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Is the ghost of Sen. Joe McCarthy alive and well in Hollywood? That is certainly on the minds of many outspoken liberals in Tinsel-town these days. The latest conspiracy theory focuses on the just-announced axing by ABC of very vocal anti-Iraq war activist Janeane Garofalo's new sitcom, ''Slice o' Life.''

A source close to Garofalo tells this column the actress and comedian was furious by the last-minute change and believes it's yet another example ''of a network bowing to the perceived power of the Bush administration. ... Janeane is convinced her politics and all the hate mail the right-wing lobby stirred up during the war is what is behind all this.''

I got an invitation to go to Apple's office for a presentation/meeting today (June 5, 2003) about how to get independent artists into the iTunes Music Store. There were about 150 people there, representatives from the best independent record labels and music services, in this invitation-only conference room. Steve Jobs came out and started a two and a half hour presentation/seminar/Q&A about iTunes and the benefits of independent labels making their music available there. I type fast and had my laptop, so I wrote down all the major points of their presentation as they went.

While the technology sounds impressive (they've run a form of TCP at speeds hitherto unknown), the claims are highly misleading -- "6,000 times faster" and "8.6 gigabits per second" references -- For one, they chained 10 Fast TCP systems together to obtain those speeds, but more importantly there is no protocol on earth that can overcome the basic speed your cable or DSL modem is locked to run at. Adding a new form of TCP on both client and server ends will not magically make more bandwidth appear, although it may behave more gracefully where there are periods of slight packet loss, and not slow down as much as normal TCP, and be more capable than TCP of extremely high speeds given extremely fast hardware and fiber optics.

The scientists hope to strike a deal with Microsoft and Disney for video on demand services, and the press reports claiming that the technology allows the download of whole movies in just five seconds is sure to help, even if the claim begs the question of how all our broadband connections are somehow going to become super fast, for the same price, or higher prices.

Scientists in California are working on a fast new Internet connection system that could enable an entire movie to be downloaded in a matter of seconds.

The Fast TCP system, designed by a team of researchers at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, runs on the same Internet infrastructure currently used but is designed to be much quicker.

Internet traffic is controlled by a system called Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) which was developed in the 1970s and breaks down files into small packets of about 1500 bytes.

"The sending computer transmits a pack, waits for a signal from the recipient that acknowledges its safe arrival, and then sends the next packet," New Scientist magazine said on Wednesday.

But if there is no reply, the packet is sent again and again at successively slower speeds until it arrives. So minor problems can make connections sluggish.

"The difference (in Fast TCP) is in the software and hardware on the sending computer, which continually measures the time it takes for sent packets to arrive and how long acknowledgements take to come back," the magazine added.

The Fast TCP reveals the delays and predict the highest data rate the connection can support without losing data.

When the researchers tested 10 Fast TCP systems together it boosted the speed to more than 6,000 times the capacity of the ordinary broadband links.

"Caltech is already in talks with Microsoft and Disney about using it for video on demand," the magazine added.

A bit Ken Kesey and a bit Jim Jones, farmer and self-proclaimed "9/11 Bounty Hunter" John Jenkel is assembling a following of disaffected youth who ape his wild claims of government conspiracy.

Jenkel has been after Mayor Willie Brown and other Bay Area elected officials for at least several years. Now, he says a recent inheritance allows him to hire people to back up his campaign to impeach the president and expose Brown as shadow chief of the United States. He teaches them from a hand-assembled book some call "John's Bible."

Jenkel has pressured various local officials for years and now has a theory that Brown and Vice President Dick Cheney control the country with Bush acting as their puppet. | Via NWD

Release Date Note: (6/1/03) This movie has two main competitors on the 2004 slate: PDI's next CGI animated movie, Sharkslayer; and the other movie about a family of superheroes, Fantastic Four. What is curious, is that both of these movies have been scheduled for the same weekend in early November. So, what does Disney do...? They've announced a release date of November 5th themselves, apparently daring their two competitors to move to other release dates. How will Dreamworks and 20th Century Fox react? Personally, I think they should stand their ground and make Disney move... they both staked their claims to this weekend first.

See the trailer.

This album was triggered by a small soundbyte of speech left by Madonna as a decoy to frustrate users sharing her songs
via Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks on the internet. As a collective of artists we have no particular beef with or even interest
in Madonna herself. There are several reasons why we made this album:

1) To protest against chilling laws such as the DMCA which erode our human rights to freedom of speech.
2) To illustrate how a sample of music can be transformed and used in a beautiful and creative way.
3) To have a corking good chuckle to ourselves.


WTF? - The Madonna Remix Project Album is available for download now from bLiP Records and in selected UK music stores by mid June.

Welcome new guest editor in charge of the space monkey droppings around here. Klint Finley is the editor of Technoccult and a contributor to Sensual Liberation Army, American Samizdat and sTaRe. He lives in the pacific northwest and wants to be a comic book writer when he grows up. (at least that what HE says...)

Uncle Roy All Around You is a mobile game:

Uncle Roy All Around You sets online players alongside players on the streets of London.

Street Players search for Uncle Roy through the back streets, the tourist traps and the leafy boulevards of Westminster with a handheld computer.

Online Players cruise through a virtual model of the same area, searching for the Street Players and looking for leads that will help them find Uncle Roy.

Using web cams, audio and text messages players must work together.

They have 60 minutes and the clock is ticking...

See also: Alternate Reality Gaming - Supafly - 34N118W - Landscape as Interface, Landscape as Narrative - Headmap | Via Smart Mobs

"In the Western esoteric practices there is an apparent knowledge gap regarding the role of esoteric practices and their effects on the subtle, and not so subtle, bodies of practitioners. In the East, all practices, whether designated as such or not, are designed to awaken the semi-dormant energy resident in all creation, and ?living beings? in particular. This energy is known as ?Kundalini?, ?The Serpent Fire?, and the ?Dragon? depending on tradition. Extreme care has been taken, despite contradictions between systems, to chart the effects of exercises on this latent energy, and how it ?flows? through the physical, emotional, and psychic body, at what stages, and in relation to which exercises. Such a detailed analysis is lacking in modern Western estotericism."

| Via Purse Lip Square Jaw

Pagan Moss, Dr. Menlo, and I saw Tribe 13's current gallery, featuring work by Alex Grey, Paul Laffoley, and Kris Kuksi. The exhibit's been extended to the end of June, so anyone in the Seattle area should check it out.

And in case there was ever any doubt: Pagan and Doc are just as cool in real life as they seem on their web sites.

And speaking of the NYT fashion section, here's a little gem:

There will doubtless be some Barbie scholars on hand in Orlando, since gender study types have always found in the doll with the pert nose and imposing dimensions a mother lode for inquiry into sexuality. That Ken has proved less attractive to academics is one of the many ways Barbie helps even the score on sexual inequality.

Brought forth from one of Barbie's ribs, Ken is Barbie's Eve. Whether impersonating an astronaut, a football player or a doctor, he remains unlike most real-world guys in another salient way. In the potent and eternally glamorous universe of Barbie, it cannot be assumed that Fashion Insider Ken will ever be No. 1. Press pass and all, he is Barbie's Plus-One. It is, and always will be, she who has the juice, the good wardrobe, the all-access pass. Fashion Insider Ken is fated to be a mere accessory, a hunky arm piece, a suit. Is there anyone who wouldn't see the justice in that?

I'm not usually one to bitch about fashion trends. I can usually stomach the most absurd of fads for however long they last. Hell, many of them end up growing on me. But this mesh hat craze has gone too far. It's been a couple weeks already since the New York Frickin' Times ran an article announcing the trend dead. Shouldn't "hipsters" move on to the next big thing by the time the mainstream press even notices a trend, much less announces it dead? Still, I see them everywhere I go. *sigh*

My hippie brother Mike Garvey has posted his collection of midwest graffiti photos.

Tony Soprano can keep Jersey (who wants it, anyways?) A new family is movin' in on unclaimed turf -- online.

An underground group known as the Sims Shadow Government has taken over the fantasy world that is "The Sims Online,'' meting out mob justice.

It's a violent twist for "The Sims,'' the dollhouse-inspired computer game that has long been portrayed as the antithesis to guns-'n-gore bestsellers like "Grand Theft Auto.'' The emergence of a seedy underbelly in the online game may reveal more about the dark fantasies of middle-aged suburbanites than anyone suspected.

In six months, the British interplanetary probe Beagle 2 will touch down on Mars and announce its arrival by playing nine digitized notes of a Blur song.

Beagle 2, riding aboard the spacecraft Mars Explorer and also carrying a painting by contemporary British artist Damien Hirst that it will use to calibrate its cameras, launched Monday from Kazakhstan. The probe is scheduled to parachute to Mars' surface on Christmas Day and begin its search for life. "The music will be played back from Mars to signal that the space ship has landed and all the systems have checked out," says Rowntree.

got tired of the rather low quality cable box that AT&T Broadband provides with their digital cable service. It's slow to change channels, ridden with ads, and the program guide is a joke. So, I figured it'd be fun to try and build a replacement. Yes, I could have just bought a TiVo, but I wanted to have more than just a PVR -- I want a webbrowser built in, a mail client, maybe some games. Basically, I want the mythical convergence box that's been talked about for a few years now.

So, in late April 2002, I started tinkering with stuff.

Some time ago I wrote an article in which I suggested that it would not be difficult for terrorists to build their own relatively sophisticated cruise missiles using off-the-shelf components and materials.
Not surprisingly, that piece has produced a significant amount of feedback from the tens of thousands of people who have read it so far.

Included in this feedback, I've received quite a number of emails from former and currently serving US military personnel who acknowledge that the threat is one they are very much aware of and for which there is little in the way of an effective defense available.

However, there have also been a number of people who claim I'm overstating the case and that it's not possible to build a real cruise missile without access to sophisticated gear, specialist tools and information not readily available outside the military.

So, in order to prove my case, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and build a cruise missile in my own garage, on a budget of just US$5,000.

When NASA launches its mission to Mars next week, lots of Silicon Valley folks will be watching.

That's because two valley companies have been working to boost the space agency's online capabilities before January, when two unmanned rovers land on the Red Planet. NASA wants to be prepared for a global online rush when the agency for the first time attempts to Webcast real-time streaming video from Mars, or any planet for that matter.

OK, near-real time. The signal will take at least 9 1/2 minutes to reach Earth, more than 100 million miles away.

The first rover's launch, to be Webcast on www.nasa.gov, is planned for Sunday.

Alexander Wolfe (Embedded-Watch.com): Microsoft granted US patent for "interactive entertainment" . If your company is thinking about delivering interactive video-on-demand cable-television programming or movies via satellite to consumers, maybe it'd better start thinking about paying royalties to Microsoft first. That's because Microsoft has just been granted exclusive United States patent rights to a "networked interactive entertainment system" which "allows viewers to create their own customized lists of preferred video content programs, such as movies, games, [and] TV shows."
If this hadn't appeared under Wolfe's byline I'd dismiss it as a joke. But sure enough, there's the claim in black and white.

The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office is out of control. This is definitive proof. | Via Dan Gillmor

When federal investigators released a report last month about the plane crash that killed Sen. Paul Wellstone, some members of Congress hoped it would dispel talk that his plane was sabotaged.

It didn't.

In Internet chat groups, political Web sites and the published reports of several leftist academics, conspiracy theories about Wellstone's death last October maintain a life of their own, particularly in northern Minnesota.

In one nasty exchange, a retired prosecutor from Duluth has threatened to take legal action against a University of Minnesota-Duluth philosophy professor who espouses the belief that the Bush White House had a hand in Wellstone's demise.

The former prosecutor, Thomas Bieter, alleges that the professor, Kennedy-assassination theorist James Fetzer, has committed "criminal defamation" by publishing articles suggesting a government coverup of the crash investigation.

A type of internet attack that involves bamboozling a computer with specially crafted packets of data has been developed by a pair of US researchers.

Dan Wallach and Scott Crosby at Rice University, in Houston, US, say the attack can knock a web-connected computer offline with relative ease.

Many programs perform small calculations - called hash functions - on substantial amounts of data to make it easier to sort through. Tables of hashed information can then be referred to, to check that information has not been corrupted or lost en route.

New Witch is a magazine for your young, hip new breed of witches. That explains the subtitle, which is "not your mother's broomstick."

Your young, hip witch has needs that her mother didn't have. For instance, she needs to know what to do with her computer when she's busy casting spells. And New Witch provides that information, in capital letters when necessary.

ARTICLE BODY | Via VIA NAME

THE CARD: The serendipitous Ferris Bueller, loved by sportos, motorheads, geeks and sluts alike, is the perfect Fool.

MEANING: The Fool asks you to have total faith in the belief that life is good Strike out on a new path, recapture your innocence, follow your bliss, be spontaneous. Bring pleasant, happy-go-lucky meanings to the verbs “lie”, “coerce”, and “steal”, and find ways to make everyone love you for executing these little miracles. The Fool is all about taking those crazy chances without the slightest fear of repercussion. Don’t sit around worrying about the “what if’s”; the “what if’s” are the true killers. Get out there! No matter what you do, someone or something will save your butt!

The question isn’t ‘What are we going to do?’ The question is, ‘What aren’t we going to do?’

Fun icons, desktop wallpaper, etc.

A young programmer whose software startup, Nullsoft, was gobbled up by America Online -- and then caused numerous headaches for its corporate parent -- plans to resign after his latest piece of rebel code was pulled from the Internet.

Justin Frankel, 24, announced his intentions late Monday, less than a week after a file-sharing program called Waste was posted and then pulled from the Nullsoft Web site.

"The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I have,'' he said in his Web log. "This is unacceptable to me as an individual, therefore I must leav (sic). I don't know when it will be, but I'm not going to last much longer.''

Attempts to reach Frankel by telephone were not successful. An AOL spokeswoman declined to comment.

AOL paid $86 million for Nullsoft in 1999. At the time, the San Francisco company was best known for creating a popular music player called Winamp.

Despite the new corporate ownership, Nullsoft's team of programmers managed to maintain a freestyle hacker culture.

In March 2000, Nullsoft briefly posted a decentralized file-sharing program called Gnutella before it was axed by AOL. But the genie had been set free, and other developers refined the code to create post-Napster file-sharing programs.

Nullsoft's latest creation was a file-sharing program that allowed users to set up secure networks of no more than 50 people.

Within hours of its posting, Waste was deleted. In its place was a notice that said the program had been posted without Nullsoft's permission.

"If you downloaded or otherwise obtained a copy of the software, you acquired no lawful rights to the software and must destroy any and all copies of the software, including by deleting it from your computer,'' the statement said. "Any license that you may believe you acquired with the software is void, revoked and terminated.''

Frankel, who is called "Our Benevolent Dictator'' on the Nullsoft site, founded the company in 1998 after dropping out of the University of Utah.

Credit card signatures are a useless mechanism designed to make you feel safe, like airport security checks. Here's proof: in some places (including, ironically, the airport), they don't even make you sign anymore, as shown on the receipt at right. When my wife's credit cards were stolen a few weeks ago, a story I wrote about here, it took about 20 minutes to resolve, and the credit card companies reimbursed us for everything. Kids, if you're going to steal, then steal credit cards, because the only people who get hurt are the credit card companies ... and they probably deserve it anyway.

So my question was, how crazy would I have to make my signature before someone would actually notice?

The soapbox of the digital age draws a crowd of academics
Is this a revolution in academic discourse, or is it CB radio?
In one form or another, that question inevitably arises in conversations with scholars who have taken up the habit of writing Web logs, or "blogs." Some have started blogging in order to muse aloud about their research. Others want to polish their chops at opinion-writing for nonacademic audiences. Still others have more urgent and personal reasons. ("The black dogs of depression are snarling at my feet," reads the first entry of one scholar's blog.)

My biology has been designated Mathew Gale Whitney. I am a free lance inventor, hemp activist, Subgenius, ontological anarchist, neo Gnostic pothead, cyberpunk, technohippie, industrogoth, pseudo redneck, subcultural mutt, tree hugger, econazi, fringe scientist, unified field theorist, futurist, high school/college dropout, hydroceramic sanitation specialist, psychonaut, Quartzhead, socioeconomic revisionist, psychedelic artist/poet, and almost an author....oh yeah, I’m The Antichrist.

The Blogging phenomenon, which recently drew much attention because of the purchase of Blogger by Google, will become the next big computer fad if it hasn't already. And I don't mean fad in a bad way. I don't want to argue with various bloggers about the fact that blogging has been going on for years already. That's beside the point, as is clear if we compare blogging to two similar über-fads—the CD-ROM business and the dot-com phenomenon. Both had been going on for years before they were suddenly catapulted into the mainstream in a big way. Blogging is following this exact path. (If you haven't seen my previous commentaries on blogging, please read these three columns: "The Blog Phenomenon", "Cult of the Cluetrain Manifesto", and "Deconstructing the Blog".

Let me stop here for a moment and make some specific predictions. Within the next year, both David Letterman and Jay Leno will make jokes about blogs and even discuss them. "Nightline" will do an entire show on blogging. San Jose journalist and blog promoter Dan Gillmor will be a guest for the episode. This is the point where
blogging will become mainstream. Shortly thereafter, we will see blogging millionaires, as venture capitalists figure out ways to make money from the trend.

Although I'm seen as some sort of enemy of blogdom, I'm actually more of a critic—mostly of the more inane diary blogs. The blogs, née Web logs, that are oriented toward pre-research, such as Wi-Fi Networking News or even the intensely fun sites like boingboing have my deepest respect. But the vanity sites such as Anti-Bloggies are just asking for ridicule. Who can resist? This is especially true now that the cat fanciers and ersatz poets have come on strong in the blog world.

Anyway, there are intriguing commonalities between the latest of the super-fads that came and went (CD-ROMs, and dot-coms) and the blog scene. The parallels are interesting and obvious. Let's go over them one by one. | *snicker, snort, giggle*

"Pompeian frescoes show startling evidence of what may have been a primitive form of virtual reality, according to British researchers who have uncovered elaborate three-dimensional wall paintings depicting theater scenes.

Frozen in time by the eruption that nearly 2,000 years ago covered Pompeii and the nearby towns of Herculaneum and Stabiae with nine to 20 feet of hot ash and pumice, the lavish Roman villas feature extravagant frescos filled with tricks of perspective to impress guests."

Golem creation is generally reserved for those learned wise men, like Rabbis or Zaddiks, who have dedicated their life to God and the Torah. Those Rabbis who have been attributed with golem creation are considered to be very holy and spiritual. If you can't successfully create the golem, either you have made a slight mistake in pronounciation or you have not achieved the proper state of holiness. | Via Orlin Grabbe

DVR SERVICES TRACK WHICH COMMERCIALS ARE WATCHED, SKIPPED
TiVo, the San Jose company known for re-inventing television viewing through digital video recording, will begin selling advertisers data it collects on the viewing habits of its subscribers.

Through a back-end technology of TiVo's DVR service, TiVo executives can see which shows its users are watching live or recording and track when commercials are being watched, re-wound and watched again or zipped past through the DVR's fast-forward feature.

...but it's no simple matter.

Good news for time travellers - it just got cheaper. The amount material needed to build a window through time is infinitesimally small, new research shows.

To travel through time, all you need to do is open a wormhole in space-time and step through it. And to do that you need a magic ingredient called 'exotic matter', which is repelled rather than attracted by gravity.

The hitch is that no one has the remotest idea how to make exotic matter. But don't despair, say Matt Visser, of the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and his colleagues. They have shown that when we do figure out how to make the stuff, we won't need very much of it.

In another example of how amateurs can harness affordable computer technology to create movie parodies amazingly similar to the originals (but with humorous twists), I give you "Matrix XP."

It's not quite as funny as "Troops," but the punchline is priceless. Even Bill Gates will laugh, I'm sure.

Federal regulators relaxed decades-old rules restricting media ownership Monday, permitting companies to buy more television stations and own a newspaper and a broadcast outlet in the same city.

The Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 - along party lines - to adopt a series of changes favored by media companies. | Say goodnight Gracie.

Raffi Krikorian is an unapologetic TiVo fanatic.

The MIT graduate student and blogger regularly takes apart his two beloved TiVo digital video recorders to soup them up and writes software code that makes the devices do party tricks, like changing the titles of TV shows or downloading weather maps off the Internet.

Why wait? Why wonder if they're ever going to come for you? Why even invest the time, trouble, and expense involved in an actual abduction when the highly trained and professional staff at Alien Abductions Incorporated can provide you with personalized, realistic memories of the alien abduction that you have been waiting for your entire life?

Once your Abduction Experience has been implanted, we offer a wide range of add-on options, from the 24/7 Surveillance Special (to give you that added edge of real-life paranoia) to our exclusive Evidence Kit, which contains items specially selected to heighten your Experience. We even offer a low cost course of deprogramming, medication, and therapy that is available to any of our customers who may choose to discontinue their Experience. | Via Fox