The Open Rights Group pledge I posted about the other day has been successful. Even if you weren't one of the first 1,000 signatories, you can still sign up if you want to support the ORG.

An excellent explanation of why the ORG is a good idea can be found here:

You have to fight these issues in the press. There is no other way to do politics these days. It has to be done in soundbites. There has to be a counter to the "piracy" rhetoric. That counter-rhetoric has to get everywhere. The pro-lockdown side can afford to have someone in every public policy consultation, someone lobbying on every bill. We can do that but it's easier to coordinate one person working 40 hours a week than 100 people working 5 minutes a week. So therefore we should use the magic of money to consolidate that time into one person.

Heard by Sashinka on a Radio 4 news bulletin yesterday evening:

A news reporter in discussion with a British Gas executive about possible staff xmas strikes in relation to their ending the final salary pension scheme for new engineers:

"Have you made a time to talk, or are you just offering them a morning or afternoon slot?"

Heh…

Edward Felten gives us chapter and verse on exactly how evil the SunnComm software Sony uses to protect music CDs really is.

On a Windows PC with Autorun-from-CD enabled (as it is on your average home user's PC), SunnComm's software will install files and sometimes even set up Windows to run components of SunnComm's software automatically at startup even if you, having read the (misleading) End User License Agreement, decide to play by Sony's rules and decide that you're prepared to forego the ability to play their CDs on your PC rather than install their software. Basically, whether or not you want to play nice with Sony they'll regard your PC as theirs to mess with.

SunnComm need to be sued for every penny they've got, Sony need to see their sales plummet as everyone with half a braincell avoids their CDs like the plague, and one or more senior Sony executives needs to be prosecuted and jailed under the Computer Misuse Act. If this sort of thing isn't stamped out it'll only encourage the bastards…

If you're in the UK and have any worries at all about digital rights abuses by government and big business, you might want to think about signing up to support the Open Rights Group at PledgeBank.

At the time of writing, the pledge is just 13 signups short of the 1,000 signatures required to activate the pledge and trigger the funding ORG needs to do its job. (If you're unclear on what the ORG is about, check out their web site, or the relevant Wikipedia entry.)

Just call him Cyrano.

The Kama Sutra of Reading.

No, not Reading, reading.

Three reviews of All-Star Superman #1. Very funny.

(For what it's worth, I thought All-Star Superman #1 was fine entertainment, at least as much because of Frank Quitely's art as Grant Morrison's script. But then, I'm not much of a Superman fan: I'm reading this because it's a Morrison-Quitely collaboration, not because it's about the Man of Steel.)

While I'm on the subject of Superman, there's a lengthy account of the ups and downs of the project to bring Superman back to the big screen here. Amazing stuff, though perhaps we shouldn't really be so surprised at the number of drafts and the range of variations on the basic theme that the story went through. I suspect that pretty much all big-budget adaptations of material from other media go through this sort of thing, as the producers and writers and directors thrash around and try to figure out what's the essence of the story they're trying to adapt. The difference is that sometimes the producer or director is a fan of the original – as with, say, Guillermo del Toro and Hellboy or Tom DeSanto on the first two X-Men films, or Peter Jackson and the Lord of the Rings trilogy – and has enough clout to resist idiotic ideas from studio executives. (In fairness, sometimes the work in question could do with some fresh thinking if it's going to work on the big screen, so the producer is entirely right to force the writers to pare down the concept to the very core and ignore the howls of the fanboys. Look at, say, Blade Runner, for an example of a successful rethink of an SF novel for the big screen. Trouble is, past form suggests that's not the way to bet…)

[ASS #1 review via Crocodile Caucus, Superman V script via MetaFilter]

As prank calls go, this is a doozy. (NB: 3.8MB MP3 file: decidedly Not Safe For Work!)

[Via GromBlog]

This week's selection:

• Some striking architecture: Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and an unidentified piece of sculpture pictured by Andy Bell.
• Unpleasant (but picturesque) weather.
• A couple of fiery sunsets.
• A door, a couple of dogs, and a nice bit of street art.

Following on from the list of the Top Twenty Geek Novels I linked to earlier this month, the Guardian's Technology Blog has asked readers to nominate the Best Geek Movies Ever.

They're still gathering nominations, but it looks to me as if the list is going to be much coherent than the list of novels, which was very much a list of SF novels. My choices, for what it's worth:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey (Best. SF. Film. Ever! Just perfect.)
• The Terminator (Forget the sequels, this was the real deal.)
• The Matrix (Ditto.)
• Star Wars (Ditto, and that goes double for the prequels. But there's no denying that for geeks of a certain age this was something special.)
• Spider-Man (You've got to have a comic book adaptation in there somewhere. I actually prefer Hellboy and the two X-Men films, but Spider-Man is the one that both geeks and non-geeks can appreciate.)

OOPs, or, Thirty Ways not to land an aircraft.

On a related subject, Aaron Koblin has posted some stunning visualisations of patterns of air traffic over the United States. My favourite is probably the Colour Coded Aircraft movie. (NB: 7.1MB Quicktime movie.)

[Both links via Look At This...]

Go and see for yourself.

(Don't just watch the first thirty seconds and assume you've seen it all. It just gets better and better as it goes on.)

The forthcoming adaptation of V for Vendetta might very well be as awful as every other big screen version of Alan Moore's work, but the poster art is really nice.

[Via Phex, posting at Barbelith Underground]

Betsy Devine found a pupil with an … inventive … solution to a maths problem.

I have no idea whether DOA: Dead or Alive is going to be a faithful adaptation of the video game series it's based on – the comments in this discussion thread suggest otherwise – but I don't really care one way or the other. How can you dislike a film which, judging by the teaser, appears to be:

[...] I swear to god CHARLIE’S ANGELS meets HERO by the director of THE TRANSPORTER, featuring, apparently, Holly Valance putting on her bra via kung-fu.

Links to the trailer that prompted Warren Ellis to make that comment can be found here.

Spike Jonze has a little fun with a Machine That Goes Ping. (NB: 4.4MB Quicktime movie)

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

The UK reportedly has a higher percentage of computers compromised by malicious software than anywhere else in the world. Asked to comment on this, a senior DTI official chose his words … poorly. According to ZDNet UK:

Nigel Hickson, head of European e-commerce and telecoms regulation at the DTI, told a London conference on Monday "we should celebrate that we are number one for [botnet] infections. It says something about our importance and the value within UK Plc."

I strongly suspect that comment looks much worse when plucked out of context. It's just a particularly maladroit way of expressing the thought that this problem is – in part – a symptom of the growth in broadband penetration in the UK.

(Well, that and a symptom of the vulnerability of the dominant personal computer software platform to crackers. And of the tendency for UK ISPs to leave it to their users to figure out that enabling their firewall might be a good idea.)

[Via Slashdot]

It turns out that shooting a padlock off really isn't as easy as it looks in the movies.

[Via Charlie's Diary]

John Siracusa looks forward to the day when personal computers get some serious mass storage:

On my very first computer that had a hard drive (circa 1986), I recall allocating storage by creating volumes (also known as partitions), one or more per disk. In 2005, I'm still doing the same thing. Yeah, I'm still using a keyboard and mouse too, but data storage hasn't remained the same because no one can come up with anything better. In the world of "enterprise" data storage, better solutions have existed for decades.

Which brings to mind a line from a site I pointed to the other day:

Every mistake in the computer industry gets made at least 3 times: once by mainframe folks, once by minicomputer folks, and at least once by microprocessor folks. (John Mashey)

At last, a proper, scientific evaluation of the usability of a chocolate teapot.

[Via GromBlog]