really clicked until now. Just as Mickey can’t make heads nor tails of this argument, I am struggling to find a connection here. I don’t recall cameras being a part of the plots to destroy the Twin Towers, Pentagon or White House.

Of course there could be more reasons for this increase in arresting photographers. Mickey suspects that part of the reason is the proliferation of the camera. Pretty much everyone with a smart phone has a camera capable of taking some very high quality pictures. Prior to this boom, the police had some modicum of control over the press. They knew the press wasn’t going to be everywhere and were used to not being under constant recordable surveillance by the public. Now that anyone could be filming them or taking their picture, they are more on edge and more prone to lashing out.

When this happens, it is important for those accused to know their rights. However, it is also important for the police to know the public’s rights as well. While you, as a photographer, may know that you have the right to take pictures or film in a public space, some officers may not know or may have forgotten that fact. That is why the Mickey and others have been working with police to keep officers reminded of that right.

Q. After photographers were stopped from photographing the police clearing Occupy Wall Street protestors from Zuccotti Park, you and representatives of a media coalition including The Times, met with the police commissioner Ray Kelly. What happened at that meeting?

A. It was on Nov. 23. I asked the commissioner if he would reissue the “finest message” from 1999 that dealt with the police cooperating with the press. He did that. It was read at 10 consecutive roll calls in every single station house and precinct.

The finest message is a policy statement on police interactions with the press. It states that officers are not to interfere with videotaping and photographing in public places. It also reminds officers that they have an obligation to assist the press whenever possible. This is very similar to the recent news when the DC police chief laid down the law on filming of officers.

Hopefully, continually repeating this message will help slow down this barrage of arrests for photographing the police. As more officers are reminded of the rights of the cameras-wielding public, we will hopefully start to see fewer future incidents. It would be great if other police departments across the nation follow the lead of NY and DC police in proactively spreading the word about the rights of the public to record and photograph the police.

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By Scott Merrill, TechCrunch – August 22, 2012 at 01:02PM

When I think of APIs, I tend to think of mostly end-user data being passed back and forth between consumer websites and various client apps. Automated uploading to Flickr, for example, or consuming Twitter data in some way. I don’t think of chemical patent searches. SureChem just announced an API for just that function, though, which goes to show that automation and ubiquitous computing is penetrating more and more industries.

I’m not a chemist, nor a patent attorney, nor am I engaged in any way with medical research. But if I were, I imagine that SureChemDirect would be a very useful tool. SureChemDirect enables customers to incorporate sophisticated chemical patent search into their workflows, and perform batch queries using their own internal platforms.

I asked Nicko Goncharoff, SureChem’s founder, for details about the API.

We have a RESTful API that enables users to directly search our database of 12 million chemical structures, 20 million full text annotated patents and 70 million patent abstracts. Results include chemical structures and their associated meta-data, patent numbers, patent meta-data and full text records. In future the chemical meta-data will also include links to our public and proprietary content partners – so for example, if you get back a chemical structure, we will tell you where it occurs not only in SureChem, but in PubChem, ChemSpider, Royal Society of Chemistry journals, etc.

The interface purports to allow users to draw chemical structures and work through the database that way, rather than simply use keyword searching. I suppose if you’re a chemist, this is a pretty big advancement.

Goncharoff also pointed out that SureChem would be depositing all of their chemical structure data into PubChem. “This will be the first time that a complete patent chemistry collection has been made freely available,” Goncharoff told me.

By Zachary Knight, Techdirt. – August 22, 2012 at 06:07AM

While some schools and teachers are looking for ways to make education, and especially textbooks, cheaper for students, others seem bent on doing everything possible to keep prices artificially high. Because colleges essentially have the textbook market cornered, they can require students to purchase just about anything in order to bring in more revenue. Unfortunately for the students, this can mean increased costs and and annoyance with the process itself.

Enter Luke Thomas, who had a very annoying textbook situation in an English class. All Luke and his wife wanted to do was take an English class together. They figured that they could get by with a single textbook between the two of them, but things in college are never that easy. You see, the professor for their class required a specific book, which he had authored, as well as an one time use access code to an online discussion board. However, the only way to get that code was to buy a brand new textbook.

My wife and I were taking that same class, and we were unable to purchase an access code without purchasing two copies of the book, which was very upsetting. I asked the individuals working at the bookstore if they sold unbundled copies of the access code, and to my dismay, they did not.

Because buying two books for two people who lived together and took the class together was a pointless endeavor, Luke decided to take matters into his own hands. He contacted the service provider of the discussion board and was able to buy the code directly through them for $20 plus shipping. Yes, the code had to be physically shipped to him. Of course, this was an option that neither the professor nor the book store offered him to begin with.

As a former college student in this internet connected world, I am also aware of such shady textbook deals. One Trigonometry class I took required the purchase of a $75 access code to the online textbook and quizzes. While my course wasn’t tied to a physical book, it did limit the end of semester cash that most students are used to getting as they sell off their books — something that schemes like this do not allow.

Of course Luke didn’t let it end with him just buying his code and getting through the course. He also spoke to the head of the bookstore as well as researched the law behind such bundles. What he found was a treat for any school or professor that would attempt to do something like this in the future:

After researching this issue, there’s a federal law which requires the unbundling of textbooks. How often is this law enforced? I have no idea…

UNBUNDLING OF COLLEGE TEXTBOOKS FROM SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIALS.—A publisher that sells a college textbook and any supplemental material accompanying such college textbook as a single bundle shall also make available the college textbook and each supplemental material as separate and unbundled items, each separately priced.

Wow! Wouldn’t that be something to bring up to that professor and his supervisors? That is, if they will actually listen. However, there is also another path that might serve a student in getting a quick resolution to the matter of being forced to buy a new book to get such online materials: patent law. Perhaps this professor is unaware that his method of forcing students to buy a new book and prevent sharing has been patented. Wouldn’t that patent showdown be a joy to watch unfold?

Lucky for us, there are plenty of people out there looking after the plight of the poor college student. Luke takes the time to highlight a few notables out there.

It looks like there’s light at the end of the tunnel, companies like Boundless Learning, Lore, and the plethora of ed-tech startups are seeking to disrupt these greedy giants. Go get em guys!

With all the attention that high college tuition prices get in the media, one would think that the textbook industry would be a prime target for an area to reduce the cost of an education for students. Sadly, the textbook industry gets a pass by most budget hawks as they tend to focus the majority of their attention on the sticker price of college. If they would expand their focus they could probably see a lot of room for improvement in additional costs outside tuition. Until then, good luck paying for all those books you may or may not need.

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By Mike Masnick, Techdirt. – August 22, 2012 at 10:11AM

A few years ago, we wrote about a horrifying ruling in which a blogger who was sued for libel was told he had to pay $60,000, even though it was shown that what he had said was entirely truthful. It’s an oft-repeated statement that truth is an absolute defense against defamation claims, but in this case, things got weird (and troubling). The ruling found that even though the statements were truthful, they represented “tortious interference” with employment. The case involved a blogger named John Hoff who blogged, truthfully, about Jerry Moore’s involvement in a high-profile mortgage fraud situation. Moore had been hired by the University of Minnesota, but was apparently let go soon after Hoff’s post. It seemed absolutely ridiculous that providing truthful information about someone should ever be seen as illegal, but that seemed to be the case here. The original ruling was a jury verdict and we had hoped that the court would set aside that verdict, but it chose not to, going against a rather large collection of case law (and common sense).

Thankfully, Hoff appealed, and the appeals court has now reversed the original ruling. The appeals court made the point clearly and concisely:

Because truth is an absolute defense to a claim for defamation, truth should also be a defense to a claim for tortious interference with a contract arising out of an allegedly defamatory statement.

The court goes into much more detail over its decision to reverse and send it back to the lower court, but it all comes back to the basics. If the content is truthful, then there’s no issue:

Moore argues that Hoff is not shielded from tort liability simply because Moore could not prove the falsity of Hoff’s statement. Rather, Moore urges us to rely instead on Hoff’s motivation for making the allegedly defamatory statements. Moore asserts that because Hoff had an ulterior motive of getting Moore fired, he can be liable for the tortious-interference claims. We disagree.

When a person conveys unflattering and possibly damaging information to another person’s employer, it is unlikely that the motivation for conveying that information is borne out of affection. It is much more likely that the intent is for the employer to take responsive action — up to and including termination — based on the content of that information. Regardless of the motivation of the messenger, if the information conveyed is true, it is not appropriate for liability to attach.

It’s good that the courts seem to have fixed the earlier decision, but it’s still crazy that it even got this far.

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By Adam Dachis, Lifehacker – August 21, 2012 at 05:30PM

Developing for iOS isn’t the easiest task in the world, and it’s hard to know where to get started. App developer and Instructables user A-Nony-Mus decided to help out and put together a guide to get you coding your first iPhone app as well as learn the basics of the Xcode platform.

The guide won’t teach you to make an app that you’ll want to submit to the iTunes App Store, but it’ll get you acquainted with all the unfamiliar territory that Apple’s platform provides. You’ll learn how to get a copy of Xcode, set up your first project, get used to the various files it creates for you, and actually write code in Objective C. Whether you’re new to programming or coming from a web development background, learning to code for iOS is going to feel a little foreign. When you’re starting off, it’s good to have a guide like this to hold your hand so you can get used to the differences when writing software for an Apple product. If you want to make an iPhone app, you’ll want to check out this guide first.

Creating your first iOS app | Instructables

By Nerdist News, GeekChicDaily – Feed Your Inner Geek – August 21, 2012 at 10:48AM

College is a place where smart, driven young people strive to learn more and better their standings. It’s also a place where you can join a frat and drink until your liver bleeds, but too many movies get made about the latter group already. Yes, we all love Animal House, but there’s no room for Bluto on this list. To celebrate the other offerings in university life and film we have compiled a list of the best college movies for intelligent people (like yourselves).Single Image Layout

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Foursquare Layout

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By Thorin Klosowski, Lifehacker – August 21, 2012 at 08:30AM

Mac: Ever wondered where your applications were sending and receiving data from? Private Eye is a real time network monitoring app that shows all of your live connections from all you open software, and includes where they’re sending data to.

Private Eye displays all connections your applications have to the web, the time, and the IP address connected to the app. You can then filter those results by app, or by incoming and outgoing traffic. Private Eye doesn’t have the power to alter any of these connections once they happen, but it does give you enough information to know if an app is connecting somewhere it shouldn’t be. If you’re interested in security, or you just want to track where your apps are sending data, Private Eye is a free utility that’s easy to use. If you want to stop those network connections, we like the lightweight firewall utility Radio Silence for preventing your apps from phoning home. Radio Silence is developed by the same developer as Private Eye.

Private Eye | via One Thing Well

By Joshua Lockhart, MakeUseOf – August 20, 2012 at 09:30PM

Ah, wisdom teeth surgery… A lot of people have to go through with it, right? It seems to be pretty common. However, what we tend to forget is that with all the gas intake people take in to put them to sleep and dumb down the pain, people can have some very weird reactions after the operation. Fortunately for us, friends and family tend to record these reactions…

I want to invite you to another side of YouTube: the one where home movies go viral, and videos normally shared with just friends and family make it to a world-wide audience. Today, I want to show you a bunch of videos that show people after their wisdom teeth operations! The videos are definitely hilarious, and hopefully, you’ll find some that you think are worth sharing.

Brother & Sister Take A Ride Home

This is one of the most humorous videos I’ve seen, but to be quite honest, it’s very slow. However, throughout the clip are a few different chuckle-worthy moments, so it’s worth the time. The video features a brother and a sister riding home after they have both had the wisdom teeth operation. With that said, the interaction between the siblings is highly entertaining.

Seeing Unicorns?

This video features a girl right after her operation, and within it, she goes on to explain just how she feels. The video info itself features the full transcript, but to sum things up, the girl feels as though a unicorn has taken her to a magical place. (Furthermore, for context, she dives into a classic 90s Christian rap tune by a fellow named Carman – “Who’s in the house? JC…”) To be honest, like all of these, this video is fairly long, but every second is worth watching.

Guy Sings Song Post-Op

Remember that good old classic, “On The Road Again”? Although simple, this video is absolutely one of the funniest things possible when you get right down to it. Admittedly, it’s one of those things that you’ll watch for a few minutes (or a few times), and say, “This is really stupid.” However, give it a go. I’d say it’s pretty great.

I Have Two Tongues

Although a little tamer than others, the sheer look of distraught on this wisdom teeth victim’s face is utterly hilarious. The situation at hand with this particular girl is a little different than others. Simply put, she believes that she has a second tongue… The realization comes towards the end of the video, but the build-up is certainly enticing.

Girl Thinks She’s A Wizard

As we’ve already gathered, there are quite a few people who fall under the impression that they are seeing things or have had some type of change to their being. In this case, we have a poor girl who has come under the impression that she is a wizard. Furthermore, she believes that the wisdom tooth operation was actually a spell cast upon her. The reaction in this video is absolutely hilarious, and despite having vertical video syndrome, it’s worth sticking around for.

Conclusion

Well, that’s all the dental operation patients we have for you today, folks. (I say that as if this is a regular thing.) However, we are sure that you’ve seen a few of your own, or maybe you’ve even made some of your own videos!

With that said, we’d love to see what you have to bring to the table. Have you made a video like this one? Have you seen better ones than these?

Image Credit: mconnors