They’re back up (well, the wave files anyway), thanks to the Internet Archive.
ZDNet’s David Berlind has started to compile a Del.icio.us list of examples of ‘DRM train wrecks’, i.e. situations where the use of DRM has a distasteful corollary for consumers unaware of what they’re getting themselves into.
“Most people don’t realize how much they’re giving up when they consciously or sub-consciously use solutions that depend on [DRM]. [...]
This BBC Newsnight story, by Adam Livingstone, about the possibilities of a two-tier internet – ‘BitTorrent: Shedding no tiers’ – has an interesting fictional ‘architectures of control’ example to illustrate the possibilities of price discrimination in networks (see also Control & Networks):
“So there’s me driving up to Homebase… and I get to within half a [...]
High frequencies being tested in the urban badlands: see, no teenagers here!
A lot of people find this site through searching for something along the lines of ‘Mosquito high frequency anti-teenager ringtone’, and are presumably disappointed when they find that there is no such ringtone to download, even if just because they’d like to test it [...]
Image from www.brake-fast.net
Thanks to Steve Portigal and Page Sands for bringing this to my attention: the Brake-Fast Doggie Bowl is designed to stop dogs wolfing down their food quite as quickly as they would otherwise, which can cause painful (and dangerous) bloating. The raised prongs act like ‘traffic calming’ to slow down the dog’s eating. [...]
Via Steve Portigal’s All this ChittahChattah, a short but succinct article by John King, from the San Francisco Chronicle noting just how quietly certain features have started to become embedded in our environment, most notably (from this blog’s point of view), anti-skateboarding measures, traffic calming and security barriers:
“…woven into the urban fabric so subtly [...]
Hot on the heels of the news that Cooper-Menvier/Fulleon is to take on global manufacture and distribution of the Mosquito, my server logs show that someone found this site through looking for mosquito download mobile phone free high frequency.
Now, he or she might simply have been looking for a ringtone that sounded like a mosquito. [...]
Via Boing Boing – ‘Hooligan chants silenced by delayed echoes’, a New Scientist story looking at the work of Dutch researchers who are using out-of-sync replayed sound to disrupt synchronised chanting at football matches.
“Soccer hooligans could be silenced by a new sound system that neutralises chanting with a carefully timed echo.
The ‘anarchitect’ group, Space Hijackers* have an interesting A-Z of Retail Tricks To Make You Shop – mostly psychological – including a couple of fascinating examples which aren’t well known, e.g.
“Supermarkets used to have a trick placing slightly smaller tiles on the floor in the more expensive aisles of the shop. When a customer entered [...]
Transfer has an amazing collection of images of ‘Anti-Sit’ devices, mostly in New York but also internationally.