Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 670

Lawsuits against Yelp

*I see that if you tag locales with user-generated content that somebody dislikes, then somebody — hmmm — will jump onto the blog comments page of the Murdoch-owned WALL STREET JOURNAL and make cruel remarks about your business.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/03/17/small-businesses-join-lawsuit-against-yelp/

*I guess maybe you could find the commenter's house and flame it with some Yelp remarks… would that help any, or is that an escalation? Such a young industry, real-world tagging, and...

Art of the Steal

*Career criminals don't go to Career Criminal University, so they have to kinda make up their own hardware and their own business opportunities.

*So, imagine being a very nimble, geeky and seriously asocial Canadian kid…

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/03/ff_masterthief_blanchard/all/1

(…)

Blanchard had first met the Boss a few months earlier in London at an electronics store. He could tell they were kindred spirits by a glance at the Boss' purchases: eight DVR recorders. Blanchard knew you...

Olia Lialina: Vernacular Web

*As the early web dies crushed beneath a stampede of broadband social media…

http://contemporary-home-computing.org/vernacular-web-2/

(…)

"So, here's the question: how does the Web look now, when it's no longer seen as the technology of the future, when it's intertwined with our daily lives and filled by people who are not excited by the mere fact of its existence?

"At a first glance, this question looks like a purely aesthetic one. One might think it's almost unimportant. But in fact, nothing...

The Great Beyond

*Here at BEYOND THE BEYOND, we didn't realize that Nature magazine's blog was called "The Great Beyond." Mostly because Nature's been big on firewalls since the Internet year zero.

*Now, however, the Nature news blog seems to be wide open. So we will be hanging out.

http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/

http://twitter.com/NatureNews

Israeli security: passport cloners in uniform

*Too bad the Guardian didn't ask, "who will guard the guardians?" Because

after this every uniformed Tom Dick and Harry inspecting luggage is gonna be keen to

clone passports.

*That could be a nice little earner, cloning passports. Especially from countries

whose passports are worth carrying.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/24/israel-ben-gurion-cloned-passports-soca

"Passing through Israel's Ben Gurion airport, a few miles east of Tel Aviv, is a unique experience no first-time...

The conclave of Internet revisionists

*I told you we'd be hearing more about this David Shields guy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/books/21mash.html

(…)

Mr. Shields's pasted-together book and defense of appropriation underscore the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism that have become prominent in a world in which the Internet makes copying and recycling as simple as pressing a couple of buttons. In fact, the dynamics of the Web, as the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier observes in...

Smith County, Texas

*One can't buy alcohol in this locale, but by golly, they've got free public wifi,

which almost reconciles one to the exigencies of historic East Texas.

Smith County Public Wireless Internet Access

Smith County is pleased to offer free wireless Internet access within the Courthouse and in the Commissioner's Court area of the Smith County Annex Building. Wireless internet access may not be used during court sessions unless expressly granted prior to a court session or by the presiding judge...

Augmented Reality: sketching games

http://gamesalfresco.com/2010/03/21/pencil-and-paper-are-not-dead-augmented-reality-sketching-games-at-vr-2010/

*AR demos look slicker these days and even feature some nifty soundtracks.

Sergio Cezar is an artist who builds model cardboard favelas

http://faiscas.posterous.com/sergio-cezar

http://www.vrio.com.br/mais_rio/15/sergio-cesar-1/

http://sergiocezar.blogspot.com/2009/05/conheca-sergio-cezar-o-arquiteto-do.html

via @brunoboutot

Yves Behar and his open-source people's car

http://changeobserver.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=13088

"A highlight of last month's Greener Gadgets conference in New York was a cute, emerald-colored product designed by Yves Béhar of FuseProject that is aimed for citizens of the developing world who might never have dreamed of possessing such an object.

"Not a computer this time, but a car.

"Inspired by what he learned as the industrial designer on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, Béhar presented a similarly conceived...