Category — General

Student Charged in DirecTV Theft. A University of Chicago student was charged with stealing secrets from DirectTV. The student is accused of taking documents, which described the technology to control access to DirecTV, and releasing them. By Jennifer 8. Lee. [New York Times: Technology]

i can say ethics across the curriculum, can you?

Memories caught on the brink of extinction. Online: An internet archive is rekindling family life in the shtetl, the eastern European Jewish villages razed in the Holocaust. [Guardian Unlimited]
as an advocate of using information technology to preserve culture, i think this is great

Slovakian Roma forced to ghettos. Defying EU pressure, Slovakia is systematically segregating its Romany minority into ghettos, and barring their entrance into cities. [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories]

here we go again… 1000 years and this still doesn't work…

Democrats face crunch time for '04. As Sen. John Edwards joins the presidential fray, a scurry for the nomination begins. [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories]

if they had any ground left, we probably wouldn't be hitting up the pretty boys to run… get me nader.

Star Wars Origami. Star Wars Origami.
It's exactly what it sounds like: square pieces of paper folded in elaborate ways to look like characters and vehicles from the Star Wars epics. Fandom at its quirkiest. [MetaFilter]

i wanted to post this when it wa on boing boing, but the moment lapsed

And they probably didn't sweat the porn, either.

I just aced this geography test (and so will you). Unsurprisingly, most young American Adults couln't find India, and 29% couldn't find the Pacific Ocean.

The significant finding:

Americans who reported that they accessed the Internet within the last 30 days scored 65 percent higher than those who did not.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

another example of why cetain kinds of tests fail….

It isn't who you are, it's how you blog.

At BoingBoing, The Reverse Cowgirl is trolling and polling for various breeds of bloggers for a Thing that Rhizome is putting on Feb 1 in L.A. I'll be there, by the way.

By the way, the headline harks back to what may be best L.A. t-shirt I've ever seen. On the front was a simple black drawing of a pair of shades and the corner of a face. The text said “It isn't who you are, it's how you look. After all, who cares who you are?” They were around in the late 80s and I haven't seen one in years. But I've never stopped regretting not buying one.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

same society different decade

on competing with free. So Peter Wayner reports that after he put his book, Free for All, under a Creative Commons license, the price for used books at Amazon has gone up by 40%. RIAA (or better, artists the RIAA is supposed to represent): Take note. [Lessig Blog]

noted…

Derivative Works And Open Source [Slashdot]

this could be a good topic to explore more in depth….

Mafia diplomacy
Apparently there's this multiplayer game called Mafia that has long been popular in SF fandom and that is now crossing over into New York literary circles, thanks at least in part to Jonathan Lethem. (The New York Observer's much-blogged report is here.) When I read about this game — which involves no paper or board but chiefly is a matter of players choosing whether to cooperate with or deceive one another — all I get is flashbacks to Diplomacy.

Diplomacy was (is?) a seven-player board game set on the eve of the First World War; in theory it was a historical strategy game but in practice it was mostly about negotiation, psychology, and stabbing fellow players in the back. Many of us geeky teenagers spent inordinate amounts of time in the 1970s playing this game both FTF and in a by-mail format, which developed its own 'zine-based subculture. Mafia does away with the board and the pieces and pretty much zeroes in on the psychology, which makes a lot of sense and no doubt accounts for its popularity. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

I think it is important to realize that games like this are actually social training of a sort that can be very hard to find elsewhere. I think more people should play games