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Tuesday, December 06, 2005 |
Child-Repellent Sounds.
I've already written about merchants using classical music to discourage loitering. Young people don't like the music, so they don't stick around.
Here's a new twist: high-frequency noise (link behind a paywall) that children and teenagers can hear but adults can't:
The results were almost instantaneous. It was as if someone had used anti-teenager spray around the entrance, the way you might spray your sofas to keep pets off. Where disaffected youths used to congregate, now there is no one.
At first, members of the usual crowd tried to gather as normal, repeatedly going inside the store with their fingers in their ears and "begging me to turn it off," Gough said. But he held firm and neatly avoided possible aggressive confrontations: "I told them it was to keep birds away because of the bird flu epidemic."
At least he didn't claim it was an anti-terrorism security measure. [Schneier on Security]
9:32:19 PM 
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Let Your PC Do the Investing. Day trader used to mean 'human with eyes glued to computer.' But people are becoming tangential to the process, and even small-scale investors rely on their computers to select, time and execute trades. By Joanna Glasner. [Wired News]
7:31:24 AM
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Document Security Redux.
Brian Krebs' Security Fix blog at the Washington Post discusses document security. Anyone who has been a consultant has likely been a victim of information leakage associated with metadata. Most of the time, this is harmless, though possibly embarrassing. Other times, as with some of the incidents Krebs describes, it is worse. I wrote about 29 specific content attributes back in May. Bitform, the company that provided the list, recently released a study of Fortune 100 websites with over 8,000 Microsoft Office files on them. Here are the results: Target Element Occurrence Rate Files Affected Audio and Video Paths 0.4%...
[Spire Security Viewpoint]
7:23:51 AM
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Copyright Mythbusters: Believe It or Not, Fair Use Exists (Donna Wentworth).
One of the more frustrating things about debating copyright issues is that copyright mythology sounds a lot more like the truth than the truth. For instance, many people believe that copyright law gives the copyright holder absolute, immutable control over a work, lasting into perpetuity. The truth -- that copyright has built-in limits to protect free speech, scholarship, research, and innovation (the "progress of science and useful arts") -- sounds like a lie. Surely all of that stuff is just bleeding-heart liberal, mushy-minded nonsense?
Oh, well, actually -- no. Fair use exists, and for very good reasons.
Thankfully, as more and more of us confront copyright issues in our daily lives, the number of copyright mythbusters is also growing. The past few weeks have brought us the usual heaping helping of copyright disinformation. Here, four pieces by mythbusters working hard to set the record straight:
Tim Lee, picking part a policy brief shoddy propaganda document claiming that legislation to protect fair use will destroy copyright law as we know it: "[We] have this gem: 'Providing an exemption for any device that has non-infringement purposes effectively destroys all protections of copyrighted material.' I bet Justices Stevens and O’Connor will be surprised to learn that they abolished copyright law when they established precisely that standard in 1984. Who knew that America had no effective copyright protections until Congress enacted them in 1998?" (Here, Joe Gratz on the same "brief.")
Joseph Lorenzo Hall, responding to an NPR report on the Google Book Search debate: "It's painful to listen to as the discussion involves two commentators who don't know anything about copyright law and one representative from a university press who misrepresents copyright law ('You've always had to ask permission in traditional copyright law'... hello, fair use, anyone?!?!)."
Derek Slater, likewise rebutting the argument that any copying without permission is piracy: "Goldenberg is thus dead wrong when he says that Google Print necessarily takes control away from authors and 'compromises the spirit...of copyright.' If Google’s use is fair, the authors have no such control to begin with, and fair use is entirely consonant with copyright’s purpose. Google’s use is piracy only in the sense that fair use quoting is piracy."
Peter Suber, deconstructing a Google Book Search critic's mistaken argument that the project will harm small publishers because Google is republishing books under copyright (it isnt): "But perhaps P&C is really thinking about its public-domain books, such as the complete works of Daniel Defoe. It's possible that Google scanning of these books, coupled with its policy to provide free online full-text for reading, will undermine library sales and hurt P&C's business. If it wants protection from this threat, then we have to ask which is worse, Google's decision to take advantage of its right to use public-domain literature or a publisher's attempt to re-enclose the commons and extend copyright-like control over public-domain literature?"
Bravo, guys.
I remain in the midst of blog-trumping life transitions, so I can't linger, but here are a few better-late-than-never links that address fair use:
[Copyfight]
7:23:13 AM
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Alaska to dude: no nuclear particle accelerators in your house!.
Xeni Jardin: Snip from a report I filed for Wired News:
 Albert Swank Jr., a 55-year-old civil engineer in Anchorage, Alaska, is a man with a mission. He wants to install a nuclear particle accelerator in his home. But when neighbors learned of plans to place the 20-ton device inside the house where Swank operates his engineering firm, their response was swift: Not in my backyard.
Local lawmakers rushed to introduce emergency legislation banning the use of cyclotrons in home businesses. State health officials took similar steps, and have suspended Swank's permit to operate cyclotrons on his property.
"Some of the neighbors who are upset about the cyclotron have started calling it SHAFT -- Swank's high-energy accelerator for tomography," attorney Alan Tesche said. "Part of what's got everyone so upset is we're not sure when it's going to arrive on the barge. We know Anchorage is gonna get the SHAFT, but we just don't know when." Tesche is also the local assemblyman who represents the area where Swank and his cyclotron would reside.
Johns Hopkins University agreed to donate the used cyclotron, which is roughly six feet tall by eight feet wide, to Swank's business, Langdon Engineering and Management. The devices are relatively scarce in Alaska, and are used to produce radioactive substances that can be injected into patients undergoing PET scans.
Link.
Image: When Mr. Swank was 17, he built this cyclotron at his home -- in the same living room where he wants to install the larger, 20-ton model from Johns Hopkins (actually, it weighs more like 40 tons when you include all the shielding and stuff).
[Boing Boing]
7:22:36 AM
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