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Playboy sues Boing Boing over a web link
Playboy has filed a lawsuit against Boing Boing, accusing the offbeat news blog of copyright infringement for linking to an Imgur gallery and a YouTube video that showed every Playmate centerfold. Boing Boing wasn't involved in the creation of the gallery and the video at all -- it simply reported upon the archive's existence. In its post announcing that it has filed a motion to dismiss, the publication called the case "baseless" and "bizarre." Linking is common practice among blogs and major media outlets alike, after all, and it's one of the most basic methods people use to exchange information online.
Recommended Reading: Cool Tools review, drone delivery and more
Recommended Reading highlights the best long-form writing on technology in print and on the web. Some weeks, you'll also find short reviews of books dealing with the subject of technology that we think are worth your time. We hope you enjoy the read. Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities by Kevin Kelly This may well be the greatest catalog of all-time -- and given its Boing Boing connection (Cool Tools was cofounded by Boing Boing creator Mark Frauenfelder), you can be assured it's full of wonderful things. Want to draw a graphic novel, design a fabric, shoot a film on the cheap or survive in the woods during the coming apocalypse? There's a cool tool for each of those activities -- several, in fact. Each tool sports a quick description (from one to four paragraphs), the price and a URL where you can buy it. There's also a QR code by each, to save you precious seconds of typing time. Cool Tools doesn't actually sell any of the gadgets itself, so the massive tome comes with a fairly lofty $40 price tag, but for the person who thinks he has everything, here's nearly 500 pages to show them just how wrong they are. -- Brian Heater, Director of Media
Don't miss Reggie Watts, Mark Frauenfelder, Sparkfun, Techdirt and Sol Design Lab at Expand NY!
With every subsequent post, our excitement for Expand New York grows -- and this is a particularly good one. We might go so far as saying that this is our most exciting speaker post yet, but we'll leave that for you to decide. Improvisational musician / comedian Reggie Watts will be on stage discussing and demoing his sampling setup. We'll also be joined once again by Boing Boing founder and Make Magazine editor-in-chief Mark Frauenfelder, along with Sol Design Lab founder Beth Ferguson, Techdirt CEO Mike Masnick and Sparkfun's educational outreach coordinator, Jeff Branson. And, of course, we've already announced a number of folks who will be joining us on November 9th and 10th, including LeVar Burton, Ben Heck, Peter Molyneux, Ben Huh and folks from companies like Google, Sony, Pebble, Adafruit and The Electronic Frontier Foundation -- and we've still got plenty to come. Check out the full list below.
Mark Frauenfelder on maker culture, openness and Apple
I'm attending Respect The Internet in NYC, a one-day Ketchum conference highlighting the sometimes tenuous and touchy relationship between online culture and traditional marketing/media. Among the morning's star presenters was Boing Boing founder and MAKE magazine/Maker Faire standard bearer Mark Frauenfelder, who discussed the maker ethos and the DIY manifesto (user-replaceable parts! screws not glue!) while highlighting some fascinating sites, companies and grass-roots efforts around the world. I noticed that Mark was presenting from an 11" MacBook Air, which had the effect of making his lap and hands look unusually large -- but it also made me wonder how the idea of a hackable product ecosystem with full user access is reconciled with Apple's attitude toward hacking in general and hardware modification/upgrades in particular. Since I had the chance to ask him about it, I did. His response is nuanced; he's "not an extremist" about openness, although he wants to see greater accessibility in product design. "Not everything has to be open," he noted. A video clip of the Q & A (sorry for the Stickam quality) is in the second half of this post. The conference continues this afternoon; you can tune into the live feed here.
MagicJack sues Boing Boing, gets bounced out of court
The MagicJack is a VoIP dongle that hooks ye olde landline telephone up to the world of tomorrow via a humble computer. By all accounts, it seems to work pretty well and does the job it promises. Sadly, it doesn't seem like we can say the same about its management team. A post on Boing Boing in April 2008 addressed some pretty concerning aspects of the MagicJack EULA: it demands that you cede your right to sue the company and give it permission to "analyze" the numbers you call, but even more worrying was the fact that no links to said EULA were provided either on the website or at the point of sale. That is to say, every purchaser of the product was agreeing to something he or she hadn't (and couldn't have, without tracking the URL down via Google) read. Oh, and apparently the software comes without an uninstaller. The whole thing could've been just a nice warning tale about not getting into contracts without reading the fine print, but MagicJack CEO Dan Borislow, hardly a man who shrinks from controversy, felt so offended by Boing Boing's, erm, statement of factual reality that he took them to court, citing that his company was exposed to "hate, ridicule and obloquy" (we had to look that last one up, it's just another word for ridicule, which makes the whole thing a tautology. Lawyers, eh?). Unsurprisingly, he lost the case, but he did manage to squeeze in one last act of shady behavior prior to his loss by offering to pay for Boing Boing's silence regarding the proceedings and costs. After he was turned down, MagicJack's coffers were still lightened by $54,000 to cover the defendants' legal fees, whereas its reputation can now be found somewhere in the Monster Cable vicinity of pond scum central. Great job, Boing Boing.
One more roundup of iPhone wallpapers
Tons of iPhone wallpapers out now-- here's a last roundup of what we've seen so far. The good bloggers at BoingBoing are going iPhone wallpaper crazy-- they've posted this terrific Sad Mac wallpaper, as well as a collection of erotic wallpapers, if you swing that way. Oh, and hey, unicorns! Hypoxic has some good pieces in his DeviantArt. Artist Coop also has a Flickr set of wallpapers up (some of them NSFW). In that same realm, Andy sent us his own Flickr set of cool-looking retro toy wallpapers. And speaking of Flickr, the iPhone wallpapers pool is also filling up with all kinds of things. So there you go-- if you don't have something pretty on your iPhone yet, you're not looking hard enough. And if you need help getting these on your iPhone we've got you covered there, too.
Steven Levy on BoingBoing podcast
Steven Levy, the author of The Perfect Thing (reviewed here), is the guest on Boing Boing's fourth Get Illuminated podcast (warning, some things on Boing Boing may not be work safe). He discusses the all things iPod with Mark Frauenfelder.Steven's audio is a little rough around the edges, but the podcast is still interesting.
A trip to Mario World, without the GameBoy
Some kid, or more likely, a 30 year old man, has had his room elaborately decorated in the style of Mario World. The conversion comes complete with ceiling pipes and blocks that stick out of the wall although, as far as I can tell, they held back from placing random bottomless pits around the room.[Via BoingBoing]
Get that authentic "cinema experience" on your Mac
You know the "cinema experience" that movie executives keep harping on about? Y'know, the "experience" that cinemas use to justify stupidly high snack and ticket prices? Well, a company has created a program that lets you relive this authentic experience from the comfort of your Mac. Peanut Gallery, billed as a "shared media experience" by its creators, allows you to recreate this experience from within a virtual 70's style movie theater. You can even chat over the movie along with seven other viewers via the web or Bonjour and animate little silhouette avatars that sit in rows of seats. Getting up and leaving after you realize you've spent your hard earned money on another piece of Hollywood crap has never been so easy; you don't even have to leave your chair to leave your chair! Don't worry if you're a little late for the showing, because there's also an option for a pre-show reel which, for extra realism, you'll be able to fill with annoying commercials and trailers for films you're completely uninterested in.Still, I'm a little angry that there's no implementation of a few other cinema features we all know and love including "mobile phone goes off at the tense bit" or the "crying baby". They didn't even place an obligatory anti-piracy PSA at the beginning! The pre-screening frisk down by a burly police officer is also missing. Another thing: Peanut Gallery doesn't disable my iSight or jam my cellphone for the duration of the film. Talk about unrealistic. How am I supposed to feel like I'm actually at the movies with essential parts of the cinema experience missing?!I give the program a B+ for effort, but I think a little more of a police state/Big Brother-style attitude is needed.[Via Daring Fireball]
Read Joystiq from within Second Life
A recent update to Second Life that allows players to view the game's online help pages using a custom Mozilla browser has been hacked so that you can view any webpage. Although there's no way to type web addresses without some basic hacking knowledge, it's quite simple to change the homepage to Google or any other website. Of course you could always just tab-out and use Firefox, but this option has a much greater "geek cool" factor. Let's just hope Fox News doesn't cotton on to the possibility of people browsing "questionable" content from within SL. Anyway, the first commentator to post a screenshot of themselves commenting on this post from within Second Life bags themselves a star.[Via Clickable Culture]
For sale: oil paintings inspired by games
Jeremiah Palacek is a painter living in Prague in the Czech Republic. Over the last year he's created 154 paintings, many of which are inspired by, as he calls it "imagery from digital mediums" (read: games). You can see three examples of his work in the image above: from left to right you have an 8 foot by 4 foot monster inspired by Counter-Strike complete with abstract blood spatters, a straight up Duck Hunt imitation and last but not least, a sweeping (at least for those days) digital landscape from Road Rash. Who says games aren't art?[Via BoingBoing]
