Category: Digital Culture

As reported already by Betsy, we were surprised and amazed at some of the stuff we found yesterday at Southern Season. They had “Not Cool” hot sauce on sale for 99 cents each, my favorite hot sauce in the world. If you like it hot and flavorful, I highly recommend the Chocolate Habenero…it is hot (according to this comparison, 225,000 scoville units) but it’s got a great coffee/chocolate flavor underneath.

From BoingBoing, a really interesting new test for digital copyright: Monolith. A description of the project, from the website:

“Things get interesting when you apply Monolith to copyrighted files. For example, munging two copyrighted files will produce a completely new file that, in most cases, contains no information from either file. In other words, the resulting Mono file is not “owned” by the original copyright holders (if owned at all, it would be owned by the person who did the munging). Given that the Mono file can be combined with either of the original, copyrighted files to reconstruct the other copyrighted file, this lack of Mono ownership may be seem hard to believe.

Consider this simple fact: for a given Element file and any other file of the same length (call it fileA), it is possible to choose a Basis file that, when munged with the Element, will produce fileA as the resulting Mono file. Therefore, if a copyright holder claims that she owns the information in all Mono files that are munged from her work, she is also claiming copyright over all possible binary files that are the same length as her work. For example, suppose that fileA is an MP3 of a Beatles song, and the Element file is an MP3 of a Britney Spears song copyrighted by Jive Records. It is possible to find a Basis file that, when munged with the Spears song, will produce the Beatles song as the Mono file. Jive Records certainly cannot claim copyright over the Beatles song (which is copyrighted by Apple Records), nor can they claim copyright over any other Mono files munged from MP3s of their songs.”

There’s more really interesting analysis on the site…this is exactly the sort of thing that many of us have thought for some time, put into practice. Very, very interesting, and I’m wondering if maybe we’ll start seeing munged files appearing for download as a civil disobedience issue. I’ll start looking for interesting things to mung….

…that is, inspire hot and heavy techno-lust deep within my heart.

Witness, the AirPort Express and AirTunes, a wireless 802.11g repeater with a USB print server built in that just so happens to also have both an analog and optical stereo out. Why, you ask? So that it’s iTunes ready…it will see your iTunes library, and you can push music through it. So anywhere in your house that you have speakers, you can have your complete music library. Wirelessly. Apple is really kicking some serious ass in the multimedia department these days…as far as I can tell, they pwn digital music. iTunes (the best jukebox/organizer/metadata mine for music bar none), iPod (the best small form factor portable music machine in the world), and now the ability to plug a box in the wall and make your music stream to it. The only thing better would be iPods with built in 802.11g for network syncing/streaming.

For a new movie, coming out this fall: Saw. Looks like a cross between Silence of the Lambs and Se7en.

Our new house in Sewanee! Got a chance to see it this weekend…great interior, 3 bedrooms, great windows in the living room, and hardwood floors all the way through. Looking more forward to the move now that we’ve seen the house!

Six things you didn’t know about Kentucky.

The BBC is going to be using Creative Commons licenses for their upcoming Creative Archive (an archive designed to give the British people free access to some BBC audio and video productions). Brilliant, and kudos to Lessig for getting named to the board.

Creative Commons just announced the 2.0 version of their licenses, that clear up issues and make certain things (like attribution) standard.

Check them out.