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First Look: Intrepid Ibex Alpha Points to Ubuntu's Mobile Future

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Webmonkey

The newest alpha release of Ubuntu Linux -- codename Intrepid Ibex -- shows enhancements aimed at improving performance on low-power devices like mobiles and mini-notebooks. In Webmonkey.

Rating the Games-on-Demand Services

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 6:06pm EDT by Game|Life

Xbox Live Arcade vs. WiiWare vs. PlayStation Store -- it's a three-way smackdown for best digital delivery system.

Telecom Amnesty Foes Lobby Obama Using Obama Tech

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 5:52pm EDT by Threat Level

Left-leaning opponents of amnesty for telecoms sued for helping the government warrantlessly spy on Americans are turning to Senator Barack Obama's own Web 2.0 tools to lobby him to oppose a pending bill. They wonder if the new participatory politics he's relied on to secure the Democratic nomination can sway him back to his original opposition to the spying bill, or if old-style politics will rule the day.

Gene Editing Could Make Anyone Immune to AIDS

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 5:16pm EDT by Wired Science

A new experimental technique strips a key gene out of T-cells in mice, blocking their ability to produce a protein that HIV uses to enter and take over the T-cells. The result: cells that are nearly impenetrable to the virus.

What's Inside a Camera? Saw It In Half and See

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 4:45pm EDT by Gadget Lab

Ever wondered what's inside your camera? An exhibit at the German Technology Museum in Berlin shows a variety of cameras and lenses, all sliced neatly down the middle, so you can see their inner workings, in this photo gallery in Gadget Lab.

How to Get a Copy of Windows XP Even Though it's 'Dead'

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 4:10pm EDT by How-To Wiki

Monday, June 30 marks the final day you can buy a copy of Microsoft Windows XP from major retail outlets, resellers and manufacturers. But thanks to some loopholes in its retirement plan, you can still get your hands on a copy of XP and avoid upgrading to Vista a little longer. In Wired.com's How-To Wiki.

RIAA 'Making Available' Argument: File Sharers 'Freeload'

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 4:00pm EDT by Threat Level

The Recording Industry Association of America told the federal judge in the Jammie Thomas case Monday that file sharers "freeload" on copyrights.

Rhapsody Moves Music Sales to Online MP3 Format

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 11:05am EDT by Listening Post

The Rhapsody music service abandons DRM on single song downloads and will now sell all of its music in the MP3 format using the web. Its new strategy also includes letting millions of Facebook, iLike, MTV and Yahoo users preview 25 songs each month with the option to buy.

If You Want Windows XP, Better Buy it Today

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 10:50am EDT by Associated Press

Microsoft, determined to push its Vista operating system over the objections of significant numbers of PC users, officially pulls the plug on its popular XP OS.

Here's the Lowdown on PS3's Big Firmware Update

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 10:20am EDT by Game|Life

Gamers talk and Sony listens: PlayStation 3 will now include support for custom soundtracks, Trophies and, most importantly, the ability to open system menus while running a game.

Preview: 'Too Human' Is Over in 10 Short Hours

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 8:00am EDT by Game|Life

With this complex action RPG about Norse gods, the makers of Eternal Darkness drive you to the edge of a cliff, then leave you hanging.

Wired.com Photo Contest: Food

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Wired.com Photo Department

This week we implore you to deliver a visual feast to our emaciated eyes. We seek gastronomical oddities and excesses, your grossest and most appetizing photos of food.

Use the Reddit widget below to submit your best food photo and vote for your favorite among the other submissions. The 10 highest-ranked photos will appear in a gallery on the Wired.com homepage. We know this is asking a lot, but please keep your restaurant ads to yourself. Instead, show us unexplored galaxies of grapes shot through with comets of roasting marshmallows. Take us down chewed-up trash shoots and climbing up slimy compost mountains. This is well-trodden territory, so you'll have to go the extra mile to catch eyes and votes.

The photo must be your own, and by submitting it you are giving us permission to use it on Wired.com and in Wired magazine. Please submit images that are relatively large, the ideal size being 800 to 1200 pixels or larger on the longest side. Please include a description of your photo, which may include exposure information, equipment used, etc.

We don't host the photos, so you'll have to upload it somewhere else and submit a link to it. If you're using Flickr, Picasa or another photo-sharing site to host your image, please provide a link to the image directly and not just to the photo page where it's displayed. If your photo doesn't show up, it's because the URL you have entered is incorrect. Check it and make sure it ends with the image file name (XXXXXX.jpg).

Please bookmark this page and check back periodically over the next two weeks to vote on new submissions!

Also, check out the winner's galleries from our previous contests: Holga, Red, Self-Portrait, Night, Macro, Transportation and Black and White.

Vote on food photos submitted by other readers.

Show entries that are: hot | new | top-rated. Submit your food photo.

Submit your food photo.

(No more than one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.)

June 30, 1908: A Very Close Encounter of the Second Kind

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Tony Long

1908: A fireball streaking across the sky and a massive explosion in the Siberian hinterlands marks the largest recorded collision ever between Earth and an object from space.

The Tunguska event flattened 80 million trees covering 830 square miles of sparsely populated (but not unpopulated) Russian outback in the region of the Tunguska River northwest of Lake Baikal.

Whatever it was -- an exploding fragment from a disintegrating meteorite seems the likeliest explanation -- scientists concluded there was no actual impact. The explosion appears to have been caused by an air burst similar to that of an artillery round detonating in midair, rather than on impact with the ground. In this case, the fragment, which is believed to have measured perhaps 100 feet across (although new research suggests it may have been even smaller), was probably traveling at around 21,000 miles per hour when it exploded anywhere from four to six miles above the Earth's surface.

Based on later assessments of the damage, the force of the blast was estimated to be between 10 and 15 megatons of TNT, roughly a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

The remoteness of the blast and the chaotic conditions prevailing inside Russia at the time prevented a thorough examination of the area until 1927, when an expedition from the Soviet Academy of Sciences finally arrived on the scene. Ironically, a lot of the data wouldn't be clearly understood until the Soviet Union began conducting its own Cold War experiments with atomic-blast impacts during the 1950s and '60s.

Soil samples revealed high levels of nickel and iridium, which are commonly found in meteorites, and the pattern of the forest devastation was consistent with a strong central detonation followed by shock waves emanating outward from ground zero.

Based on eyewitness accounts at Tunguska, a bluish fireball appeared in the sky at around 7:15 a.m. Ten minutes later, there was a flash, followed by a deafening explosion that was heard 300 miles away. The ground began shaking as in an earthquake, and a hot wind blew across the land, singeing crops and shattering windows.

While contemporary accounts refer to many people in the vicinity becoming covered with boils and dying as a result of the blast, that may be better explained by a smallpox epidemic that was occurring at the same time.

The fear, of course, is that the Earth is vulnerable to these meteor strikes. Flying objects enter the atmosphere every day, but the vast majority burn up before posing any real threat. Some meteorites do get through, however, and there have been events similar to -- if smaller than -- Tunguska recorded in the past century.

Here's something to consider: In its 1966 edition, the Guinness Book of Records concluded that, based on the Earth's rotation, had the Tunguska meteorite struck 4 hours, 47 minutes later, it would have obliterated St. Petersburg, then the capital of imperial Russia. Given the events that would shortly torment that nation -- and all of Europe -- for the better part of the 20th century, one is left to wonder how history might have changed in those circumstances.

Sounds like the premise for a pretty good alternative-history novel.

Source: Various

Games Without Frontiers: 'Space Invaders' Remake Takes Retro Gaming to the Limit

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Clive Thompson

This is slightly embarrassing to admit, but I'm addicted to ... Space Invaders.

Not the 1978-issue game, mind you. No, I'm talking about Space Invaders Extreme -- a re-visioning of the original game, released this week for the Nintendo DS and PSP by Square Enix (which now owns Taito, creator of the original thud-thud-thudding arcade classic). The game is enormously fun, gorgeously rendered and -- other than the horrid use of extreme in the title -- a loving tribute to the Precambrian title that birthed the entire videogame industry.

But here's the really interesting thing. I think the new Space Invaders is the first "reissue" of a videogame that is completely successful.

This really has never been done before. This subgenre of gaming -- the classic remake -- is littered with failure. Defender, Asteroids, Galaga: You name the old-school game, and it's been ruined by some designer's misbegotten attempt to improve it. It's like a form of cultural taxidermy: They take a wonderful old game, surgically drain it of all joy, then leave the mounted corpse on your mantelpiece to glare at you with its creepy, glassy eyes.

But why? Why is it so hard to update a cool old game?

Usually because the designers get too fancy. They assume modern gamers will only play a game if it's 3-D, so they go to painful lengths to transform 2-D titles into full, "immersive" reality. Among other things, this inevitably screws up the control system. The playfully unmanageable chaos of the old-school Robotron 2084, for example, becomes the grindingly unmanageable chaos of the 1996 remake on the Nintendo 64.

Worse, by moving into 3-D, these games abandon the chunky, low-fi graphics that made those 1980s titles so vibrant and Jungian in their symbolic heft. In the original Battlezone, the world was rendered in green, vectorized geometric shapes. It was a perfect evocation of the ghostly quality of "surgical" Cold War combat: We fight amongst Platonic solids!

Then Atari redesigned the game in 2006 for the PSP -- transforming it into the sort of brown/beige 3-D sludge so omnipresent in today's gaming, with sundry powerups that promise "complexity" but only serve to ruin the Zen-like simplicity of the original.

This is what's so refreshing about the new Space Invaders. It avoids all these pitfalls. First off, it remains resolutely 2-D. Indeed, the aliens look precisely as they did in 1978 -- chunky, pixelated blots of Otherness dread. They still crawl across the screen, slowly at first and then faster as you eliminate their ranks. And as before, you can only zip back and forth along the ground and fire upward.

Yet Square Enix has also managed to insert clever new bits of gameplay. Some of the aliens carry shields that deflect missiles back toward you; others, once wounded, stagger downward in kamikaze attacks. Every once in a while, one of those mystery ships at the top of the screen will pause, fizz and unleash a searing, laserlike blast for a few seconds. Meanwhile, you've got new powerups: multiple missiles, cluster shots and a penetrating laser.

The upshot is that the game remains neatly balanced. The aliens have their new tricks, but so do you. In fact, as a whole, the game advances with the same sort of inverse logarithmic difficulty: Around 10 minutes in, you'll feel precisely the same oh-shit-oh-shit loss of control you experienced in the original arcade game. It's quite eerie.

What I'm trying to argue, ultimately, is that Square Enix has captured the spirit of the original game. The funky weapons, the zigzaggy attacks -- sure, they're new. But they also seem like part of the Space Invaders canon. In essence, Space Invaders Extreme feels like a game that Taito's designers would have wanted to produce if they'd had just slightly more processing power.

Square Enix's designers have deftly channeled the limitations that Taito's designers faced. And this, really, is the secret to their success -- because it's your choice of limitations, not freedoms, that makes for superb game design.

So yeah: It's 1978 again. Except, somehow, slightly better. Welcome back!

- - -

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.

Gallery: Top 10 Wired.com Readers' Square Photos, Decided by You

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Wired.com Photo Department

If our readers are anything like us, they've probably had the word "square" hurled at them a few times. Fortunately, kick-ass photos are an excellent salve for this particular brand of nerd sting. These 10 readers exercised these demons in our square photo contest, and were voted the top contenders by their peers. Neil Bruder took home the gold with his photo "Office Life" at left. Mr. Bruder will be receiving a subscription to Wired magazine and a digital picture frame for his desk.

Since we had so many great photos that we thought should've received more votes, we've also compiled a Wired.com Editor's Choice Square Photo Gallery.

Our next biweekly photo contest is food. Now's your chance to give us a bib and cram your greasy photos down our gullet. Check out the contest page for more information.

Left:

Office life
Submitted by Neil Bruder

Photographer's comment:

"Late-afternoon shadows on an office building in Vancouver."

MAM
Submitted by Evan Stremke

Photographer's comment:

Main atrium (looking up) of the Milwaukee Art Museum."

Windows
Submitted by Andrew Brooks

Photographer's comment:

"Taken in Berlin, 2006."

Blocks
Submitted by Jamei Carl

Photographer's comment:

"Taken on the roof of Parliament House in Canberra, Australia."

It wasn't me!
Submitted by Shawn Isaac

Photographer's comment:

"I swear ;-)."

Waiting
Submitted by Eric Cabahug

Photographer's comment:

"Waiting is the hardest thing. Especially if you're in the dark."

OCAD
Submitted by Steven Kamenar

Photographer's comment:

"Ontario College of Art and Design."

Rox
Submitted by Christiaan d'Arnaud

Photographer's comment:

"Scheveningen, Netherlands"

Rolling Hill's Guest House
Submitted by Greg

Photographer's comment:

"Hyundai's guest house near their R&D facility in Korea."

fred & ginger
Submitted by Anonymous

Photographer's comment:

"praha."

Gallery: Top 10 Wired Square Photos, Decided by Us

Posted: June 30th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Wired.com Photo Department

Though Wired.com readers selected 10 excellent photos in our square photo contest, we here at the Photo Department like to fight for the underdog. Here are our 10 favorite submissions that we think deserved more attention.

Our next biweekly photo contest is food. Now's your chance to give us a bib and cram your greasy photos down our gullet. Check out the contest page for more information.

Left:

La quadrature du cercle
Submitted by Alain Tougas

Photographer's comment:

"Not everyone wants to be a square."

Butterflies
Submitted by Peter

Photographer's comment:

"Butterflies at the Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe in Seattle."

Old Barn Window
Submitted by John A. B.

Photographer's comment:

"The old barn window on Uncle Harold's farm."

Neighbourhood
Submitted by Ronan Farrell

Photographer's comment:

"Sighisoara, Romania."

Jealousy Windows
Submitted by Hana

Photographer's comment:

"Designed so that you can see the world but the world can't see you."

Tai Chi Squares
Submitted by Matt Kaune

Photographer's comment:

"Man doing tai chi in Denver's Civic Center Park."

Chicago Squares
Submitted by Maurice

Photographer's comment:

"Would you expect anything less interesting from the great architects that have made Chicago famous?"

Squared Circles?
Submitted by Jon

Photographer's comment:

"Polaroid Land Cameras glued to the "Camera Van." Shot at the Maker Faire 2007."

slow worship day
Submitted by axaxaxas mlö

Photographer's comment:

"Temple Mount, Jerusalem, March 2006. Nikon Coolpix L2."

Bricks
Submitted by Maziar H

Photographer's comment:

"Sidewalk bricks, Vancouver, BC."

Video: Lab-Grown Meat's Tough to Swallow

Posted: June 29th, 2008, 11:18pm EDT

A new public television show, Your Week, asks consumers if they would be willing to eat artificial meat.

Researchers Make Noise About Aztec Whistles of Death

Posted: June 29th, 2008, 8:13pm EDT by Associated Press

Ancient noisemakers unearthed in Mexico's ruins were once dismissed by museums as toys. But modern-day researchers are using them to discover the complex role that sound played in Pre-Columbian society.

Some Proof That Marijuana Is a Powerful Medicine

Posted: June 29th, 2008, 4:31pm EDT by Wired Science

Scientists prove that beta-caryophyllene, a chemical found in marijuana, soothes the immune system, increases bone mass, and blocks pain signals -- without causing euphoria or interfering with the central nervous system.

ICANN Gets Pwned

Posted: June 29th, 2008, 10:34am EDT by Underwire

Not even ICANN and IANA are safe from domain hijacking. Those pesky Turkish hackers strike again.

'Doctor Who' Cliffhanger Teases Endless Possibilities

Posted: June 29th, 2008, 3:59am EDT by Underwire

If the cliffhanger of Saturday's episode of Doctor Who is legitimate and not some clever, alternative universe, time-traveling trick, Russell T. Davies and his Who crew pulled off one of the truly great swerves in television history.

California Wildfires Threaten Public Health

Posted: June 28th, 2008, 7:55pm EDT by Associated Press

Thanks to hundreds of lightning-sparked wildfires in Northern California, air pollution readings in the region are two to 10 times the federal standard for clean air. Some areas are experiencing the worst air quality on record.

Secrets of 'Wanted''s Insane On-Screen Action

Posted: June 28th, 2008, 7:23pm EDT by Underwire

When you've got high-priced talent like Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy on the payroll, nobody's going to risk the actors' lives or limbs for the sake of an awesome stunt. That said, superhero-assassin movie 'Wanted' pushed its stars pretty hard to sell the train wrecks and gunfights that drive the action. Here's how they did it.

Prescription Meds: Rock's New Drug of Choice?

Posted: June 28th, 2008, 4:30pm EDT by Listening Post

Rockers from Aerosmith's Stephen Tyler to Hawthorne Heights' Casey Calvert are snubbing heroin and coke. Their new favorite vice is prescription meds. And they're not alone: U.S. teens are currently abusing painkillers more than coke, heroin and meth combined.

UNKLE Goes Widescreen, Remixes 'X-Files'

Posted: June 28th, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by Listening Post

James Lavelle's electronic supergroup has got an ear on cinema of the sci-fi variety. UNKLE's latest effort is called End Titles...Stories for Film, plus its remix of 'The X-Files' theme song touches down with the film on July 25, and on the official soundtrack on July 21.

Scientists: Atom Smasher Won't Spawn Scary Black Holes

Posted: June 28th, 2008, 1:41pm EDT by Associated Press

The most powerful atom-smasher ever will make its debut in August, and experts say doomsday fears that the Large Hadron Collider could create black holes or killer particles are unfounded.

Can Miracle Material Stop Radiation?

Posted: June 28th, 2008, 11:58am EDT by Danger Room

An anti-radiation blanket that supposedly protects against Gamma emissions hits the market. What's its secret? The blanket's 30 inches by 36, and weighs 60 pounds, equal to one-seventh of an inch of lead.

'Mr. Clock Radio' Wakes Up the Horror

Posted: June 28th, 2008, 3:00am EDT by Underwire

Buyers looking to round out their evil toy collection should make room on the shelf for Mr. Clock Radio, "The Talking Robotic Clock Radio." Mr. Clock Radio will rouse you into grim consciousness with 50 variations of soul-crushing banter and music delivered in his hellish howl from the abyss.

Tips For Keeping Your RSS Feeds Lean and Clean

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 6:00pm EDT by Webmonkey

Are your feeds well-formed? If not, maybe it's time you gave them a good scrubbing. Webmonkey offers these simple suggestions for cleaner, faster-loading Atom and RSS content. Follow our tips and you'll be validated, compressed and optimized to rule in no time.

Make Your PC Phone Home: How to Access Your Computer Remotely

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 5:45pm EDT by How-To Wiki

Traveling this summer? Don't lug your data with you -- just set up your laptop to talk to your machine remotely and access your music, e-mail, photos and other files from thousands of miles away. In Wired's How-To Wiki.

Uncle Sam Rolls in a 100-MPG Hybrid

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 5:21pm EDT by Autopia

Tony Markel, an engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, drives a plug-in hybrid that gets 100 mpg and gets its power from the sun. If he has his way, you will too.

California Traffic: Like a Wildfire Every 9 Days

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 4:59pm EDT by Wired Science

While this week's wildfires might be more dramatic, California's on-road traffic generates as much carbon dioxide as all of them combined in a mere nine days.

'Dark Knight' Selling Out 3 Weeks Early

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 4:49pm EDT by Underwire

Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker, and the sad specter of the actor's premature death, are fueling ticket sales and leading theaters to add 3 a.m. screenings.

Review: 'Operation Darkness' Succeeds Despite Flaws

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 4:41pm EDT by Game|Life

Nazis team up with zombies and vampires to crank up the freak factor in this World War II strategy role-playing game for Xbox 360.

Video: Bill Gates' Best Bits, From Pies to BSODs

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 4:15pm EDT by Gadget Lab

Bill Gates retires from full-time work at Microsoft next week. We figured that would be the perfect time to put together a highlights reel showing the most entertaining, goofy and inspiring moments from his 33-year career.

Hacker Launches Botnet Attack via P2P Software

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 3:44pm EDT by Threat Level

A 19-year-old hacker is agreeing to plead guilty to launching a botnet attack and stealing financial data from thousands of computers. The malware program installed itself on victims' computers when they downloaded peer-to-peer file sharing software, authorities said. Jason Milmont, of Cheyenne, Wyoming, faces a maximum five-year term.

Q&A: 90 Minutes With Miyamoto, Nintendo's Master of Amusement

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 2:35pm EDT by Game|Life

The man who blessed the world with Donkey Kong, Mario and the incredible Wii opens the door to his game-changing imagination. Wired.com interview by Chris Kohler and Clive Thompson.

The Many (Geeky) Faces of Bill Gates, a Capsule Biography

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 2:00pm EDT by Betsy Schiffman

The Bill Gates that most people are familiar with is the socially awkward nerd who strong-armed his way into becoming the head of the largest software company in the world.

In reality, Gates is a smooth operator who, despite his uncombed hair, baby face and disheveled appearance, knew exactly what he was doing every step of the way. He successfully transitioned from cocky college dropout to brass-knuckle negotiator to seasoned captain of industry, eventually becoming the richest man in the world and a model philanthropist.

"This is a guy who really morphed over time," says Mary Jo Foley, a longtime Microsoft watcher and author of Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era. "When I look at other CEOs -- guys like [Oracle CEO] Larry Ellison -- they haven't changed much, but Gates has really changed. I still think he's a hard-charging businessman, though -- I don't think he's gone soft."

Here's a look at some of the tricky transitions that Gates successfully navigated over the course of his career. Each of these changes were necessary and probably inevitable for any ambitious entrepreneur. It's a measure of Gates' business acumen that he successfully pulled these off where many lesser entrepreneurs have failed.

Transition One: Coder to Negotiator

If you told the 20-year-old Gates, who co-founded Microsoft in 1975, that he actually pulled off his grand plan he probably wouldn't be surprised. And that's part of his charm.

Back in 1980, when Gates was barely old enough to rent a car, he walked into a room filled with IBM execs and sold them a product he didn't even have. IBM wanted to get into the computer business, and Bill Gates wanted to get into the software business. He didn't have any negotiating skills, but he landed a deal under which IBM licensed MS-DOS from Microsoft. It was a ridiculously advantageous arrangement since it gave Microsoft the freedom to license the operating system to any other computer maker -- which is what eventually fueled Microsoft's fantastic growth.

"He's not a rock star programmer, but he's always had a knack for seeing where the industry is going. He's not always right, but he's a visionary in terms of seeing how markets and industries evolve," Foley says.

Transition Two: Founder to Fortune 500 CEO

Many entrepreneurs are fully brilliant leaders of startups, but they crash and burn when those companies grew beyond the startup stage. There's little overlap between the skill sets involved in running a small startup and those required to steer a major corporation.

Gates is one of the few to pull off both feats with aplomb.

"His management style worked really well when they were a scrappy upstart. He brought in young smart guys like him. But he had to tone it down when Microsoft became a big company. A ruthless management style doesn't work as well with a company of 80,000 people," says Foley.

Gates matured simultaneously with the company. He learned to tuck his shirt in, comb his hair, and make polite cocktail conversation.

"When I was a summer intern at Microsoft in grad school in 1989, he hosted the summer MBA interns to a very nice backyard barbecue at his old house, before he got married. He worked the crowd expertly, despite his reputation for being ill-at-ease with people, and gave everyone their chance to ask him a question or two," says Ted Weinstein, a San Francisco-based literary agent.

Transition Three: Monopolist to Savvy Defendant

His visions didn't help when the feds came knocking in the late 1990s for one of the longest, most drawn-out antitrust cases in U.S. history. In what has been famously characterized as the 1998 "Rainman" deposition, Gates rocked back and forth in his chair, at times snapping at prosecuting attorney David Boies and generally behaving like a temperamental child. The thing is, it worked. Gates didn't give an inch. And roughly 10 years later, even Boies concedes that Gates' performance was spot on, both in the deposition and on the stand in court.

"He was the most potentially effective witness," Boies says. "Nobody knew the stuff as well as he did, and nobody had the passion for it that he did. I definitely would have called him to the stand ... He's a very smart guy."

Gates wasn't the most sympathetic witness, though, and in many ways it was a risk to let him testify.

"If you're going toe to toe with the government, and the message you want to send is, 'Come hell or high water, we're fighting this until the end,' then you do exactly what [Gates] did," says Barbara Sicalides, an antitrust attorney with Pepper Hamilton. "But in any case where you have a client the size of Microsoft, and where you have inflammatory documents, it's the sort of situation where you'd want to think twice about fighting until the bitter end ... For the most part, I think Microsoft's lawyers were exactly right."

Transition Four: Captain of Industry to 'Venture Philanthropist'

It was a peculiar situation, though, when, in his early 40s, Gates found himself one of the richest men in the world and had to start thinking about giving away his money, while he was still hungry to earn more. His initial attempts at philanthropy did not go over well.

The Gates Library Foundation, founded in 1997, was widely criticized for being too modest (he initially funded it with $200 million) and for being self-serving. And indeed it was -- the mission of the foundation was to provide libraries in low-income communities with internet access and computers. While a worthy cause, Microsoft was also a beneficiary of the foundation's work.

"I think he started the library effort because it was related to things he knew about," says Stacy Palmer, editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy. "That's pretty typical. I think it was successful, but it was limited compared to the things he's involved with now."

It didn't take long until philanthropy became Gates' full-time occupation. In 1999 Gates folded his various charitable efforts into one organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and in 2000, Gates stepped down as CEO to spend more time on philanthropy.

"He seemed to be really interested in philanthropy from the beginning," says Foley. "He's the kind of guy who doesn't care what other people think of him, so I don't think he was bowing to pressure."

The net effect is that he has shaken up the philanthropy world. In earlier decades, industry titans often gave locally and more or less felt that their work was done at that point. Bill Gates -- and other tech-made billionaires -- have changed the landscape.

"We're seeing a growing emphasis on bringing bottom-line efficiency to venture philanthropy," says Palmer. "It's fairly dramatic -- he's trying to change the face of global philanthropy, but it started in a fairly parochial way."

Predator Met 16-Year-Old Victim Through 'World of Warcraft'

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 1:37pm EDT by Threat Level

A 16-year-old autistic girl who was allegedly abducted last February by an adult male met the man online while playing World of Warcraft, according to a police affidavit filed in the case.

AT&T Whistleblower: Spy Bill Creates 'Infrastructure for a Police State'

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 1:15pm EDT by Threat Level

The whistleblower at the heart of a lawsuit against AT&T for illegal eavesdropping says Congress is set to stage a 'coup against the Constitution' as it nears passage of a new spying bill. Former AT&T technician Mark Klein provided internal company documents that he claims show that AT&T spied on the internet inside the United States on behalf of the NSA.

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Pimp My Smart — And Put 13 People in It

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 1:04pm EDT by Autopia

It was only a matter of time before someone made an outlandish body kit for the Smart ForTwo and someone else decided to see how many people you can cram into one.

Declaring Whales Safe, Navy Presses On With Sonar Training

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 11:30am EDT by Associated Press

The Navy completes an environmental impact report and says it is satisfied that the safeguards are in place for protecting marine mammals while the fleet conducts sonar exercises in Hawaiian waters.

New Rules Could Mean Hundreds of New Domains

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 10:50am EDT by Associated Press

A relaxation of rules by the internet's oversight agency means that .com and .net may soon be joined by a slew of new domain names. What's behind it? Like most things, money.

So Long, Bill Gates, and Thanks for the Monopoly

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 12:45am EDT by Dylan Tweney

He's a merciless competitor, a shameless "fan" of other people's ideas and an unapologetic monopolist. And because of all that, Bill Gates has done more to create the thriving computer industry than anybody else.

As Gates prepares to retire from full-time work at Microsoft July 1, after 33 years of doing everything from writing code to defending his company's business practices in court, many people are saying 'good riddance' to the man most techies loved to hate. What the critics won't acknowledge is that it was Gates' most obnoxious qualities that made it possible for the tech industry to grow as large as it has.

"In his prime, Gates combined the monomania of the compulsive software programmer with the competitiveness of Attila the Hun," said Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter and The Big Switch.

And that was a good thing. "A lot of people see Microsoft as the enemy of openness and innovation, but it's worth remembering that it was the open architecture of the Microsoft-based PC that spurred massive creativity in both hardware and software and sped the adoption of computers both at home and at work," Carr said.

In fact, the monopoly that Microsoft once had on computer operating systems was essential to the development of the computer industry, enforcing a de facto standard that permitted thousands of software and hardware companies to blossom.

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The Microsoft monopoly was one part luck, one part business acumen. The lucky part: When IBM asked Microsoft to provide an operating system for its new personal computer in 1980, Gates got the contract, even though he didn't have an OS to sell.

No problem. Gates immediately bought the rights to another operating system, QDOS, which he then recast as MS-DOS and sold to IBM.

The savvy part: Gates' fledgling company was able to retain rights to the new operating system, securing Microsoft's place at the hub of the PC industry. Later, Gates leveraged that monopoly into such complete dominance of the PC industry that Microsoft was able to collect payments from PC manufacturers for every PC they sold -- even if those PCs didn't carry a Microsoft operating system.

That monopoly was bad for competitors who had arguably superior operating systems -- including, later, IBM's OS/2. And it was built in large part on appropriating the best ideas of other companies, from Gary Kildall's CP/M to Apple's Macintosh.

But the upside was enormous because the monopoly created a stable environment where entrepreneurs could develop new companies and new products around a common platform.

Without that standard, the computer industry in the 1990s would have resembled the web today: diverse, vibrant and flowering with abundant innovation, but also frequently broken because of the inability of disparate products to make the most basic connections with one another.

"Unlike oil, pharmaceutical or steel, monopolies are a necessary ingredient in the technology business," Forrester Research founder George Colony wrote in a recent blog post. "It's only when de facto standards like Windows or de jure standards like HTML become dominant that usefulness soars."

Contrast that to the state of the internet today. While the web abounds in standards, a frequent problem is that companies don't hew to them (and since 1996, Microsoft has been guilty of this behavior too). Having trouble syncing your Google calendar with your Yahoo calendar? Wondering why your camcorder won't upload to your new Macbook, your iPod can't share files with your friends' MP3 players and your mobile phone can't display webpages properly? All of these problems are traceable to a lack of widely supported standards.

Just imagine if the same chaos had reigned throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Hardware manufacturers like Dell, Hewlett Packard, Compaq and IBM would still be battling it out with incompatible systems. And software like Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and, yes, even Microsoft Office never would have achieved widespread success.

"[Bill Gates] made an unbelievable contribution," said Netscape, Opsware and Ning founder Marc Andreessen, while speaking at a keynote with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco earlier this year. "It's hard to conceive what this industry would look like today if Microsoft hadn't standardized the OS ... I think the industry would be much smaller if that hadn't happened."

Of course, success breeds resentment, and Gates' aggressive business practices -- and less-than-polished personal style -- made him many enemies.

"The problem is when you're the biggest sequoia in the woods, everyone wants to cut you down," said Paul Santinelli, a general partner with North Bridge Venture Partners, a venture capital firm.

Gates didn't help matters by overreaching once his company's monopoly was firmly established.

"Gates became kind of a Godfather figure in the industry, demanding tributes from his partners and whacking those who threatened his power," Carr said. "So Microsoft deserves both praise for stimulating innovation and criticism for stifling it."

And then there was the problem that many of Microsoft's products simply didn't work that well. Indeed, as the chorus of complaints about Windows Vista grows louder day by day, it could be said that Gates is leaving Microsoft at exactly the right time, before the company's long decline sullies his reputation.

"If all that stuff worked right out of the box, we'd all be out of a job," said David Strom, an independent technology consultant and speaker in St. Louis. Strom has a speech praising Gates for, among other things, effectively guaranteeing full employment for IT people called in to make Microsoft products work properly.

But while technologists may curse Gates' aggressiveness and the buggyness of Microsoft software, they should also raise a glass to toast him as he departs the computer business.

"He didn't have the zest of a Philippe Kahn, or the elegance of a Steve Jobs, or the stage presence of a Larry Ellison. But the guy revolutionized the PC industry, and that's what people need to remember," said Santinelli.

The Brains Behind the Image Fulgurator

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 12:15am EDT by Gadget Lab

Julius von Bismarck's 'Image Fulgurator' is a clever hack that uses a flashgun, a modified 35mm camera and a special sensor to project secret images onto other people's photos. Wired.com's Gadget Lab scored an exclusive interview with von Bismarck, with photos of his gear.

Review: Wii 'Guitar Hero' Controller Makes You a Rawk God -- Almost

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Gadget Lab

The Nyko Frontman is a Telecaster-style wireless Guitar Hero controller for the Nintendo Wii. It's a bit cheaper than the standard Les Paul model, and has a slightly different feel.

June 27, 1898: Down to the Sea in Ships, and Then Some

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Tony Long

1898: Joshua Slocum completes a solo voyage lasting nearly three years, becoming the first sailor to circumnavigate alone.

Slocum, born within sight of Nova Scotia's Bay of Fundy in 1844, ran away from home at 14 and signed on a fishing schooner as cabin boy to begin a lifetime at sea. He later crossed the Atlantic and became an ordinary seaman on the Tangier, a British merchantman. By 18, he had received his papers from the Board of Trade qualifying him as a second mate.

Landing in California, Slocum received his first command there and spent 13 years sailing out of San Francisco, taking square-rigged ships to Japan, China, Australia and the Spice Islands (the Moluccas of present-day Indonesia), as well as engaging in the coast-wise lumber trade.

Several ships, two wives and two sons later -- his first wife died in Argentina -- Joshua Slocum found himself back on the East Coast, in possession of a rotting old oyster sloop called the Spray. He would make history with this boat.

He spent the next few years restoring the Spray and rigging her for solo sailing. In 1895, at age 51, Slocum set out to be the first sailor ever to make a solo circumnavigation. The 37-foot Spray left Boston in April 1895 with her original sloop rig, but difficulties in the Strait of Magellan would cause Slocum to re-rig her as a yawl for the remainder of the voyage.

One peculiarity of Slocum's sailing was his decision to eschew the chronometer -- in favor of using a sextant and the ancient method of dead reckoning -- for fixing his longitudinal position at sea.

It was an eventful passage. Chased by pirates, feted by island kings and almost drowned a couple of times in storms, Slocum sailed 46,000 miles, staying for weeks and sometimes months at various stops along the way. His longest time at sea without making landfall was 72 days in the Pacific.

In addition to his seafaring skill, Slocum was an accomplished writer. His account of the voyage, Sailing Alone Around the World, is considered a classic of adventure literature. He begins his story thus:

I had resolved on a voyage around the world, and as the wind on the morning of April 24, 1895, was fair, at noon I weighed anchor, set sail and filled away from Boston, where the Spray had been moored snugly all winter. The 12 o'clock whistles were blowing just as the sloop shot ahead under full sail.

A short board was made up the harbor on the port tack, then coming about she stood to seaward, with her boom well off to port, and swung past the ferries with lively heels. A photographer on the outer pier of East Boston got a picture of her as she swept by, her flag at the peak throwing her folds clear.

A thrilling pulse beat high in me. My step was light on deck in the crisp air. I felt there could be no turning back, and that I was engaging in an adventure the meaning of which I thoroughly understood.

Kind of makes you want to dump your stupid computer and run off to sea, doesn't it?

Sailing Alone earned Slocum a lot of money, enabling him to buy his first home on land -- though characteristically offshore -- in Martha's Vineyard in 1902.

Although sales of the book remained brisk during the first several years of the 20th century, they were waning by 1908. Slocum was suddenly hurting for money and decided to sail south this time, to the Orinoco River in Venezuela, with the idea of gathering material for another book. Luck was not with him on this voyage, however, and the Spray, while still seaworthy, was not what she had been a decade earlier.

Slocum set sail for the West Indies in November 1909 and was never heard from again. He wasn't declared officially dead until 1924.

A World War II Liberty ship, SS Joshua Slocum, was named for the doughty mariner.

Source: Various

ICANN and IANA Sites Hacked, Redirected

Posted: June 27th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Threat Level

A Turkish hacking group calling itself NetDevilz on Friday temporarily took control of the websites of two of the world's leading internet regulatory bodies, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

Ambitious California Emissions Plan Could Boost Economy, Chart National Policy

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 8:30pm EDT by Alexis Madrigal

California's blueprint for slashing greenhouse-gas emissions could transform the world's seventh-largest economy -- and be a model for a nationwide plan in 2009.

The state presented its plan Thursday morning to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by about 30 percent by 2020. Based on legislation passed in 2006, the state is proposing a slate of changes including a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases, a requirement that renewable sources power one-third of the state's grid, and taxes on gas-guzzling cars. The state's approach could become a model for the nation, if climate-change legislation of some sort gets passed by Congress and is signed by the next president in 2009 -- as is widely expected.

The state anticipates that implementing the plan will not only attack climate change, but also provide a net benefit to the California economy.

"Setting California ahead of the curve on global warming will give our state a competitive advantage," said Mary Nichols, chair of the Air Resources Board.

That conclusion flies in the face of conventional wisdom that the costs of combating climate change will be high, perhaps several percent of a country's total economic output. That said, most of the debate over the costs of climate change and mitigation has been until now slightly more sophisticated than back-of-the-napkin calculations.

California's Air Resources Board, on the other hand, undertook a detailed, near-term look at the state's infrastructure to decide exactly how to get emissions cuts without economic pain. It was required to do so by the groundbreaking AB32, the "Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006," signed into law in September of that year.

If California's numbers hold up to scrutiny, it could be a major boost for the proponents of fighting climate change.

"The key thing with the AB32 scoping plan is that it really helps California create green jobs, green dollars and a clean environment," said Spencer Quong, a Union of Concerned Scientists analyst.

Quong also noted that consumers stand to economically benefit. The state estimates that car owners will save about $30 per month if all the plan's car regulations are deemed legal.

One intriguing way that California made the numbers look prettier was to include the health benefits of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Cutting down emissions could save over 300 lives and up to $2.4 billion dollars, ARB staffer Edie Chang said. The savings would come mostly from decreasing asthma and lost-work days.

Despite the overall triumphant tone that colored the unveiling of the long-awaited plan, there are some areas where environmentalists, green-tech types and old-line industries continue to disagree.

As with national legislation battles, the issue of emission permits is looming large. In a cap-and-trade system, the government sells or gives away permits to discharge a certain amount of CO2 into the air. As you might expect, utilities and industry want to get these permits for free, while most public advocates and environmentalists want the state to sell the permits, then use the proceeds for green-tech investment or taxpayer refund.

"We think that auctioning is a key element of a plan" that maximizes the public interest, said Chris Busch, another Union of Concerned Scientists analyst.

Meanwhile the industry countered that they would need the permits given to them so that they could make the necessary changes to their businesses to keep costs for consumers low.

"Auction revenues, which are a very scary thing for us ... should be left 100 percent in the hands of those utilities," Bruce McLaughlin, representing the California Municipal Utility Association, told the board.

The issue is unlikely to go away, but most seem to expect somewhere between 25 and 75 percent of the permits to eventually be auctioned.

That number could be the standard that John McCain or Barack Obama looks to when he signs a bill that puts a price on carbon, as either is expected to do if elected.

In that way, the nitty-gritty details of a board meeting in Sacramento could end up having a major impact on the entire globe.

"We believe that this scoping plan is going to be an important milestone, an important framework for other states," said Nichols, the board chair.

Get to Usenet Even if Your ISP Blocks You

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 8:20pm EDT by How-To Wiki

Internet Service Providers have started to censor Usenet by blocking it completely and now you are left out of your favorite newsgroups. Don't panic, there are ways to tunnel through the information embargo and get back to flaming discussion boards and citing Godwin's Law in no time.

Mash Your Pics Onto a Map: Get Started With Flickr's API

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 7:45pm EDT by Webmonkey

Flickr's dedicated community and slick user interface aren't the only reasons the photo-sharing has earned major kudos from the Web 2.0 set. It's also because its flexible API makes it easy to build simple mashups in a variety of programming languages. Webmonkey shows you how to mash your favorite photos onto a map using a few lines of Python code.

Yahoo Shakes Up Management Amid Shareholder Unrest

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by Associated Press

For the third time in 19 months, Yahoo redraws its management chart as it tries to snap out of a financial malaise that has ravaged its stock price, jeopardized its independence and demoralized employees.

ICANN Has New Domains

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by Associated Press

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers votes in Paris to permit the introduction of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new Internet domain names.

Review: Charming 'Wall-E' Sweeps Up Trash, Hearts

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 6:30pm EDT by Underwire

Pixar's latest adorable animated creation longs for love on a lonely planet. When a laser-wielding ladybot interrupts his garbage-compacting task, he's off on a sci-fi adventure in an attempt to save the world.

Senate Committee Approving AM-FM Royalty Bill

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 6:00pm EDT by Threat Level

A House subcommittee on Thursday approved legislation requiring AM-FM radio broadcasters to pay royalties to singers, musicians and their labels. Broadcasters decried the proposal, and have invoked the xenophobia card, saying as much as $2.4 billion a year in royalties would go to "foreign-based" record companies. The music industry labeled the broadcasters as pirates and the proposal moves to the House Judiciary Committee.

Mars Soil Appears 'Very Friendly' to Life

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 6:00pm EDT by Associated Press

A mission scientist reports that, based on the first of Phoenix lander's soil samples, there is "nothing about [Martian soil] that would preclude life."

Video: Bio House Keeps You Younger, Say Designers

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 5:15pm EDT by Video Department

Arakawa and Madeline Gins say a $2 million house they designed "staves off death." It features uneven floors, striking colors and no doors, which the artists say boosts the immune system.

Review: Walkman Phone Nails Form, Not Function

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 5:00pm EDT by Gadget Lab

Sony Ericsson's new W350 Walkman phone is indisputably attractive but proves hard to get along with -- kind of like your high school crush.

Poll: Should McCain Learn To Use A Computer?

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 5:00pm EDT by Threat Level

John McCain admits that he's computer illiterate. Does it matter that the Republican presidential candidate is clueless when it comes to technology? Take our poll.

The Fight to End Aging Gains Legitimacy, Funding

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 4:00pm EDT by Alexis Madrigal

Gandhi once said, describing his critics, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

After declaring, essentially out of nowhere, that he had a program to end the disease of aging, renegade biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey knows how the first three steps of Gandhi's progression feel. Now he's focused on the fourth.

"I've been at Gandhi stage three for maybe a couple of years," de Grey said. "If you're trying to make waves, certainly in science, there's a lot of people who are going to have insufficient vision to bother to understand what you're trying to say."

This weekend, his organization, The Methuselah Foundation, is sponsoring its first U.S. conference on the emerging interdisciplinary field that de Grey has helped kick start. (Its first day, Friday, will be free and open to the public.) The conference, Aging: The Disease - The Cure - The Implications, held at UCLA, is an indication of how far de Grey has come in mainstreaming his ideas.

Less than a decade ago, de Grey was a relatively unknown computer scientist doing his own research into aging. As recently as three years ago a cadre of scientists wrote in the Nature-sponsored journal EMBO Reports, that his research program, known as Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, was "so far from plausible that it commands no respect at all within the informed scientific community." Also in 2005, MIT-sponsored magazine Technology Review went so far as to offer a $20,000 prize to anyone who could prove that de Grey's program was "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate." (No one won.)

Now, though, some scientists are beginning to view his approach -- looking at aging as a disease and bringing in more disciplines into gerontology -- as worthwhile, even if they still look askance at his claims of permanent reversible aging within a lifespan. The Methuselah Foundation now has an annual research funding budget of several million dollars, de Grey says, and it's beginning to show lab results that he thinks will turn scientists' heads.

What's more, other researchers have also found some success pursuing similarly structured research programs. For example, late last year, the Buck Institute for Age Research received $25 million from the National Institutes of Health to establish a home for the "new scientific discipline of geroscience." The new field, and its research institute, are dedicated to proactively fighting aging with researchers from a dizzying array of fields.

"There are vast areas of what we're calling geroscience, which is the interface between aging and disease," said Gordon Lithgow, a Buck researcher who is managing interdisciplinary geroscience research for the institute.

And de Grey seems to have earned Lithgow's respect not necessarily by the power of his ideas, but rather his powers of persuasion in getting money for researchers to put his ideas into practice.

"We're all out here doing the best damn experiments we can think of … So the response to Aubrey was, go off and get a grant to do [experiments]," Lithgow said. "And to be fair, that's what he's done. He's gone out and raised money in an unconventional way and funded his research."

In research that will first be presented on Friday at the conference, Methuselah-funded scientists will demonstrate a proof-of-concept experiment for using bacterial enzymes to fight atherosclerosis, or the hardening of the arteries. That's an idea that de Grey has been pushing for years.

"Back in 2002, I published an inconspicuous review paper that suggested we might be able to use this approach," he said.

But de Grey isn't quite an establishment figure yet. Instead, he seems to have made the move from outsider crackpot to, well, insider crackpot. Lithgow maintains that de Grey still makes predictions far beyond what the messy lab work of biology can support.

"Aubrey extrapolates from current hard science into, 'If we can do something about this process and that and seven or eight other ands, then there's this great opportunity for great human life extension,'" Lithgow said. "And it's at that point that a lot of scientists are dropping off."

For now, de Grey and his foundation keep trucking along trying to pick off each of those processes one by one.

"In perhaps seven or eight years, we'll be able to take mice already in middle age and treble their lifespan just by giving them a whole bunch of therapies that rejuvenate them," de Grey said. "Gerontologists all over, even my most strident critics, will say yes, Aubrey de Grey is right."

Even as he imagines completing Gandhi's fourth step, de Grey always keeps his eye on the ultimate prize -- the day when the aging-as-disease meme reaches the tipping point necessary to funnel really big money into the field.

"The following day, Oprah Winfrey will be saying, aging is a disease and let's fix it right now," de Grey said.

Review: In 'Wanted,' Angelina Jolie Speed-Races Through Sexy Violence

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 4:00pm EDT by Underwire

A comics-fueled flick doesn't need a costumed superhero to deliver the pulse-pounding action. This bloody, stylized movie about an ancient league of assassins harnesses Jolie's star power as she turns a geek into a killer.

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Lore Sjöberg's Alt Text Episode 10: Moody Transformer Hulk

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by Lore Sjöberg

If I were stronger than any person on Earth, I’d have a better attitude than the Hulk. Maybe he’d have a better time if it weren’t anger that set off his transformation.

Can the Internet Save Indie Film?

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 2:40pm EDT by Fred Schruers, Portfolio.com

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There was a time in the indie film business when specialty houses from the major studios stalked the earth, reaching into deep pockets to acquire the rights to distribute the buzziest films at the coolest festivals -- notably Sundance.

Lately, however, the indie situation is so dire that industry savant Mark Gill bemoaned its fate in a keynote address at the current Los Angeles Film Festival. His talk has been linked to across a wide spectrum of blogs, less for its hopeful closing notes than for its array of forlorn statistics about tanking indies.

If part of the problem is the growing primacy of the Web in consumer culture, could that same Web be part of the answer?

Matt Dentler of Cinetic Rights Management insists it's so. He was to be seen recently in a crowded Starbucks a few steps from the indie-minded crowds populating the LAFF, explaining why the new digital film rights venture he's a key part of is being embraced by just about anybody -- internet portals, cable and satellite operators, wireless and telephone providers, etc. -- who's got an interest in purveying the content that has been flunking in the cinemas.

"There is very little bitterness in this realm because everyone wants it to work," Dentler said. "It's the next big hope for the film business."

He's speaking, mind you, only of specialty films. The big international business in action films and other popcorn fare is having quite a healthy season in the cinemas -- Paramount just hit $1 billion in box office for the year. (To emphasize how well mainstream studio fare is doing, LAFF kicking off its skein of screenings with the premiere of the gut-punching kineticism of the blockbuster-scale Wanted.)

But as Gill bleakly noted in his talk ("If you decide to make a movie budgeted under $10 million on your own tomorrow, you have a 99.9 percent chance of failure"), the 5,000 or so films submitted to Sundance each year are more than likely headed to oblivion whether they're tossed in a programmer's rejection pile or greeted with huzzahs on opening night.

Enter Cinetic Rights Management, the Dentler-energized digital arm of John Sloss's New York-based Cinetic Media.

As the leading representative of a host of quality indie films over the past few years, the firm was looking for a way to revive the marketplace for the kinds of virtuous indie films they have long represented -- for something under 15 percent, a figure that will push toward 50 percent under the new model -- and in many ways, curated.

A welcome aspect of this push, for movie lovers, is the reissue of certain titles that Cinetic will pluck from the archives. "We're already repping Hoop Dreams, Slacker, American Job -- some of these perennial American indies," says Dentler, "films that came out at a time when things like on line video and Web journalism didn't really exist, and would have benefited from all that."

There's something of the crusader in Dentler, down to the squared-off features and alert gaze. Raised in the Rio Grande Valley before migrating to Austin as a film major at the University of Texas, he ran the South by Southwest Film Festival for five years before Sloss lured him away in April. He's generally credited with putting SXSW on the map.

Logically, part of Dentler's mandate is to beat the drum for the new enterprise -- "It's not unlike a political campaign in a way ... very similar to when I used to go pound the pavement on behalf of SXSW to prove to the world we were worth a damn."

The vote he's now trying to get out is that burgeoning online constituency that doesn't respond to typical marketing ploys. "It's really going to be about tapping into the audience that's already living on line, then making a film [viewing] just a click away," he said.

The process is very different from using the Web to sell theater tickets or even DVDs. "Companies always wonder why they don't see more tangible results" from using social networking or viral videos to promote traditional films, he said. "It's because you are asking people who live their entire life online to then leave their computer, go out of the house, go to a theater, and buy a ticket."

Dentler and C.R.M. recognize that the tipping point for online film consumption hasn't been reached yet, though they anticipate rapid growth soon. (In this, they're not alone. The Web video site Jaman boldly, if somewhat self-servingly, predicts that the online video distribution business worldwide will grow to $12 billion a year by 2012 from the current $2 billion.)

"It is certainly being utilized, but primarily by younger consumers, college kids or recent college graduates," Dentler said. "I think Christmas 2008 is going to be an incredibly big season for the acceptance and the accessibility of a lot of this material and a lot of this hardware because giant HD televisions are going to have this capability programmed in."

(For now, the $100 Roku box, with access to 10,000 streamed Netflix titles, will have to suffice.)

Dentler said he's "agnostic" about whether his films will be distributed by iTunes, Joost, Netflix, or Jaman.

What he and his company want to do is partner with the various outlets to steer viewers to an array of online extras, such as filmmaker interviews, on their own website, which is now being developed.

Cinetic may buy advertising for particularly promising specialty films, he added, but the ads are more likely to be viral campaigns on the Internet than full-page ads in the major newspapers.

As Dentler rises to go to his panel, one of four public events they LAFF lumped onto his schedule when they'd head he would be in own, his energy seems undimmed. Later he'll do dinner with film folk and a post for his blog.

As CRM's chief operating officer Janet Brown says: "For anyone in this indie business, the clock never stops -- and Matt embodies that to the fullest."

First Look: Maker's Notebook Justifies Its Steep Price

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 2:10pm EDT by GeekDad Blog

The editors of Make magazine are selling a $20 "Maker's Notebook" aimed at hackers, crafters and other creative types. Modeled after a lab notebook, its quality and extra features justify its steep price.

VW Rolls Out a Sweet Plug-In Hybrid

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 2:07pm EDT by Autopia

Volkswagen boss Martin Winterkorn says "the future belongs to all-electric cars" and announces the company's first step toward that day -- a diesel-electric plug-in hybrid it'll have on the road by 2010.

Japan's Cult Retro-Gaming TV Show Debuts in English

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 1:20pm EDT by Game|Life

Two episodes of Game Center CX get translated for an American audience, and the hit show's even more humorous when you can understand what Shinya Arino is saying.

RIAA Must Pay Defendant's Legal Fees

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 11:30am EDT by Threat Level

The music industry lobbying group is told to cough up $108,000 to cover Tanya Andersen's legal costs after she beats an RIAA file sharing lawsuit.

Obama's Musical Tastes: Eclectic, and a Bit Surprising

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 11:15am EDT by Listening Post

If Barack Obama becomes the next president, the White House iTunes library will require a little updating. From Listening Post.

Live Coverage: California's New Plan to Cut Emissions

Posted: June 26th, 2008, 11:00am EDT by Wired Science

California's Air Resources Board is unveiling a new plan to cut carbon emissions in the state. This closely-watched plan could become a model for nationwide policy in 2009. Wired Science is providing live coverage of the ARB's announcement.

Rule the Blogosphere in 5 Easy Steps

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 8:00pm EDT by Webmonkey

Maybe you're new to blogging. Or maybe you've been around a while and you just want to give your site a boost. Either way, there's no excuse for going unnoticed. Here are Webmonkey's tips for increasing your blog's visibility, professionalism and all-around awesomeness.

Broadcasters Playing Race Card of Sorts in AM-FM Royalty Flap

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 7:15pm EDT by Threat Level

The NAB suspiciously leaves off the only American-based major label on its ad concerning an upcoming congressional vote on whether U.S.-based AM and FM radio broadcasters should pay royalties to singers, musicians and their labels.

Netroots Nation Organizer Says McCain Welcome to Attend

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 5:45pm EDT by Threat Level

Gina Cooper, executive director of the massive blogger convention Netroots Nation (formerly known as YearlyKos,) discusses this year's gathering in Austin, Texas with Wired.com. John McCain is invited, but Cooper says she wonders whether he knows whether they even exist.

Hands-On: User-Gen Xbox Games Are Rough But Promising

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 5:40pm EDT by Game|Life

Microsoft's XNA Creators Club makes it simple for indie developers to craft and distribute Xbox 360 titles. Most of the videogames are only half-baked, but the service shows definite promise.

Prince Sues To Destroy All Copies of Tribute Album

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 3:30pm EDT by Listening Post

A Norwegian record label's plan to give away 5,000 copies of a Prince tribute compilation to honor the star's 50th birthday backfires. Prince throws a royal conniption fit, demanding that all copies be destroyed.

Microsoft Delivers Long-Awaited Mac Open XML Converters

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 3:20pm EDT by Webmonkey

Microsoft's Open XML format is now compatible with older Mac versions of its Office suite. The updates finally put the ISO-ratified file format in the hands of everyone.

FCC Free Wireless Equals Censorship Technology Bonanza

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 3:20pm EDT by Threat Level

The Federal Communications Commission's proposal to open up part of the public airwaves to provide free wireless internet requires that content providers filter out pornography and "any images or text that otherwise would be harmful to teens and adolescents."

Stoners, Like, Totally Solve Nation's Air Travel Woes

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 2:53pm EDT by Autopia

Marijuana advocates in Denver say air travel would be less stressful -- and passengers less likely to get unruly -- if airports installed marijuana lounges. If people can get hammered before flights, they argue, why can't they get stoned?

All-Seeing Car Reads Road Signs For You

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 2:50pm EDT by Autopia

General Motors builds a car that reads signs and warns drivers when they're straying into another lane, giving people yet another reason not to focus on the task at hand.

Scientists: It Once Rained on Mars

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 11:46am EDT by Wired Science

Precipitation once fell on Martian soil, according to a new geochemical analysis, although the forecast probably permanently changed several billion years ago.

Interactive Advertising's Coming Out Party

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 11:45am EDT by James P. Othmer, Portfolio.com

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Consider this:

A viral online video phenomenon won a Grand Prix at the Cannes International Advertising Festival that was usually reserved for only the best in traditional TV advertising.

A cyber campaign about a supposedly dying medium—yes, ironically, television—won another Grand Prix.

And a groundbreaking Japanese online effort for a clothing retailer won the most coveted creative prize of all, the Titanium Grand Prix, and had everyone gushing about the unlimited future of interactive branding.

Whatever you call it—online, interactive, viral, 360, or cyber—a new advertising paradigm has finally come of age after years of empty hype and broken promises.

"TV used to be the sun and all other mediums were merely satellites around it," said David Lubars, chief creative officer at BBDO New York, which was named the agency of the year. But this year's festival represented the first true global validation of the power of interactive work, he added.

"TV is still the only place where you can get 70 million eyeballs on an ad," Lubars said, "but now, if your message is engaging enough, you can get people to voluntarily spend 10, 20, 30 minutes, totally engaged with a brand."

Take the Titanium Grand Prix, which went to the 4-year-old production boutique Projector Tokyo for the breadth, depth, and refreshing level of consumer engagement of its work for the Uniqlo clothing retailer.

Projector's creative director, Koichiro Tanaka, said the challenge was to create a relevant, portable experience. The result combines user-generated media and the Uniqlo website with a nonstop fusion of dance, sound, and viral video. It's available via product catalogs, screensavers, ringtone downloads, and customizable T-shirts. There isn't a single 30-second TV spot to be found.

(The fun starts here.)

Other notable interactive Grand Prix winners include 42 Entertainment's "Year Zero" viral campaign for Trent Reznor and a new Nine Inch Nails album, as well as T.A.G. and McCann Worldgroup's imaginative "Believe" campaign for Halo 3.

But the Uniqlo work was seen as a seminal, barrier-breaking moment. While the Nine Inch Nails and Xbox work benefited from an already rabid audience eager to glean clues about a favorite artist or game, Uniqlo managed to be compelling and immersive in the relatively unsexy business of clothing retailing. With retailers, expectations are low and websites often offer little more than online catalogs.

Entertainment and social-responsibility advertisers have had interactive hits, but Uniqlo is among the first to show that an interactive effort can be breathtakingly creative, engaging, viral—and, most importantly, still increase sales.

"The industry is always talking about viral," said Titanium jury panelist Jean-Remy von Matt, founder and member of the board. "The Uniqlo work is viral-branded utility. It's so simple, smart, and beautiful. All over the world people have it on their desktops, giving them a brand presence in countries where their products don't even exist."

Mark Tutssel, chief creative officer of Leo Burnett Worldwide and jury judge of the Titanium and Integrated Lions, said that more than the film award, the Titanium Grand Prix has become the most prestigious honor in the industry.

"It's a glimpse into the future of what we do," Tutssel said. It is, he added, "the most prestigious [award] and the new standard for what everyone should work for."

The compelling nature of interactivity was also apparent in the august Film Lion Grand Prix for the best TV ad. Fallon London won for its "Gorilla" short, which it created for Cadbury Dairy Milk, a British chocolate bar.

Originally intended for the British market only, the film, which features a gorilla playing a drum solo while listening to the Phil Collins song In the Air Tonight, spread virally on the internet. Even better, it generated thousands of consumer-produced remixes. Total views on viral-video platforms by fully engaged audience members: close to 10 million.

The fact that the Film Lion went to a viral-video hit that became interactive, and that many awarded campaigns crossed or defied categorization, says much about the transitional state of the industry and gives Cannes Festival leaders something to ponder for next year's awards.

But, because Cannes is one of the few for-profit advertising-awards shows and the cost of entering work is more than $1,000 (there were 28,000 entries this year), don't expect fewer categories or awards at the 2009 festival. Just more award-winning work that transcends traditional labels.

More coverage of the Cannes International Advertising Festival and advertising in general can be found here on Portfolio.com.

T-Mobile Rolls Out Broadband/Landline Service

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 2:08am EDT by Associated Press

T-Mobile USA is launching a nationwide service that lets customers place unlimited domestic calls with their landline phones over a broadband connection. The service is targeted at people who are reluctant abandon their landline completely in favor of wireless.

Pending FISA Spy Bill Redefines WMDs

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 12:30am EDT by Danger Room

The new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act update (the one that lets telecom companies skate for snooping on your phone calls and e-mails) includes a new definition for "weapons of mass destruction." The definition is a lot more broad -- and vague -- than the atomic-bomb-scale weapons originally described by the United Nations.

Lore Sjöberg's Alt Text: Earth to Aliens -- We're a Bunch of Dorks

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Lore Sjöberg

Humans have been attempting to send messages to the stars since ... I'm going to say the early '70s. I mean, theoretically some caveman could have yelled, "Hey! Stars! You suck!" a hundred thousand years ago, but he was an idiot.

But of all the messages sent into space, which ones are good? Which ones conform to quality standards? That's what I'm here to tell you.

Alt Text Podcast
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The Pioneer Plaques
These are identical, gold-plated plaques attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. They feature a picture of the solar system, a picture of the probes and a pictorial representation of the hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen. Ring any bells? No? Well, it also has a picture of a naked man and woman on it. Ah, yes. Now you remember.

Many people considered this nothing more than interstellar porn. Others objected to the fact that the man is the one waving his hand, presumably to give the woman time to bake the aliens a nice batch of muffins. My objection is that the people depicted have no body hair at all. Aliens are gonna come down and think we're living in symbiosis with our pubes.
Grade: C
The Voyager Record
I love that we sent an LP. It's so delightfully retro! I expect alien life forms to discover it and say, "Clearly, this is the work of a truly groovy civilization. We do not know what to expect when we visit their planet, but we should prepare ourselves for an extremely mellow experience." In actuality, the funkiest track on the album is "Johnny B. Goode," which I think is a poor choice. I mean, I'm not sure how one carries a guitar in a gunnysack, and I was born on this planet.
Grade: B
The Arecibo Image
This is actually a short binary message beamed into space. When decoded, it creates an image that looks remarkably similar to an Atari 2600 videogame. The apparent object of the game is to maneuver your guy through the cavern and up the waterfall, bypass the attacking spacecraft and grab a delicious slice of cake while avoiding the evil letter M. I'd play that game.

It should be noted that the human depicted here is also naked, but he's a pixel guy so it's fine. We don't want aliens to know we have genitals, but it's OK if they mistake us for table lamps.
Grade: A
The Teenage Message
This was beamed into space in 2001. It starts with some radio-transmission Doppler-tuning boring-boring-boring thing, segues into theremin music -- THEREMIN MUSIC -- and finally ends with some more binary images, including the logo of the Teenage Message program itself. So lame.

It's called the Teenage Message because it was put together by Russian teenagers. I think that will be apparent to anyone who receives it. "Blaxnorvag! What is this tedious message from another world?" "I don't know, Jerry, but it sounds like something put together by Russian teenagers."
Grade: D
Television Signals
A common science fiction trope involves aliens intercepting our television shows and being so impressed that they use it as a basis for their entire civilization. That's pretty egotistical. Even human beings don't base their entire lives on one long-defunct television show. Well, except for Firefly fans.

Presumably aliens who can detect our faint signals can get any channel on any planet, and I hear Canopus has some pretty compelling public-access shows. Still, we should use this to our advantage. We need to immediately produce a television show about benevolent aliens who come to Earth and give human beings candy and hugs and play Super Smash Brothers Brawl with them, but don't use Pit because he's cheap.
Grade: C-

- - -

Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a futurist, a futurologist and a futilitarian.

June 25, 1867: Barbed Wire -- the Beta Version

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred

1867: Lucien B. Smith patents barbed wire, an artificial "thorn hedge." It's an idea whose time clearly has come, but not quite in this form.
Smith's design called for spools of four short, sharp metal spikes at right angles. The spools would revolve loosely and be set every 2 to 3 feet along the fence wire.

William D. Hunt patented a similar design that year, and Michael D. Kelly did so the next. A patent battle was sure to follow, but none of these guys would win.

The great need was the Great Plains. As American settlement moved West in earnest, the spaces to enclose got bigger, while nearby materials for building fences -- wood and stones -- got scarcer. Growing hedgerows took time ... and water, also scarce. Shipping in materials for fencing got more expensive the farther you got from their source.

The fencing wire fence available at the time was brittle, and cattle could rub against the smooth wire with impunity until it broke or the fence posts loosened. Then the critters could wander into your kitchen garden, your cash crops, your neighbor's ranch or the wide open spaces where the deer and the antelope roamed.

Joseph F. Glidden got his idea for barbed wire when he saw Henry M. Rose's invention at a county fair: boards with sharp nails hanging from a smooth-wire fence. Glidden thought the board unnecessary and expensive: Why not put the barbs directly in the wire?

He rigged the crank of household coffee-bean grinder -- his wife's suggestion, the legend goes -- to twist the wire into loops that were then clipped off into sharp points. Irritating.

Glidden patented his version in 1874, then sold half his patent rights to hardware merchant Isaac Ellwood for $265 ($4,500 in today's money). Together they formed the Barb Fence Co. and started making and selling the stuff.

Soon there were 570 different patents for different types of wire, twists and barbs. A three-year legal battle ensued, but Glidden triumphed over all. By the time of his death in 1906, he was one of America's richest men.

Some people objected to the "devil's rope" as cruel to livestock, and they formed anti-barbed-wire associations. They initially got legislation passed in some states to ban barbed wire or at least hold fencers responsible for any damages they caused. But barbed wire caught on, as it were, because it was more effective and less expensive than other cattle fences. By the early 1880s, U.S. manufacturers were turning out half a million miles of barbed wire every year.

Railroads used prodigious amounts of the stuff to protect their rights-of-way from livestock and livestock from their locomotives. Ranchers put up more thousands of miles on their own lands and sometimes, perhaps not legally, on public lands.

Herding livestock across the range to a distant market was no longer practical, and the era of cattle drives came to an end. Barbed wire fenced off much of the prairie, and the deer and the antelope roamed no more.

Barbed wire, of course, also works to deter humans and soon found uses protecting land and buildings against trespassers and burglars, and battlefield turf against enemy troops. British military manuals were already recommending its use by 1888, and it played a key role in the Spanish-American War, the Boer Wars in South Africa, and of course the extended trench warfare of World War I.

Source: Various

Clive Thompson on How Email Bots Can Deal With Your Overstuffed Inbox

Posted: June 25th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Clive Thompson

Suppose you need to reach me with an urgent email? Try hitting Send at precisely 10:47 am. Statistically speaking, that's when my most crucial messages arrive each day — and when I'm most likely to ping you back.

How do I know this? Because I've been using a new software app called Xobni to manage my horribly overstuffed inbox.

Among other cool tricks, Xobni spots hidden patterns in your email usage. It identifies, for instance, who your most important contacts are, what time of day they typically send email, and how long it takes you to reply to one another. I discovered that the missives I care about most — from my wife, editors, and closest friends — tend to arrive in bursts during the mid-morning and late afternoon.

This is incredibly useful knowledge. These days, instead of leaving my email open all the time and jumping with Pavlovian slaver at each ding, I check in only during what I now know are my two "hot zones." I can work uninterrupted most of the day with the confidence that I'll be online when the on-fire messages arrive.

Artificial intelligence in the service of life-hacking: It's the future of email.

And God knows we need a better future for email, because the present is intolerable. This once-miraculous productivity tool has metastasized into one of the biggest timesucks in American life. Studies show that there are 77 billion corporate email messages sent every day, worldwide. By 2012, that number is expected to more than double. The Radicati Group calculates that we already spend nearly a fifth of our day dealing with these messages; imagine a few years down the road, when it takes up 40 percent of our time. "It's madness," says Merlin Mann, who runs 43Folders.com, a leading productivity blog. "We're all desperately trying to figure out how to cut stuff so we can get through the day, and it just gets harder and harder." (Mann advocates dealing with incoming messages immediately so your inbox is always empty. Me, I've got 12,802 messages in there right now.)

Why has email spun so badly out of control? Because it's asymmetric — incredibly easy to send but often devilishly burdensome to receive.

For example, in one minute I can send an email to a thousand coworkers asking them to review a document. Let's say each recipient spends five seconds disgustedly discarding it. Boom: In just one minute, I've wasted 5,000 seconds — 1 hour, 23 minutes — of my organization's time. Equally insidious is the growing plague of semi-meaningful emails — friend requests, one-word replies from your boss. Email apps weren't designed to recognize such idiocies, which is why our inboxes become unruly messes, with important messages pushed offscreen and out of mind.

Thankfully, this has begun to change in the past year with the arrival of AI-equipped email monitors like Xobni. Another of my favorites is ClearContext, which identifies your most valued contacts — people you reply to quickly and frequently — and flags their incoming messages. It also endows you with superpowered sorting. If a work-related thread goes off the rails — like when colleagues hijack a project discussion to argue about Lost — you can zap it. From that point on, new messages in the thread are filtered out and deleted automatically.

For my money, though, the best part of these nü-email apps is more subtle. They give you insight into yourself — how and why you email at all.

After a few days of using these tools, I began to see that much of my supposedly "crucial" correspondence wasn't really all that urgent. I was wasting a lot of time on endless volleys that could have been dispatched with a quick phone call. (Helpfully, Xobni auto-extracts phone numbers from emails, making this a snap.) I've started typing less and dialing more.

A really good email app, in other words, encourages you to use email less. And that seems like the best solution of all.

Email clive@clivethompson.net at precisely 10:47 am EST.

FBI Arrests Six More in Citibank ATM Heists

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 11:00pm EDT by Threat Level

Ten have been arrested so far, as the FBI engages in a cat-and-mouse game with New York-area fraudsters stealing millions in cash from Citibank ATMs. Citibank is still closed-mouthed about the computer intrusion that put an unknown number of customer PIN codes in the hands of a Russian cybercrime boss.

FBI Visits Leaker of Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 9:30pm EDT by Listening Post

A blogger who goes by the name "Skwerl" says two "Mulder and Scully" types from the FBI questioned him in the lobby of his workplace about the nine songs he leaked from Guns N' Roses "Chinese Democracy" album, which fans have been anticipating for over 14 years. He says he's not worried, even though distributing an unreleased album is punishable by fines, jail time or both.

Genetic Testing Company Details Regulatory Defense Plan

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Wired Science

A high-profile genetic testing company reveals how they plan to stay in business after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from California's health department. Their argument? DNA is data.

By Open Sourcing Symbian, Nokia Kicks Off the Mobile Age

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Dylan Tweney

The mobile software age is here.

Symbian co-founder Nokia announced Monday night that it is buying the 52 percent of the software maker that it doesn’t already own and releasing its mobile operating system under an open source license.

With that move, Symbian joins two other major platforms -- the Google-backed Android operating system and Apple's OS X iPhone -- that give programmers tools for creating and deploying software for smartphones.

The Symbian OS dominates the world market, with about 60 percent of the installed base among smartphones. According to Nokia, more than 200 million phones currently in use worldwide are running Symbian software. But Symbian trails in the United States, where Research in Motion, Palm, Windows Mobile -- and now the iPhone -- are the major players.

Nokia uses Symbian software across its range of mobile devices, primarily with the extremely popular S60 interface. Other handset companies also use some variety of the Symbian operating system, including Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo.

"Nokia could, if they found inside the corporation the resolve to do so, come out with the definitive open platform," said Bruce Perens, an open source advocate and CEO of Kiloboot. "They would have a platform of the type we haven't seen since the original Palm. When that was dominant, there were 16,000 applications available to install. The question is, can they find the corporate resolve?"

The prospect of thousands of mobile apps -- instead of the few dozen typically available through most wireless carriers -- is something new in the wireless world. And the 6 million iPhones sold to date show that mobile users like having open, unfettered access to web applications and online content.

In short, what matters to handsets now is not so much features, graphics chips and innovative interfaces -- though those do help. What's critical is an easy-to-use development platform that enables programmers to create a wide range of software quickly and easily, so that they can give consumers the content and the software they demand.

Android (whose first handsets are expected later this year) is clearly aimed at that goal. And while it's not open source, Apple has built a complete developer ecosystem around the iPhone, including everything from development tools to a store (which will open next month) for selling finished applications.

That's a significant shift from just a year ago, when programming tools for handsets were specialized and difficult to use, and carriers and handset manufacturers alike kept a tight rein on mobile application deployment.

To support the new open source project, Nokia is establishing the Symbian Foundation, a collective of hardware and software companies that have pledged to donate code and resources to Symbian's development. Phone makers Motorola and Sony Ericsson are on board, contributing software from their UIQ project, a touchscreen interface for Symbian. Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo has pledged support and is contributing its Symbian interface, MOAP(S). Other supporters include AT&T, Samsung and Texas Instruments.

"Establishing the foundation is one of the biggest contributions to an open community ever made," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia, somewhat hyperbolically. But it is true that Nokia has, at one stroke, created an enormous open-source ecosystem, thanks to the huge number of Symbian phones already in use.

Nokia's move is a defensive one, of course. The Symbian Foundation plan is strikingly similar to Google's plan with the Open Handset Alliance, a collective of industry players who have come together to build and nurture the Android open source mobile operating system. On the carrier side, Google has NTT DoCoMo, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile on board. On the hardware side, HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung have signed on to support Android.

Nokia says it is even taking a Google-like approach to rolling out the open source code. It will release components of its code under an open source license at first, with the full OS to follow "over the next two years." Right now, Nokia says, it intends to release Symbian under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.

But not everyone is convinced that open source operating systems are the way to go.

"With the success of Apple's and RIM's models, we would have thought traditional handset vendors would develop and maintain similar proprietary OS models," said Tavis McCourt, a Morgan Keegan analyst. "We view this move as a long-term positive for the smartphone vendors that own their own OS (RIM, Apple and, soon, Palm)."

And it's still too soon to tell which mobile platform will win out. Symbian has the advantage of a large installed base; Android will benefit from the pure innovation seen when developers take a "sky's the limit" approach to building a new OS. And Apple provides a complete, turnkey approach to software sales via its iTunes App Store, which may appeal to consumers.

One thing's for sure: The floodgates are opening, and the coming year will see an explosion of mobile software for a wide range of smartphones.

Additional reporting by Betsy Schiffman.

Ferrari Building a Smaller, Lighter, Quicker Enzo

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 8:00pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia

Ferrari believes smaller, lighter cars will help it cut fuel consumption by 40 percent and emissions by 25 percent, and its engineers are working on a 600-horsepower supercar that weights a scant 2,200 pounds. Look for it in 2010.

How to Throw a Perfect High-Five

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 7:40pm EDT by How-To Wiki

The classic high-five says a lot of things: I'm awesome, you're awesome, the moment we just shared was awesome. But there's nothing more un-awesome than a botched high-five. So the next time you get rad with your buddies, make sure you have your technique down. In Wired.com's How-To Wiki.

Get Started With REST

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 7:10pm EDT by Webmonkey

REST is another of those tech-savvy acronyms that make you cringe in fear. But REST assured, using it is easy. In fact, if you’ve ever filled a form out online, you are already familiar with REST. Make a few GET and POST requests using our REST tutorial.

Inside the MPAA's Understanding of Copyright Infringement

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 6:58pm EDT by Threat Level

Two of the leading lawyers for the Motion Picture Association of America said Tuesday that no actual transfer of copyrighted works is required to prove peer-to-peer infringement under the Copyright Act. "You don't have to prove actual distribution. You need to prove there's works in the share folder, and that is distribution," the MPAA lawyer said.

Cheating Fans Give Avril Lavigne a YouTube Lift

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 6:10pm EDT by Underwire

A bogus campaign pushes the Canadian singer's video toward the top of the heap.

Six Crazy Concept Bikes You'll Never Ride

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 5:00pm EDT by Gadget Lab Blog

Ultralight folding bikes, a bicycle made of cardboard, and a street cruiser with an infinitely variable transmission are just a few of the way-out concepts in this gallery of prototypes and high-end fringe bicycles.

Greener Jet Engine Could Reduce Aviation's Carbon Footprint

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 4:30pm EDT by Dave Demerjian

One of the biggest names in aviation has developed a jet engine that is more efficient, less polluting and cheaper to use than almost everything else in the sky, and it could revolutionize an industry facing skyrocketing fuel prices and mounting pressure to clean up its act.

Pratt & Whitney has spent the better part of two decades developing the geared turbofan engine that burns 12 to 15 percent less fuel than other jet engines and cuts carbon dioxide emissions by 1,500 tons per plane per year. It's being called one of the most exciting developments commercial aviation has seen in years, and it was a hot topic at the Eco-Aviation Conference, where the aviation industry spent two days charting the course to a greener future.

"It's technology like that geared turbofan that's going to drive fuel efficiency forward for this industry in the short and medium term," says Earnest Arvi of the Arvi Group. "Alternative fuels show great potential, but they're decades away."

Pratt & Whitney was just one of the heavy hitters at the conference, an unprecedented gathering that underscored the severity of the issues the industry faces. With airline passenger growth rates and aircraft emissions expected to double by 2020 and 2030, respectively, the pressure is on to address those problems quickly. The conference saw a lot of talk -- and a little green-washing -- about developing alternative fuels to replace jet fuel, easing airport pollution, and building greener aircraft to replace the industry's aging fleet. Nearly 1,000 planes flown by domestic carriers will be more than a quarter of a century old by 2015, and Boeing officials have said that more than 10,400 new planes will be needed in the coming decades and making them as green as possible will go a long way toward reducing commercial aviation's carbon footprint.

That's why Pratt & Whitney has so much to brag about with its geared turbofan, which significantly advances jet-engine technology. Current jet engines have fans that suck air into the combustion chamber, where it is compressed, mixed with fuel, and ignited. Then it's blown through a turbine, generating thrust. It works, but it's inefficient because the fan is connected to the engine and turns at the same speed as the turbine. Fans work best at low speed, while turbines work best at high speed.

Pratt & Whitney solved that problem with a gearbox that lets the fan and turbine spin independently. The fan is larger and it spins at one-third the speed of the turbine, creating a quieter, more powerful engine the company says requires less fuel, emits less C02 and costs 30 percent less to maintain. Pratt & Whitney has been torture-testing the engines, and its engineers have simulated more than 40,000 takeoffs and landings.

The company's VP of Technology and Environment, Alan Epstein, says the engine will not only cut CO2 emissions, but will also reduce nitrogen-oxide emissions, noise and -- ultimately -- ownership costs. "For the next generation of single-aisle aircraft, there's no question that engine performance will be key," he says. "Both economically and environmentally, this engine will deliver significant benefits."

The industry seems to agree and is lining up behind the engine, which Pratt & Whitney expects to have in regular service by 2013. It's already slated for jets currently being developed by Mitsubishi and Bombardier.

Pratt & Whitney isn't the only firm developing greener aircraft. Airbus is dabbling in alternative fuels and researching ways of recycling more than 6,000 planes slated for retirement during the next 20 years. Boeing is dabbling with hydrogen fuel cells and investing in algal fuels while pushing lighter planes like its 787 Dreamliner. Boeing says composite materials make up nearly 50 percent of the plane, which can carry as many as 330 people, making it far lighter than other planes its size. It is 20 percent more fuel-efficient and produces 20 percent fewer emissions than similarly sized aircraft, company officials say. Boeing is betting composite construction will bring huge improvements in fuel economy and emissions to commercial aviation.

Further gains could come from improving the nation's outdated air traffic control system, something nearly everyone at the conference said must happen. The current system is based on radar technology that dates to World War II, and plans to replace it with a satellite system known as NextGen are at a standstill while FAA reauthorization is stalled in Congress. But the industry has several other ideas, from allowing flights through military airspace to widespread adoption of a quieter, more efficient landing technique called continuous descent approach. Industry experts say adopting such steps could significantly reduce fuel consumptions and delays. The International Air Traffic Association says cutting just one minute from every commercial flight would save more than 1.9 million tons of fuel and 6.3 million tons of CO2 annually.

The air travel industry has taken a lot of heat for being slow to address its environmental impact, and some say parts of the eco-conference were just slick PR. But even some critics say the fact the industry is discussing environmental stewardship shows it's finally getting serious about the issue -- if only because doing so is in its best interest. "Climate change could mean fewer coastal vacation destinations, inaccessible airports and a general economic malaise that cuts travel spending," says Liz Barratt-Brown of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Looked at in that context, you could argue that the aviation sector has the most to lose from global warming."

Charter Freezes Web Eavesdropping Plan

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 1:27pm EDT by Threat Level

Charter Communications, the nation's fourth largest ISP, is halting a plan to test ad technology that monitors its customers' web and search engine usage. The move comes after customers complained about the proposed pilots and a powerful lawmaker questioned the legality of the eavesdropping.

Review: Nokia E66 Is Business up Front, Party in the Back

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 1:00pm EDT by Gadget Lab

The new Nokia E66 smartphone is out, and it comes with some goodies: a beautiful, chassis, solid web apps and a button that can switch you to two separate screen modes. Trouble is, the thing heats up hotter than the sun and tears through batteries like greased lightning.

Watching the Skies: Space Is Really Big — But Not Too Big to Map

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Michael D. Lemonick

In 1930, a young astronomer named Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto. He did it with a high tech marvel called a blink comparator; he put two photographs of the same patch of sky taken on different nights into the contraption and flipped back and forth between them. Stars would stay fixed, but objects like comets, asteroids, and planets moved.

Astronomers have since traded photographic plates for massive digital images. But Tombaugh's method — take a picture of the sky, take another one, compare — is still used to detect fast-changing stellar phenomena, like supernovae or asteroids headed toward Earth.

True, imaging the entire sky, and understanding those images, won't be easy. The first telescope that will be able to collect all that data, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, won't be finished until 2014. Perched atop Cerro Pachón, a mountain in northern Chile, the LSST will have a 27.5-foot mirror and a field of view 50 times the size of the full moon seen from Earth. Its digital camera will suck down 3.5 gigapixels of imagery every 17 seconds. "At that rate," says Michael Strauss, a Princeton astrophysicist, "the numbers get very big very fast."

The LSST builds on the most ambitious attempt to catalog the heavens so far, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Operating from a New Mexico mountaintop, the SDSS has returned about 25 terabytes of data since 1998, most of that in images. It has measured the precise distance to a million galaxies and has discovered about 500,000 quasars. But the Sloan's mirror is just one-tenth the power of the mirror planned for LSST, and its usable field of view just one-seventh the size. Sloan has been a workhorse, but it simply doesn't have the oomph to image the entire night sky, over and over, to look for things that change.

The LSST will cover the sky every three days. And within the petabytes of information it collects may lurk things nobody has even imagined — assuming astronomers can figure out how to teach their computers to look for objects no one has ever seen. It's the first attempt to sort astronomical data on this scale, says Princeton astrophysicist Robert Lupton, who oversaw data processing for the SDSS and is helping design the LSST. But the new images may allow him and his colleagues to watch supernovae explode, find undiscovered comets, and maybe even spot that killer asteroid.

The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn't Just More — More Is Different

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 12:00am EDT

Sensors everywhere. Infinite storage. Clouds of processors. Our ability to capture, warehouse, and understand massive amounts of data is changing science, medicine, business, and technology. As our collection of facts and figures grows, so will the opportunity to find answers to fundamental questions. Because in the era of big data, more isn't just more. More is different.
The End of Theory
The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

Feeding the Masses:
Data In, Crop Predictions Out

Chasing the Quark:
Sometimes You Need to Throw Information Away

Winning the Lawsuit:
Data Miners Dig for Dirt

Tracking the News:
A Smarter Way to Predict Riots and Wars

Spotting the Hot Zones:
Now We Can Monitor Epidemics Hour by Hour

Sorting the World:
Google Invents New Way to Manage Data

Watching the Skies:
Space Is Big — But Not Too Big to Map

Scanning Our Skeletons:
Bone Images Show Wear and Tear

Tracking Air Fares:
Elaborate Algorithms Predict Ticket Prices

Predicting the Vote:
Pollsters Identify Tiny Voting Blocs

Pricing Terrorism:
Insurers Gauge Risks, Costs

Visualizing Big Data:
Bar Charts for Words

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Chris Anderson

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."

So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don't have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don't have to settle for models at all.

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.

Google's founding philosophy is that we don't know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that's good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required. That's why Google can translate languages without actually "knowing" them (given equal corpus data, Google can translate Klingon into Farsi as easily as it can translate French into German). And why it can match ads to content without any knowledge or assumptions about the ads or the content.

Speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this past March, Peter Norvig, Google's research director, offered an update to George Box's maxim: "All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them."

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

The big target here isn't advertising, though. It's science. The scientific method is built around testable hypotheses. These models, for the most part, are systems visualized in the minds of scientists. The models are then tested, and experiments confirm or falsify theoretical models of how the world works. This is the way science has worked for hundreds of years.

Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. Consider physics: Newtonian models were crude approximations of the truth (wrong at the atomic level, but still useful). A hundred years ago, statistically based quantum mechanics offered a better picture — but quantum mechanics is yet another model, and as such it, too, is flawed, no doubt a caricature of a more complex underlying reality. The reason physics has drifted into theoretical speculation about n-dimensional grand unified models over the past few decades (the "beautiful story" phase of a discipline starved of data) is that we don't know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses — the energies are too high, the accelerators too expensive, and so on.

Now biology is heading in the same direction. The models we were taught in school about "dominant" and "recessive" genes steering a strictly Mendelian process have turned out to be an even greater simplification of reality than Newton's laws. The discovery of gene-protein interactions and other aspects of epigenetics has challenged the view of DNA as destiny and even introduced evidence that environment can influence inheritable traits, something once considered a genetic impossibility.

In short, the more we learn about biology, the further we find ourselves from a model that can explain it.

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

The best practical example of this is the shotgun gene sequencing by J. Craig Venter. Enabled by high-speed sequencers and supercomputers that statistically analyze the data they produce, Venter went from sequencing individual organisms to sequencing entire ecosystems. In 2003, he started sequencing much of the ocean, retracing the voyage of Captain Cook. And in 2005 he started sequencing the air. In the process, he discovered thousands of previously unknown species of bacteria and other life-forms.

If the words "discover a new species" call to mind Darwin and drawings of finches, you may be stuck in the old way of doing science. Venter can tell you almost nothing about the species he found. He doesn't know what they look like, how they live, or much of anything else about their morphology. He doesn't even have their entire genome. All he has is a statistical blip — a unique sequence that, being unlike any other sequence in the database, must represent a new species.

This sequence may correlate with other sequences that resemble those of species we do know more about. In that case, Venter can make some guesses about the animals — that they convert sunlight into energy in a particular way, or that they descended from a common ancestor. But besides that, he has no better model of this species than Google has of your MySpace page. It's just data. By analyzing it with Google-quality computing resources, though, Venter has advanced biology more than anyone else of his generation.

This kind of thinking is poised to go mainstream. In February, the National Science Foundation announced the Cluster Exploratory, a program that funds research designed to run on a large-scale distributed computing platform developed by Google and IBM in conjunction with six pilot universities. The cluster will consist of 1,600 processors, several terabytes of memory, and hundreds of terabytes of storage, along with the software, including Google File System, IBM's Tivoli, and an open source version of Google's MapReduce. Early CluE projects will include simulations of the brain and the nervous system and other biological research that lies somewhere between wetware and software.

Learning to use a "computer" of this scale may be challenging. But the opportunity is great: The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.

There's no reason to cling to our old ways. It's time to ask: What can science learn from Google?

Chris Anderson (canderson@wired.com) is the editor in chief of Wired.

Feeding the Masses: Data In, Crop Predictions Out

Posted: June 24th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Ben Paynter

Farmer's Almanac is finally obsolete. Last October, agricultural consultancy Lanworth not only correctly projected that the US Department of Agriculture had overestimated the nation's corn crop, it nailed the margin: roughly 200 million bushels. That's just 1.5 percent fewer kernels but still a significant shortfall for tight markets, causing a 13 percent price hike and jitters in the emerging ethanol industry. When the USDA downgraded expectations a month after Lanworth's prediction, the little Illinois-based company was hailed as a new oracle among soft-commodity traders — who now pay the firm more than $100,000 a year for a timely heads-up on fluctuations in wheat, corn, and soybean supplies.

The USDA bases its estimates on questionnaires and surveys — the agency calls a sample of farmers and asks what's what. Lanworth uses satellite images, digital soil maps, and weather forecasts to project harvests at the scale of individual fields. It even looks at crop conditions and rotation patterns — combining all the numbers to determine future yields.

Founded in 2000, Lanworth started by mapping forests for land managers and timber interests. Tracking trends in sleepy woodlands required just a few outer-space snapshots a year. But food crops are a fast-moving target. Now the company sorts 100 gigs of intel every day, adding to a database of 50 terabytes and counting. It's also moving into world production-prediction — wheat fields in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine are already in the data set, as are corn and soy plots in Brazil and Argentina. The firm expects to reach petabyte scale in five years. "There are questions about how big the total human food supply is and whether we as a country are exposed to risk," says Lanworth's director of information services, Nick Kouchoukos. "We're going after the global balance sheet."

June 24, 1947: They Came From ... Outer Space?

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Tony Long

1947: Pilot Kenneth Arnold sights a series of unidentified flying objects near Washington's Mt. Rainier. It's the first widely reported UFO sighting in the United States, and, thanks to Arnold's description of what he saw, leads the press to coin the term flying saucer.

Arnold was an experienced pilot with more than 9,000 hours of flying time. He had diverted from his flight plan -- Chehalis to Yakima, Washington -- to search for a Marine Corps C-46 transport plane reported down in the Cascades near the southwest slope of Mt. Rainier. A sweep of the area revealed nothing, and Arnold resumed his original course.

As Arnold recalled, the afternoon was crystal clear, and he was cruising at an altitude of 9,200 feet. A minute or two after noting a DC-4 about 15 miles behind and to the left of him, he was startled by something bright reflecting off his plane. At first he thought he had nearly hit another aircraft but as he looked off in the direction the light had come from, he saw nine "peculiar-looking" aircraft flying rapidly in formation toward Mt. Rainier.

As these strange, tailless craft flew between his plane and Mt. Rainier and then off toward distant Mt. Adams, Arnold noted their remarkable speed -- he later calculated that they were moving at around 1,700 mph -- and said he got a pretty good look at their black silhouettes outlined against Rainier's snowy peak. He later described them as saucer-like disks … something the gentlemen of the press glommed on to very quickly.

At the time, Arnold said, the appearance of these flying saucers didn't particularly alarm him, because he assumed they were some kind of experimental military aircraft. If they were, nobody in the War Department (soon to be merged into the Department of Defense) was saying.

In fact, the official Army Air Corps position was that Arnold had either seen a mirage or was hallucinating. He insisted he was perfectly alert and lucid, adding that he was not a publicity hound, either. He also invited both the Army and the FBI to investigate. The Army sent a couple of officers out to talk with Arnold. Even though they concluded that "a man of [his] character and apparent integrity" almost certainly saw what he claimed to have seen, the Army's initial verdict remained unchanged.

As Arnold's story leaked out, other people stepped forward to say they had seen the objects, too. The most-credible report may have come from a United Airlines crew, which reported seeing nine similar disk-like objects over Idaho only 10 days after Arnold's sighting.

Whether Arnold actually saw something or not, the resulting publicity touched off a worldwide spate of UFO sightings. Barely two weeks after Arnold's flight, the Roswell story broke, and UFO hysteria was on.

Was it the power of suggestion that led to all these sightings, or was 1947 a peak travel year for little green men? You decide.

Source: History.com, Project 1947

Gallery: Surreal to Sublime, Wired.com Readers' Geekiest ASCII Art

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Lisa Katayama

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We asked for ASCII, and you delivered.

Two weeks ago, Wired.com launched an art contest inspired by our gallery, "Art and ASCII: The Stories Behind All Those Brackets, Slashes and Carets."

Thanks to all you keyboard art experts, we got dozens of entries that blew our minds. To help us judge the contest, we solicited the help of two ASCII art experts from Japan, entrepreneur Osamu Higuchi and online media expert Ichiroo Kiyota.

The votes are in, and the winner is John AuCoin of Texas, who submitted this drawing of the Creation of Adam. Congrats John -- we'll have some Wired.com swag headed your way momentarily. Click through to see other geeky ASCII creations, from pop culture stars to robots.

Creation of Adam

By John AuCoin of Houston

The judges said: "This is an orthodox piece of work with a Japanese manga-esque touch." AuCoin claims this was the first time he ever tried ASCII art. Apparently he's a natural.
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Astral Apple

By Maija Haavisto of Helsinki, Finland

Haavisto says: "In 2004 I got interested in surrealism in ASCII art and ever since I've drawn several surreal ASCII pieces. This is one of my own favorites. It was drawn for an Apple-themed demo party in 2006. I wanted to show that ASCII art was not just about animals and cartoon characters."
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Tiger

By Maija Haavisto of Helsinki, Finland

Haavisto says: "I spent weeks tweaking every little detail of this picture. I like combining line art and so-called 'solid style' in the same piece for more lively results."
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Scooter Girl

By Piller Gregerson of Norfolk, Virginia

Gregerson says: "It's a punk rock woman with a punk rock scooter!"
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Servbot

By Sadas Dasda, location unknown
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Dwight

By Sadas Dasda, location unknown
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Giant Robots

By Joseph Barrile of New York City

Barrile says: "This piece is part of a collection of four ASCII Battle-Bots and the mad scientist who created them."
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Battles show poster

By Michael Tabie of Orlando, Florida

Tabie says: "This is an ASCII art piece I created for a gig poster to promote a Battles show here in Orlando. It's actually screen-printed two colors (white and silver) on black French paper, 18x24. It's featured in this year's Graphis poster annual."
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Radiohead poster

By Todd Slater of Round Rock, Texas

Slater says: "I designed this hand-pulled silkscreen poster for Radiohead's show in Virginia a few weeks ago. The image is a comment on how the band distributed their newest album, In Rainbows."
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Captain Picard

By Andy Evelhoch of Thousand Oaks, California
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Stephen Colbert

By Taylor Handleton of Maryland

Handleton says: "This is everybody's favorite reporter, Stephen Colbert. I can't seem to find the source image, but I made it in a few hours in Metapad (for the transparency)."
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Marlboro poster

By Nozomu Wakabayashi of Kanagawa, Japan

Wakabayashi says: "Making ASCII art is a hobby. There's a lot of hype about the high price of cigarettes these days, so I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if there was a cigarette poster like this one?'"

Recording Industry Decries AM-FM Broadcasting as 'A Form of Piracy'

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 8:00pm EDT by Threat Level

The recording industry and U.S. radio companies are squaring off over whether AM and FM radio broadcasters should pay royalties to singers, musicians and their labels. Billions of dollars are at stake. The recording industry is seeking new income avenues in the wake of wanton peer-to-peer piracy and declining CD sales in part due to the iPod and satellite radio. A U.S. House subcommittee could vote as early as Thursday on a royalty measure.

'Futurama: The Beast With a Billion Backs' Ramps Up the Raunch

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 7:30pm EDT by Underwire

Fry, Bender and the rest of the crew return with a surplus of intergalactic one-liners (and an extra ration of adult humor) in the franchise's second direct-to-DVD movie release. See an exclusive clip on Wired.com.

Nation's Spies Say Climate Change Could Spark War

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 5:30pm EDT by Danger Room

Environmental groups have been warning for years that global climate change could make already-tense parts of the world even worse, and even spark whole new conflicts. Now, in a classified national document, the nation's spies are saying pretty much the same thing.

DNA Testing Company Stops Internet Sales in California

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 5:30pm EDT by Wired Science

The regulatory battle over genetic testing has claimed its first victim in the state of California as HairDX shutters its direct-to-consumer Internet sales after being sent a cease-and-desist order from the state's public health department.

Save Money, Go Adventuring With Japanese RPG Piggy Bank

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 4:51pm EDT by Game|Life

BankQuest, a castle-shaped repository for loose change, makes fun the coin of the realm.

Report: Beatles Eye 'Rock Band,' 'Guitar Hero'

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 11:47am EDT by Listening Post

They aren't on iTunes yet, but word is that the keepers of the Beatles flame are considering a licensing deal that would put music by the Fab Four on Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Was that tie-in with American Idol the crack in the dike that make lead to many other interesting things?

Romenesko and the Dawning of Gossip Journalism

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 10:45am EDT by Howell Raines, Portfolio.com

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Howell Raines was executive editor of The New York Times from 2001 to 2003.

Back in 1999, I was at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank in St. Petersburg, Florida, when Jim Romenesko was introduced as Poynter's newest hire. Sandy Rowe, editor of the Oregonian, in Portland, was there too, along with a venerable prof from Columbia’s journalism school. As ink-stained traditionalists, we were aflutter about Poynter president Jim Naughton's nervy decision to hire an obscure gossip blogger to increase traffic on Poynter's dignified website. Poynter called our little group of visiting editors its advisory board, which meant we got a free trip to sunny Tampa Bay every January. Little did we suspect that in the person of Romenesko, a shy journalism nerd from Wisconsin, we were looking at the future—or at least the next decade.

I found Romenesko recently, where he begins every day, in his home office. Since he inhabits a virtual world, it was a virtual interview. I watched the famously reclusive blogger on my computer via an iChat video hookup that let him see me as I asked questions about the death of American newspapers. Romenesko described how his inspiration, circa 1998—to link up all the journalists in America on a blog originally called MediaGossip—had made him a cloistered digital monk, rising at 5 a.m. every day to begin doggedly posting tidbits of journalism-related news gleaned from other websites (he looks at more than 100 sites a day). A true obsessive, he quit taking vacations because he knew his second-guessing would drive any stand-in editor crazy. In the early days, he read some print newspapers every morning, but like the rest of America, he got over it: "They can stack up for a week plus, and maybe on a weekend, I'll finally get to them."

Romenesko quickly found himself living a lonely-guy existence. "I was basically stuck in my apartment," he says. “I would find myself at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, still in my bathrobe." This way of life grew from his hunch about the future of social interaction. "The first time I really sampled the internet, in 1989," he says, "I knew this would be a culture-changing force, and I wanted to be part of it."

So did the disgruntled newsies who quickly discovered that by having Romenesko post their internal memos they could manipulate their bosses. Poynter had retitled Romenesko's "one-man show," as he calls his site, to remove the noxious word gossip. In short order, Bill Mitchell, the director of Poynter Online who first spotted Romenesko, said that his new star helped Poynter surpass the journalism reviews as the place where professionals get their "news about news." The site soared to ever-greater prominence after 9/11, Romenesko says, and by "following little dramas in journalism, like the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times." Ouch! It's true that the late Gerald Boyd and I, then the top two editors at the Times, were among the first to get Romenesko'd out of our jobs. According to Roy Peter Clark, the senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, the verb form of Romenesko's name quickly established itself as journalistic shorthand for getting zapped, often fatally, by unflattering publicity. I never really blamed the messenger. Since then, however, hard times have hit the newspaper business, and today, many editors are doing just that, grousing that Romenesko's blog at poynter.org feeds gloom and doom in the nation's newsrooms with its instantaneous reporting of layoffs, declining ad revenues, and fire-sale prices being paid for metropolitan dailies.

Romenesko himself sees the irony. With typical Midwestern modesty, he says he didn't set out to create a media-economics monitoring service but rather a national "community of journalists" for "people like me who are obsessed with newspapers." That his site has become a high-tech tom-tom for angst-ridden members of a dying tribe was merely a side effect. In a sense, Romenesko is both the medium and the message. Newspaper publishers assumed that even if the printing press disappeared, the internet would still have an insatiable need for their basic product—verified facts, hierarchically arranged by importance. But Romenesko's rapid growth showed that even newsrooms are part of the emerging market for an unprocessed sprawl of information, delivered immediately and with as few filters as possible between the fingertips of one laptop user and the eyeballs of another. In short, it's not technology per se that’s killing newspapers; it’s plummeting demand for quality information.

That's the big picture for journalism and Romenesko. They are both being done in by large impersonal forces like the commoditization of news, accelerated obsolescence, mutating news values, and what happens when newspapers try to wring 21st-century profits from the 18th-century technique of transporting, by cart and hand, individualized packages of words on paper. So there was something vaguely Conradian about the video image of Romenesko’s apartment and his soft pleasant features, and his obviously sincere devotion to words on paper that came through my laptop's tiny speaker. It's not that either of us was mumbling about "the horror, the horror." But we are both survivors of the print era destined to be bucked off the same bronco of change. Some of us and our papers are already history. I'm not sure Romenesko has yet grasped that the informational storm he unleashed a decade ago is already undermining his prominence as the most famous trade name in media blogging.

Right now, though, life is good. Romenesko is Poynter's highest-paid nonexecutive employee, at more than $170,000 a year. The advent of WiFi has freed him from his one-bedroom apartment in Evanston, Illinois. By 6 a.m, he's dressed and off to the Starbucks across the street, drinking coffee and multitasking on his MacBook Air. He also runs Starbucks Gossip, an independent blog about the company, a job that "pays for my coffee and maybe a sandwich." Then he moves to other WiFi-enabled spots, notably the Unicorn, a café crowded with "old fogies like me reading newspapers" and Northwestern University students munching sandwiches and staring at their computer screens. "I like to think they don’t see me as a dinosaur site," Romenesko says when I suggest that he, like print newspapers, has an aging readership, and the kids are probably not on his blog. Indeed, there are signs that younger journalists are looking elsewhere for trade news that is intentionally satirical and loaded with political spin and contempt for the bosses.

One site of choice these days is Gawker, which promises "media gossip and pop culture round the clock." Gawker now reaches an audience several times larger than Romenesko's and has paid backhanded tributes to "mild-mannered Jim Romenesko, who runs the most feared blog in journalism (except for this one)." Gawker has also needled the pioneer of its craft about his Starbucks gig, and its readers tend to speak of Romenesko more as a historical figure than a must-read. "I don’t feel obligated to check it daily since a lot of the news doesn’t directly relate to me," says a young New York-based reporter at a major newspaper. "I think Romenesko is what Gawker would look like if it had morals. It's basically a newspaper on newspapers and provides a great top-line summary for a dying industry—an invaluable tool for that master's thesis 20 years from now on the fall of paper."

Even without such scholarship, we know that the internet chews up content faster than print or broadcasting, and more impersonally. The swift rise and incipient eclipse of Romenesko illustrates what a quick trip it is from guru to geezer in cyberspace, and the Manhattan buzz is that Gawker, too, has already peaked. Traditionalist critics view Romenesko as the guy who opened the first and biggest hole in the sacred wall between news and gossip in reporting about the media. The newer media blogs, however, see him as being confined by passé, self-imposed rules, such as his steady refusal to make his own website into a political soapbox and post the most extreme commentators from the alternative press. Given my age, I tend to regard Romenesko's legitimation of gossip as unfortunate and his devotion to the tradition of fairness as noble. There's a word for these kinds of distinctions between the tawdry state of today's journalism and the golden age of immutable values: quaint.

In little more than a century, journalism has been conducted under a variety of short-lived labels. Yellow journalism begat objective journalism, which begat investigative journalism, which begat advocacy journalism. To some of us, the New Journalism looked like a destination, but that was before the passage through gossip journalism to our next stop: fact-free journalism.

The fogies are in an uproar about the internet's glorification of opinions from a nation of bloggers sitting around, figuratively speaking, in Romenesko's old bathrobes. Oregonian editor Sandy Rowe, one of the more original thinkers at a legacy newspaper, counsels us to ignore the "journalistic tizzy fit of righteous indignation." We were never as careful with facts as we claimed to be before Romenesko's great leap, which she defines as "the whole notion of the viral broadcast of often unverified information." According to Rowe, the instant peer review that Romenesko has instituted by nationalizing newspaper shoptalk has two sides: "At its worst, it stifles creativity, makes executives risk-averse, and wastes valuable time and energy," Rowe said in an e-mail exchange in which we shared memories about the day we met Romenesko. "Advantages: It's fast, it's free, it's efficient, and sometimes it's even correct.”

I would simply add that you should read Romenesko while you can. He won't be around forever, but his contribution will last. I’m not talking about his wholesaling of newsroom gossip; I'm talking about his trailblazing business model, succeeding where the websites of major newspapers have pretty much failed. That is, he's proven that speedily aggregated, often unsubstantiated information is marketable. Both the Huffington Post and the investors behind Tina Brown's proposed aggregation site are also betting on that.

Because Romenesko is an online pioneer with old-fashioned newspaper values, he chose to do it in a nonprofit environment, but money can be made with his formula. That's why Poynter has steadily boosted his pay and why Roy Peter Clark and others at the institute are anxious that an internet giant like Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo will soon dangle a big salary in front of him to shift-key his daily bundle of nearly 100,000 unique visitors over to its website. Poynter comforts itself with the thought that Romenesko didn’t found MediaGossip back in the dawn of the digital era with the idea of becoming rich. But like the rest of us, he might not mind wealth if it plopped into his lap. He wisely declined a 2002 job offer from Steven Brill, founder of the now defunct Brill's Content. With the velocity of creative destruction in the information industry ever increasing, though, I say this to the Monk of Evanston about the next time the big dogs come sniffing around: Take the money.

Submit Your Best UFO Pics

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 6:16am EDT by Autopia

Police in Britain say a flying saucer almost hit their helicopter, which makes us wonder -- who else out there has had a close encounter with a UFO? Submit your favorite pics.

George Carlin Dies at 71

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 2:14am EDT by Listening Post

George Carlin, who pushed the boundaries of language and culture in five decades as a stand-up comic, dies of a heart attack. He was 71

June 23, 1983: DNS Test Sets Stage for Internet Growth

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred

1983: Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel run the first successful test of the automated, distributed Domain Name System. DNS will lay the foundation for the massive expansion, popularization and commercialization of the internet.

The fledgling internet of the time (Arpanet and CSnet) relied on a bulky and exponentially growing "phonebook" of addresses called the "host tables." It was a text file maintained by SRI International in Menlo Park, California. You contacted another computer on the network by looking up its numerical address, and typing it in.

Craig Partridge, another DNS pioneer (.ppt), later called the host tables an "operational nightmare." Everyone on the network had to copy it nightly to get the latest version. There "were many opportunities for error," Partridge wrote, "and we experienced many of them."

"People had figured out that the old scheme wouldn't work forever," Mockapetris told Computerworld a few years ago. He worked at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, and his manager, Jon Postel, assigned him to devise a new way of assigning and recording internet addresses.

Their solution was brilliant. It still used an underlying system of numerical designations, but allowed you to reach a computer by name as well. It was also hierarchical and distributed. Top-level domains would mark out various types of users, like .mil or .edu. Once a name like berkeley.edu got assigned to the University of California at Berkeley, its local network administrator could independently add computers within the domain, numbering and naming them. Or the Berkeley administrator could subdelegate areas of the domain.

After testing the new plan and tweaking it for a few months, Mockapetris, Postel and Partridge published their idea in a Request for Comments (RFC) memorandum in November 1983. The system gained gradual adoption over the next few years (with prodding from the Arpanet overlords at Darpa), first supplementing and then entirely supplanting the host tables.

The first generic, top-level domains weren't officially established until October 1984 (and implemented in January 1985), but they live on: .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .net and .org. Though DNS was originally designed to handle 50 million-plus entries, it's been expanded and internationalized. There are now probably more than a billion entries, counting all the DNS names hidden behind firewalls.

Without the Domain Name System, it's doubtful the internet could have grown and flourished as it has. Would a dot-com boom (and bust) have been the same as a dot-22.33 boom (and bust)? If numbers were being used as addresses, would Web 2.0 have emerged as Web B? Would I be writing this? Would you be reading it?

Source: Various

Regulatory Deadline Looms over DNA Testers

Posted: June 22nd, 2008, 11:00pm EDT by Wired Science

Genetics testing companies face off against California's health department requirement that they submit plans for coming into compliance with the biological materials testing laws or face civil and criminal sanctions.

Console Makers Open Doors to Indie Game Designers

Posted: June 22nd, 2008, 5:25pm EDT by Associated Press

The game industry has been a tough sell for indie game makers. However, now players like Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony are opening up digital distribution channels and reaching out to the independents.

Brain Drainer Puts Audience to Sleep With Music

Posted: June 22nd, 2008, 4:51pm EDT by Listening Post

Famed Japanese "sleep doctor" Takuro Endo attempts to lull an audience of 1,500 to sleep with a playlist that includes Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Japanese tenor Masafumi Akikawa. The result? A partial snooze.

NASA Hopes for Microbe-Friendly Mars

Posted: June 22nd, 2008, 1:25pm EDT by Associated Press

Bizarre microbes, like those that survive in punishing environments on Earth, might also thrive on Mars, some researchers speculate.

Harvard Docs Uncover New Clue in Alzheimer's Battle

Posted: June 22nd, 2008, 1:08pm EDT by Associated Press

Researchers discover that a particular form of beta-amyloid, a sticky protein found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, causes dementia in rats where other forms of the same protein don't. The findings help explain why not all patients with the protein develop the disease.

'Cinematic Titanic' Makes Hot Hollywood Debut

Posted: June 22nd, 2008, 5:00am EDT by Underwire

While hosting an impressive collection of fresh studio features, award-winning documentaries and competitive short films, the Los Angeles Film Festival turned the spotlight toward celluloid's ugly side with a painfully funny live screening of The Doomsday Machine with the cast of Cinematic Titanic.

GlaxoSmithKline Goes Open Source on Cancer Info

Posted: June 21st, 2008, 9:44pm EDT by Wired Science

GlaxoSmithKline donates a massive amount of information -- gleaned from studying cancer cells -- to the online research community. The data, which now lives on a website run by the National Cancer Institute, should aid in the discovery of new drugs and blood tests.

Critics Blast Pending Clean Air Rule

Posted: June 21st, 2008, 2:37pm EDT by Associated Press

Opposition mounts to a pending Environmental Protection Agency rule that some say would threaten air quality in national parks.

Pasture of Muppets: Inside the Metallica Reviews Scandal

Posted: June 21st, 2008, 10:44am EDT by Listening Post

Listening Post scored an interview with the editor of the only publication that refused to pull their review of Metallica's upcoming album. As heavy metal continues to evolve, its publicists remain tragically rooted in the past.

Super Antennas, Made From Invisible Stuff

Posted: June 21st, 2008, 9:30am EDT by Danger Room

The Pentagon is using "metamaterials" for revolutionary new antennas with obvious commercial spin-offs. These bundles of carbon fiber might be used to create an invisibility cloak, or even a cloak of silence -- some day.

Microcontrollers Made Easy for Hardware Hackers

Posted: June 21st, 2008, 6:00am EDT by Geek Dad

With a little training, hardware hackers will find that arduinos, or easily programmed microcontrollers, are inexpensive, fun and a cinch to manipulate.

Scientists: Did Ice on Mars Ever Melt?

Posted: June 21st, 2008, 2:36am EDT by Associated Press

The discovery of water ice near Mars' north pole is big news, but scientists still don't know whether that ice ever melted and remained liquid for long enough to sustain life on the red planet.

Video: Watch Fire Researchers Torch Homes, Offices and Warehouses

Posted: June 21st, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Alexis Madrigal

:
To model how flames turn buildings into ashes, the nation's leading fire researchers don't play with matches over the sink. Instead they burn down entire homes, cubicles and warehouses.

At the National Institutes of Standards and Technologies, researchers set huge fires under a 40-foot-long by 30-foot-wide exhaust hood that is connected to an $8 million control unit.

Using measurements of oxygen consumption, the researchers can precisely determine the temperatures inside the room as well as the heat-release rates of different materials. Then, using software like Fire Dynamics Simulator and Smokeview, the researchers run virtual and real-world side-by-side comparisons of how combustion works.

By modeling the way flames and smoke travel under real conditions, the fire scientists are creating new strategies and technologies for fighting tough blazes.

In this video gallery, you'll see Christmas trees fires, dorm rooms ablaze, and cubicles melting.

Poor Bunny

In this clip, we see how quickly a dried out Scotch-pine Christmas tree can light a room on fire. Within 30 seconds, the room is engulfed in flames. According to the NIST, holiday trees account for more than 400 fires, 10 deaths and $15 million in property damage every year.

Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
:
At the end of the nerd-classic Office Space, Milton, the much-abused office loser, sets fire to the cubes of Penetrode, where the main characters work. Here, fire scientists give you an unintentional peek inside the movie's end. The video shows how quickly flames spread from ignition to a point known as flashover, when the room becomes engulfed in flame, in an open office plan.

Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
:
When you can't trust your college roommate not to accidentally drop a lit cigarette into a trash can, this video proves that you don't need to -- as long as your college has sprinklers installed.

Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
:
Following a six-fatality fire in Chicago in 2003, NIST modeled what happened on the 12th story of the Cook County Administration building. To understand how the fire got out of hand, the researchers measured the heat release rate of different components of the office building. In this video, we see four workstations with chairs in a 23-foot by 24-foot enclosure.

Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
:
Here's another video from the series of tests intended to model the Cook County Administration building fire. This time the researchers tested a single workstation that wasn't enclosed. Eventually, these tests helped NIST recommend safety changes that should prevent future fires from turning deadly in similar environments.

Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
:
Part of NIST's mission is to educate the public about how fires work. In this video, we watch as a living room goes from spark to flashover in mere minutes.

Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
:
When firefighters lit up this Phoenix warehouse, they employed infrared cameras, lasers, sonar, vibration sensors and video to look for clues about how to predict structural collapse. They didn't find any dead giveaways, even with all that tech, but their conclusions and data can be seen here (.pdf).

Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski
:
For firefighters, one of the worst things that can happen is the building collapsing on top of them, so figuring out how and when that's going to happen has been a focus of NIST research. In this video, dummy firefighters on top of a burning house fall through the roof before being pulled out by ropes.

Video courtesy Daniel Madrzykowski

Photographer Documents Secret Satellites -- All 189 of Them

Posted: June 21st, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Bryan Gardiner

BERKELEY, California -- For most people, photographing something that isn't there might be tough. Not so for Trevor Paglen.

His shots of 189 secret spy satellites are the subject of a new exhibit -- despite the fact that, officially speaking, the satellites don't exist. The Other Night Sky, on display at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum through September 14, is only a small selection from the 1,500 astrophotographs Paglen has taken thus far.

In taking these photos, Paglen is trying to draw a metaphorical connection between modern government secrecy and the doctrine of the Catholic Church in Galileo's time.

"What would it mean to find these secret moons in orbit around the earth in the same way that Galileo found these moons that shouldn't exist in orbit around Jupiter?" Paglen says.

Satellites are just the latest in Paglen's photography of supposedly nonexistent subjects. To date, he's snapped haunting images of various military sites in the Nevada deserts, "torture taxis" (private planes that whisk people off to secret prisons without judicial oversight) and uniform patches from various top-secret military programs.

The nearly vertical streak in this image shows a satellite called Keyhole 12-3 crossing the sky near the constellation of Scorpio.
Photo: Trevor Paglen
While all of Paglen's projects are the result of meticulous research, he's also the first to admit that his photos aren't necessarily revelatory. That's by design. Like the blurry abstractions of his super-telephoto images showing secret military installations in Nevada, the tiny blips of satellites streaking across the night sky in his new series of photos are meant more as reminders rather than as documentation.

"I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy," Paglen explains. "You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons."

More significant than the discovery itself, Paglen says, was the idea that anyone with a telescope could verify it and see the same exact thing that Galileo saw -- an idea Paglen is trying to re-create in his own photographs.

"It really was analogous to a certain kind of promise of democracy," says Paglen, who sees a similar anti-authoritarian premise running through his own work.

Paglen says his most recent project is the culmination of close to two years of trial-and-error experimentation with astrophotography, untold hours of fieldwork and analysis, an ongoing collaboration with amateur astronomers, and many nights in his Berkeley backyard and at California's Mono Lake.

"Lacrosse/Onyx II Passing Through Draco (USA 69)" shows the transit of another surveillance satellite.
Photo: Trevor Paglen
To capture his images, the researcher and "experimental geographer" employs a motorized mount with various combinations of telescopes and digital and large-format film cameras. Paglen uses spy-satellite data compiled by Ted Molczan -- a renowned amateur astronomer profiled by Wired magazine in 2006 -- to predict where a given "black satellite" will be in the sky. Then he decides how he wants to compose the image.

"I'll find where a star will be in the compositional plane," he says. "Then I'll use one telescope, which is attached to a webcam, to focus on that star."

With the help of a computer program that controls the mount of the telescope and keeps it focused on the heavenly body, Paglen says he can get the telescope to swivel with the Earth's rotation.

He then uses another telescope attached to a high-end digital camera for his deep-sky shots, similar to the rig he used for his desert shots.

"I'll see the satellite in the sky, kind of know where it's going to be in the frame, then I'll open the shutter and take a long exposure of the satellite passing through."

Paglen's initial interest in the government's so-called "black projects" took shape while combing through U.S. Geological Survey archives of satellite prison photos in 2002. He noticed that many of the photo frames of prison sites were missing or, in some cases, heavily edited.

"I thought: What the hell is this? We still have blank spots on maps? We've mapped the whole structure of the cosmos and the human genome, so what's this all about?" Paglen said.

Eventually, those blank spots led Paglen to other covert subjects and turned a hobby into a full-time job -- one with a decidedly political stance.

"For a time, people were getting arrested for photographing the Brooklyn Bridge," Paglen notes. "So to me, what it meant to do photography also changed. There was a new kind of politics to it -- something that was very aggressive and dangerous -- and a presumption that it would reveal some kind of truth or evidence."

Ultimately, the satellite photos are an attempt to critique that attitude. While the budget for black military operations has more than doubled in the last 10 years and the government continues to espouse the virtues of secrecy, it can't prevent interested amateur astronomers from calculating the orbital paths of spy satellites.

"The National Reconnaissance Office cannot classify Kepler's laws of planetary motion," Paglen says. "They just work ... and they're unbelievably accurate."

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