Lego promoted do-it-yourself in 1971
by Daniel Terdiman
January 29, 2008 12:03 PM PST

With Web 2.0 in full ascent and the widely accepted view that do-it-yourself, or DIY, is the way to get users or audiences engaged these days, we tend to forget that it's a relatively new phenomenon, at least from the corporate perspective.

For every Second Life or YouTube that exists today, that encourages users to create their own content and to potentially do so without spending any money on their corporate parents' products, there are endless examples of companies going out of their way in the past to make sure you do anything but that.

But way back in 1971, when most people had never even heard the term "do-it-yourself," a little paragraph hidden in the middle of the German edition of the Lego catalog promoted that very concept. On page 43 of that catalog, according to Chris Hecker, a technologist who currently works for Electronic Arts, there was a tidbit that seems oh-so-juicy to someone with today's perspective.

It was instructions for building a tunnel. But as the translation from German below indicates, Lego wasn't interested solely in customers spending their hard-earned Deutschmarks on their product: "You can...build a tunnel from Lego bricks. But you'll need quite a few of them," the catalog reads....

CNET Blogs
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Yale students unable to identify anonymous forum bashers
By Nate Anderson
January 27, 2008 - 10:39PM CT

Two female Yale law students who were the target of vicious (and anonymous) online attacks are having a tough time figuring out who was behind the postings. The women filed suit last June as "Does I and II" in an attempt to unmask "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey," "DRACULA," "Sleazy Z," "hitlerhitlerhitler," and "The Ayatollah of Rock-n-Rollah" (among others), but in a legal filing this week the women's lawyers admitted that they had so far dug up nothing.

The lawyers have even resorted to asking the anonymous defendants to turn themselves in, a tactic that has worked about as well as might be expected. The anonymous posts went up on AutoAdmit.com, a popular laws school site and discussion forum. When the women entered Yale Law a few years back, a series of vindictive threads attacked them with a bizarre range of fabricated charges.

These aren't your standard Internet trolls, either; messages advocated punching the women in the gut while pregnant, raping them, and sodomizing them. The women were each accused of having STDs, having done sexual favors to Yale Law faculty or deans, and being lesbians, among other lurid accusations. AutoAdmit doesn't log IP address, so finding out who was behind the messages has been difficult.

After filing suit, the women's lawyers explored a host of different avenues; in a court document filed this week, those strategies were laid out in detail (and were also noticed by a Slashdot poster). The legal team contacted Microsoft, Highbeam Research, the University of North Carolina, ServInt Internet Services, PenTeleData, GoDaddy, and others.

Ars Technica
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Woman receives Sprint wireless broadband bill for $14,062.27
December 30th, 2007
By Russell Shaw

This fall, a Sprint customer named Krystyl signed up for Sprint’s $59.99 a month unlimited broadband service. Unlimited? I don’t think so. As Krystyl’s YouTube video (via the Consumerist) reveals, she didn’t get an invoice for $59.99, but um, uh, $14,062.27. Here’s Krystal’s version of what went down:

My name is Krystyl. I recently signed up for Sprint, to utilize their wireless broadband card, where I can use the internet on my laptop virtually anywhere where there is a wireless signal. I signed up for the unlimited $59.99 plan, at which I had 30 days to keep or cancel the service.

Within the first week of having the service, the card that was sent to me no longer worked. I called to cancel the service, and the gentlemen I spoke with told me that they didnt want to lose me as a customer, so they would drop my service for half the cost and send me a new card. I figured, why not, this is still within my 30 day trial. They sent me a new broadband card, and it the speeds it gave me were in a 14k modem speed, which is about a dial up connection speed or slower these days. I called Sprint for them to tell me to take the card to the store and do an instore return.

The nearest store they sent me to that allowed returns was 25 minutes away from where I live. Once I got there, the store told me they could not return the package because the upc code was different than that they carry in the store. The next day I called sprint for them to tell me to give me a run around. After 2 hours on the phone, I finally told them I wanted to cancel the service. At which they did on December 10th.

ZDNET Blogs
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How To Lose Your Job On Your Own Time
By Randall Stross
December 30, 2007 - 11:05 AM

Were Henry Ford brought back to life today, he would most likely be delighted by the Internet: the uninhibited way many people express themselves on the Web makes it easy to supervise the private lives of employees.

In his day, Ford Motor maintained a "Sociological Department" staffed with investigators who visited the homes of all but the highest-level managers. Their job was to dig for information about the employee's religion, spending and savings patterns, drinking habits and how the worker "amused himself."

Home inspections are no longer needed; many companies are using the Internet to snoop on their employees. If you fail to maintain amorphous "professional" standards of conduct in your free time, you could lose your job. Employment law in most states provides little protection to workers who are punished for their online postings, said George Lenard, an employment lawyer at Harris Dowell Fisher & Harris in St. Louis.

The main exceptions are workers who are covered by collective bargaining agreements or by special protections for public sector employees; members of these groups can be dismissed only "for cause." The rest of us are "at will" employees, holding on to our jobs only at the whim of our employers, and thus vulnerable.

CNET Blogs
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Folk Flock To Flog Unwanted Presents Online
By Nick Farrell
December 27, 2007 - 8:33 AM

AUSSIES who do not give a XXXX about their Christmas presents are off-loading them online, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Ebay has found two-thirds of Australians have received at least one unwanted gift and claims they are off-loading them online.

An Ebay survey found that nearly a billion Aussie dollars wasted on unwanted Christmas gifts this year. This figure was more than $35 million more than last year. While most people are stuck with socks, the most unpopular gifts are scented candles and joke ties. Foot spas are also likely to end up on eBay. Apparently the worst buyers of gifts are mother-in-laws and work colleagues.

The people who suffered the most were people aged between 18 and 34 years. However the world wide wibble has provided some people with hope, according to Ebay. A spokeseBay claimed that a lot of the unwanted gifts are ending up on its site and those who used to suffer are making money on them.

Yesterday there was a significant spike in the number of books, CDs and DVDs posted for sale, she said. Quite where someone is going to shift a job load of scented candles she did not say.

The Inquirer

The wisdom of crowds: "w00t!" voted word of the year
By Nate Anderson
December 11, 2007 - 11:58PM CT

Had Merriam-Webster asked me (they did not), the 2007 "word of the year" might have been git, huckster, or, possibly, toadeater. (My mechanic, he likes to pad the bill.) But Merriam-Webster asked the Internet, and the Internet chose "w00t," complete with two zeros. Welcome to the wisdom of crowds.

"This year's winning word first became popular in competitive online gaming forums as part of what is known as l33t ('leet,' or 'elite') speak-an esoteric computer hacker language in which numbers and symbols are put together to look like letters," said the company.

Yes, 2007's word of the year is "w00t," an expression so likely to die off in the near future that I can just about see its pallbearers lining up down the hall. Merriam-Webster offers this definition for those not quite l33t enough to spend their lives in online chatrooms: "expressing joy; similar in use to the word yay."

The word is not even included in the print version of the dictionary ("yet"), but that didn't stop voters from flooding the tubes with ballots. Perhaps they were interested only in seeing what sort of unintentional hilarity would result when the wordsmiths at Merriam-Webster tried to explain the genesis of w00t to the world at large. If so, their wishes were granted.

Ars Technica
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Chocolate in beta testing, offered by a Wired founder
By Katie Hafner
December 10, 2007, 10:03 AM

SAN FRANCISCO--In a vast refurbished warehouse on one of this city's historic pier, Louis Rossetto, the co-founder of Wired magazine, is at it again. Only this time, his project has nothing to do with media or high technology. It is hand-crafted chocolate.

But Rossetto, 58, is applying the language of high-technology business to chocolate making. Rossetto and his business partner, Timothy Childs, explain that their company, TCHO, is still in start-up mode, its chocolate still in beta. Beginning today, Tcho's dark chocolate will be available in 50-gram beta bars, representing Version .10.

The $4 bars, made of Ghanaian beans and wrapped in brown paper, will be sold only locally at first, only to those who have signed up on the Tcho Web site, and only to those willing to go pick up the chocolate at Tcho headquarters. "A lot of people think companies like See's and Godiva are chocolate makers," said Childs. "But they're not.

They're confectioners who take someone else's chocolate and do something with it." Others, said Childs, simply remelt other people's chocolate and put their brand on it. Slightly less fresh-faced than he was in the early 1990s, but with no less fervor for his product, Rossetto likes to say that Tcho is "where Silicon Valley start-up meets San Francisco food culture."

CNET News/The New York Times
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Buyer in Italy snaps up Texas town on eBay
Nov 24, 2007 11:29 am

Someone in Italy placed the winning bid of $3.8 million on Friday in an online auction for an unpopulated, one-house Texas town. No one lives permanently in the 13-acre town of Albert, about 60 miles north of San Antonio, but the tavern created from the frame of the old general store is open on weekends.

The town also includes a pavilion, an 85-year-old dance hall, a tractor shed, a three-bedroom house, plus peach and pecan orchards. But before town owner Bobby Cave signs the deed over, he must ensure the eBay bid is legitimate.

Cave said that unlike the usual items bought through eBay, there are no contractual obligations when it comes to real estate. "There's just not any way to insist that a guy from Italy write me a check for three million," said Cave, 47, an Austin, Texas, real estate agent. The reserve price for the town was $2.5 million.

Even if the deal doesn't go through, Cave said he has about five other prospective buyers genuinely interested in the town. Bridgeville, in northern California, was the first town ever put on the eBay auction block. The 83 acres were twice sold on the site, in 2002 (that deal fell through) and again last year.

CNN/Associated Press

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WiFi and autism: a quick debunking
By John Timmer
November 23, 2007 - 12:43PM CT

Late Wednesday, as most people in the US were focusing on the next day's holiday festivities, Engadget picked up on a potentially unnerving press release entitled "Link Between Wireless Technology and Autism Unveiled in New Scientific Report."

Given the increasing prevalence of WiFi use, a clear link between this technology and autism should give many of us pause. But a closer examination of the press release should raise enough red flags that the announcement should be viewed with extreme skepticism. The first issue comes from the journal in which the results are apparently published.

The press release calls the source the Australasian Journal of Clinical Environmental Medicine. As noted by a ZDNet columnist, however, that journal doesn't actually exist. The detailed reference refers to the "J.Aust.Coll.Nutr.& Env.Med," which translates to the Journal of the Australasian College of Nutrition & Environmental Medicine.

This does exist, but the journal's web page is currently under construction. Information elsewhere on the site claims that it is peer reviewed, but it's not indexed by PubMed, meaning it's not on the radar screens of the vast majority of biomedical researchers.

Ars Technica
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Is This Bike Made From Spider Webs?
By Michael Kanellos
November 19, 2007, 3:51 PM PST

Some people weave baskets by hand. But Delta 7 Sports is weaving bikes that way. The Payson, Utah-based company on Monday unveiled the Arantix, a mountain bike made out of hollow tubes spun from carbon fibers.

The unusual design of the so-called IsoTruss tubes, based on technology from Brigham Young University, allows Delta 7 to cut down weight. A standard hard-tail mountain bike frame (without shock absorbers) made from the stuff weighs about 2.7 pounds, but it's as strong or stronger as a conventional carbon or aluminum frame, according to the company.

In 2009, Delta 7 will come out with a lightweight road bike too, said Lester Muranaka, who runs marketing and sales for the company. Delta 7's road bike will likely weigh around the same as other elite road bikes, but early tests indicate that it could be more aerodynamic and, thus, potentially give a rider an edge.

"We think the strength and aerodynamics are going to be big sellers," Muranaka said. If anything, you'll get noticed. Delta 7 has taken its prototype out to nearby Moab, the epicenter of dirt riding in North America. There are a lot of fancy bikes in Moab, but the Arantix gets stares. Test riders must invariably answer a lot of questions.

CNET News
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In Korea, a boot camp cure for Web obsession
By Martin Fackler
November 18, 2007, 6:00 AM

The compound--part boot camp, part rehab center--resembles programs around the world for troubled youths. Drill instructors drive young men through military-style obstacle courses, counselors lead group sessions, and there are even therapeutic workshops on pottery and drumming.

But these young people are not battling alcohol or drugs. Rather, they have severe cases of what many in this country believe is a new and potentially deadly addiction: cyberspace. They come here, to the Jump Up Internet Rescue School--the first camp of its kind in South Korea and possibly the world--to be cured.

South Korea boasts of being the most wired nation on earth. In fact, perhaps no other country has so fully embraced the Internet. Ninety percent of homes connect to cheap, high-speed broadband, online gaming is a professional sport, and social life for the young revolves around the "PC bang," dim Internet parlors that sit on practically every street corner.

But such ready access to the Web has come at a price as legions of obsessed users find that they cannot tear themselves away from their computer screens. The compound--part boot camp, part rehab center--resembles programs around the world for troubled youths.

CNET News
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Study: people use IM to hook up, avoid, and dump each other
By Jacqui Cheng
November 15, 2007 - 10:47PM CT

A recent survey has confirmed what many of us have long feared: the proliferation of instant messaging has begun to make younger generations more socially "challenged" when it comes to real-life interaction.

It seems she's not alone in wanting to avoid the messy personal aspects of communication. In fact, 43 percent of people who IM feel the same way, with 22 percent using IM to ask people out and/or accept them-another 13 percent admitted to using IMs to break up with someone.

Among teens, those numbers are higher: half of girls and over a third of boys said that they use IM to say things that they're afraid to in person. "If you're face to face, you can't close out the window and disappear if you've been rejected" added 19-year-old Lewis Grove. We're sure that you have an extremely healthy personal life, Lewis.

Okay, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but teenagers spend an increasing amount of time IMing, the second annual Instant Messaging Trends Survey conducted by the Associated Press and AOL discovered.

Ars Technica
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