The mob-trend

sp!ked-IT | Article | 'A mob for no reason': "The Mob Project was an invitation-only thing. A guy called Bill sent out email invitations, which in turn were forwarded on to others. This was no protest, no expression of social angst, not even an inaugural meeting of a carpet fetish society. Instead, these people were all happy just to be there. As one of them put it, 'I always wanted to say 'I'm a member of the mob' and now I can'. This kind of thing is being taken seriously. The technology commentator and social software advocate Joi Ito described the Mob Project as a 'very cool social hack', and bloggers throughout the blogosphere are making similar comments" flash mob and Friendster phenomena

Hijacking the mobile

The art of 'bluejacking' is on the move. It's the technology of Bluetooth in the mobile phones that have got a revival of the hoax.

To bluejack is to send unsolicited textmessages or with the new SonyEricsson 610 also sending pictures to strangers in the range of the Bluetooth-radiofrequency.

2003 in 20

In the mayfly project 2003 you summon your past year in twenty words. Hard as hell but rather good to try.

"Born. Eat. Shag. Die." is the best one yet in the big project where your whole life should be downsized into a twentyword short note.

Nr 1 britblogging

Guardian Unlimited have issued The best of British blogging of the year. I say that is really a good work of the lads at the online-staff of the paper since it is like chosing the best website from the whole net. But they done it and you are the judge of their ability to choose the best blog from all the diverse blogs at the Net.

"All the blogs mentioned here are exceptional. They are a testament to the growing richness of British blogging. They demonstrate great design, good writing and smart use of links to provide a series of windows on worlds we would otherwise never know about. This was exactly the intention of the awards when we first began them in 2002."

So who did win? Well - there is a lot of them but the special juror award did go to LinkMachineGo.

Blogs worth noting is the winner of the photo category: NYCLONDON and the strange (fictive?) blog of the call-girl in London: Belle de Jour. But the most strange one is truly the London Underground Tube Diary where a guy is just writing and share photos from his ordinary daily routine as a employee at the London Tube.

The big turkey hoax

Not just that the turkey president Bush did give the american soldiers was of plastic - there've been stories from armysources that the soldiers that was invited to the special Thanksgiving-woa was screened by NSA. All for the media to get the best pics and to have the story in control.

It might be the worry about some american soldier should beat the president up since "a survey it did of troops in Iraq, finding that half of those questioned described their units' moral as low and their training as insufficient and said they did not plan to reenlist.".

Another thing this mediocre mediajamboree have yet to explain is the fact that the pilot on Air Force One did say that they was a Gulfstream V instead of the much bigger Boeing 747.

It's Santa...

...and he is evil. This game surely is made for us who don't throw ourself into the arms of the shopping-mall Santa or thinder the eyes when speaking about a Christmas-tree.

Cuz this Santa is axing some blob-like humanoids down. A simple arcade game but surely make the day of a Xmas-hater like me.

A Noble Tower

NY Times do tell how the city is planning to use Ground Zero and somehow do something to build up the great skyline of the Big Apple.

The idea is to show the world the greatness of the "Homeland" America and that even the 9-11-incident won't get the land on their knees.

Of course this will be the highest tower in the world.

Why Georgie loves Wacko Jacko

"In the last two years, CNN has not devoted this much energy and coverage to any story in the manner that is unfolding right now.

Enron, the stock market, the reasons for September 11, the nomination of Henry Kissinger to chair the investigation into that event, the disinformation that was pushed by the Bush administration before the attack on Iraq, the civilian casualties during the attack on Iraq, the American troop casualties during and after the attack on Iraq, the missing weapons of mass destruction, the missing Osama bin Laden, the war in Afghanistan that is far from over, the outing of a CIA agent by the Bush administration in an act of political revenge, and about two hundred other explosive stories did not get the attention that Michael Jackson is getting now."

Read the wonderful flic from truthout.

Crash Internet

"A team of UC Berkeley and University of Southern California professors has received a $5.46 million grant to build one of the most realistic models of the Internet ever created -- and then wreck it with debilitating hacker attacks...

the team is trying to answer questions with major national security implications: What would really happen if the Internet were hit with an attack bigger than the Nimda or Slammer worms? Could we fight it with the technology we have today? Or would everything connected to the Internet, from private e-mail boxes to automatic teller networks to power plants, topple like a house of cards? ...

The new test network, called the Cyber Defense Technology Experimental Research Network, or DETER, will contain lots of routers and switches imitating the complexity of the real Net. It won't be nearly as big as the real Internet -- the goal is to eventually hook up 1,000 PCs -- but the researchers hope it will be comparable in behavior. ."

Blogging a story

Is this true or is it a fake? The blogging technology have given this question a brand new justification. There is blogs where the stories seem too fantastic to be true and a lot of them where the author is rather enstranged of the effect his or hers imaginary writing have been taken.

In Wired News they try to find out some ways of it: Catch Me If You Can and some blogs is proven to just be false: on simple and true stories through a detectivework of other bloggers:
Nelson's Weblog.

The possibility to use the blog-tool to write fiction without telling it is of course a thing writers would appreciate since you in this way really get proof if you are able to write that well that people believe the fiction is the truth.

Let's make the dead come alive

"Sure you can use the ROM's," said Woz in an e-mail that Briel forwarded to Wired News. "I'm sure that Apple would deny this request, even though what you are speaking of is very noble and cannot hurt Apple in any way."

Briel is trying to make the old Apple motherboard brand new but of course the good old closed patentidea from Apple do put him down. And of course; Jobs should know how easy it is to loose good ideas - according to the "official" myth he did steal the whole idea of the graphical user interface from Xerox Park in the dawn of the computer age.

But even though one can feel that it is a good story, there might be much more boring background as recognized by the works of Making the Macintosh Project at Stanford and the stories that Jef Raskin is telling.

Onewheeler

Who need a Segway when Bombardier is making such a hit as this Embrio-concept? For the moment it's just a prototype but using the same gyroscope-technology as the Segway Human Transporter do but is more of a moto-bike than the reversed skateboard the Segway is.

"The Embrio is powered by a hydrogen fuel cell, a technology that creates power by mixing hydrogen and oxygen, ideally resulting in water as the only exhaust. The Embrio also borrows several other advanced technologies from cars, like infrared night vision and an active suspension, which can vary its damping rates based on road conditions. To move the Embrio, you use an accelerator trigger on the left handlebar and a brake trigger on the right.
The vehicle is made of lightweight materials, like aluminum, magnesium and nylon. It weighs only 360 pounds. The vehicle is also kept longitudinally stable by a smaller wheel that operates like an airplane's landing gear. It touches the ground when the vehicle is stopped or just starting. Once the Embrio is in motion, the landing gear will retract when the vehicle reaches about 12 mph. During braking, the gear redeploys when the vehicle slows to 12 mph."

Department of Comp.Science

Have you ever wondered about what's the "Scroll Lock" key on my computer for?

"The main intent of the Scroll Lock key was to allow scrolling of screen text up, down and presumably sideways using the arrow keys in the days before large displays and graphical scroll bars. You can see where this might have been handy in the DOS era, when screen output typically was limited to 80 characters wide by 25 rows deep. For some types of programs, spreadsheets being the obvious example, it's still handy now. In Microsoft Excel, Scroll Lock allows you to scroll a spreadsheet with the arrow keys without moving the active cell pointer from the currently highlighted cell. In Quattro Pro, another spreadsheet program, Scroll Lock works in a similar manner, although in contrast to Excel it's not possible to scroll the active cell pointer completely off the screen."

JenniCam goes dark

After seven years she is pulling the plug from her website: Jenni Ringley who the netizens have been able to follow in her everyday life. CNET News is telling the sad story: "Ringley, a self-described former computer geek who works at a non-profit social service agency near Sacramento, Calif., says in her mission statement that she wanted to create a 'window into a virtual human zoo. ' "

There's no explanation on her site but it might be because of Paypals redlisting of her account since she is showing her tits and that's against Paypals "rules". Americans...

Barbie with burka

No way that girls in Arab-countries should not be able to play with Barbies but of course their Barbies can't show their hair. So Razanne is here.

A muslim version of Barbie: "the doll not only fills a marketing gap but also offers Muslim girls someone they can relate to" as Noorart Inc., the company who made the doll explains. It fills a market void where muslim parents don't want their girls to play with the curly, blonde and curved original-Barbie. But Razanne have aspirations of being a modern Muslim woman and the target groups seem to be the Muslimcommunity in Britain and USA.

Mattel - the Barbiecompany, is selling a Morrocan Barbie called Leyla, and of course her accessoires is the one of belly dancing and concubine. And the company is rather silent about the competition from the Noorart Inc. and Razanne.

Don't eat this

As it didn't was enough that the wellknown Bush-turkeydinner in Iraq at last years Thanksgiving.

Now there been proven that the turkey El Presidente gave to the soldiers was fake. A turkey made of plastic for photo-ops. "[M]ilitary sources said a trophy turkey is a standard feature of holiday chow lines."

List the reality

Some lists:

All-Time Top 100 Best Singles

Supercars with top acceleration

Top 100 Women

The 100 greatest novels of all time

Top Charities

400 Richest in America

Letters from outer space

The NASA ISS Science Officer Ed Lu is writing kind of a diary when on his mission on the ISS. In the nowhere of the space, orbiting the earth.

"There really isn't an up or down anywhere else here, but there is a direction we think of as the floor and a direction we think of as the ceiling in each module. Most of the labeling on panels and equipment is written so that it is right side up assuming this orientation, and also most of the lights are on the "ceiling" so they cast light "downwards." To add to the effect, there is a simulator back on Earth we spent a lot of time in where we got used to one direction as the floor and the opposite direction as the ceiling. So up here, when Yuri and I say downwards or upwards, we mean the equivalent directions as in the training module on Earth."

But hopefully he won't have to buy the spacestamps.

Do they pick them from the trees?

The question How LEGO is made might not be as hard as one could think even for a four-year old. But this is a really good way to show a sometimes difficult production with a mix of animations and film.