Lengthy About us test verbage

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Rebecca Jeschke sez, "EFF's Jennifer Granick outlines how you should protect yourself while traveling with private data. Bad news: it's not easy."

If you encrypt your hard drive with strong crypto, it will be prohibitively expensive for CBP to access your confidential information. This answer is imperfect for two reasons—one is practical, the other is technological.

Practically, the government has not disclosed CBP's laptop search practices, despite our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for these documents. We don't know what a border patrol agent will do when confronted with an encrypted machine. One possibility is that the agent will simply give up and let the traveler pass with her belongings. Other possibilities are that the agent will turn the traveler and her machine away at the border, or that he will seize the laptop and allow the traveler to continue on. I suspect that on most occasions, CBP agents confronted with encrypted or password-protected data tell the owner to enter the password or get turned away, and the owner, eager to continue her voyage or to return home, simply complies.

If you don't want to comply, CBP cannot force you to decrypt your data or give over your password. Only a judge can force you to answer questions, and then only if the Fifth Amendment does not apply. While no Fifth Amendment right protects the data on your laptop or phone, one federal court has held that even a judge cannot force you to divulge your password when the act of revealing the password shows that you are the person with access to or control over potentially incriminating files. See In re Boucher, 2007 WL 4246473 (D. Vt. November 29, 2007).

Link (Thanks, Rebecca!)

See also: EFF and security experts to Congress: We need hearings on Customs laptop seizures and snooping
posted in: Civlib
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Today on Boing Boing Gadgets
Posted by Joel Johnson, May 1, 2008 12:33 PM | permalink
ufo-cd_a1_48.jpg Today on Boing Boing Gadgets, we boarded a binary kite and did turn-based battle with the world's first clamshell Blackberry. Japan got a steam-powered newspaper, nostril filters and pastel Eee PCs; China got a $12,000 CD player; and Kenya a domestic renewable energy business; Rob recorded it all on a DIY tape delay machine, while John ducked boomerangs in space.

In Sri Lanka, a mongoose unset us up the bomb; Pittsburgh plays with flesh-healing pixie dust; and here at home, hard drive crushers crushed drives hard.

International adventures done with, we announced the winners of the 1 kilobyte competition. Amazing stuff!
posted in: Gadgets
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Japanese anatomical illustrations from 1819
Posted by David Pescovitz, May 1, 2008 11:25 AM | permalink
Images Anatomical Scroll 1 Images Anatomical Scroll
These two happy indiviuals are featured in the Kaibo Zonshinzu anatomy scrolls from 1819. Pink Tentacle has more on the scrolls, painted by a physician named Yasukazu Minagaki. Link
posted in: Art
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Boomerangs in space
Posted by David Pescovitz, May 1, 2008 11:08 AM | permalink
Bommmmm On a recent visit to the International Space Station, Japanese astronaut Takao Doi brought paper boomerangs with him. They were given to him by world boomerang champion Yashuhiro Togai, who wondered whether the flying objects would work in low gravity. Turns out they worked perfectly. The Japan Aereospace Exploration Agency just posted the video.
Link to video, Link to more info at New Scientist
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Space aliens invade Canada
Posted by David Pescovitz, May 1, 2008 10:46 AM | permalink
Images Front Picture Library Uk Dir 4 Fortean Times 2157 8-1 2008 0321 15662691 240X180
These extraterrestials are making frequent appearances at the Calgary, Canada home of Karen Henuset. As the aliens seem to vanish on cloudy days, a neighbor dismisses them as reflections. BB readers know better though. From WCAU:

"I looked out and I thought, 'Oh my gosh, I've lost my mind,'" resident Karen Henuset said of the first time she saw the specters. "So I asked our nanny to come and take a look at this, and the hair on her arms just stood straight up."

It's as "clear as day. You see two eyes on each of them, they both have this little thing over their head. It's a little weird," said resident Reid Henuset.

Link (via Fortean Times)
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Virtual reality for flies
Posted by David Pescovitz, May 1, 2008 10:16 AM | permalink
Researchers built a wind tunnel for flies with scenes projected on the interior walls. The fly's motion is tracked with a 3D camera and the images change in response. By changing the patterns on the tunnel's walls, the scientists can control the untethered fly's movements. According to an article and video at New Scientist, understanding the complexities of insect flight could inform the development of new microrobotic aircraft. From New Scientist:

Data Images Ns Cms Dn13814 Dn13814-1 270Previous setups have presented flies with changing images but involved tethering the fly and could not change the images in response to its movements. "That is very unnatural and it becomes very difficult to interpret the data because of the strong interference by the experimenter," explains (lead researcher Steven Fry from the Institute of Neuroinformatics, Zurich, Switzerland)...

"This programme defines how the world reacts to the fly's behaviour," says Fry. "You gain access to information you just wouldn't get without the tools, because you can control a fly that is immersed in a virtual environment."

In future, the team plans to project more naturalistic patterns on the walls of the tunnel, to gain more detailed insights into how flies react to their environment.

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Gary Panter talks about his new book
Posted by Mark Frauenfelder, May 1, 2008 10:06 AM | permalink

panter-book.jpg Here's a video of Gary Panter (wiki), the artist who created the character Jimbo and was the designer of the set for Pee Wee's Playhouse, talking about his new art monograph. Link (Thanks, Coop!)
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Baby drop ritual
Posted by David Pescovitz, May 1, 2008 10:04 AM | permalink
Babyfallll Muslims in the Indian town of Solapur line up to drop their babies off a 15 meter tower, catching them in a white sheet. The ritual, which has taken place for more than half a millennium, is believed to make the children grow up healthy and strong. The faithful claim there have never been any injuries. Reuters has amazing video of the ritual.
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Young adult sections in bookstore -- a parallel universe of little-regarded awesomeness
Posted by Cory Doctorow, May 1, 2008 9:05 AM | permalink
My editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, rang me yesterday to talk about a weird little phenomenon: people who were going to stores looking for my newest, Little Brother, were walking away unfulfilled because they were looking in the science fiction section, not the young adult section. Many of us grew up in an era before the young adult section -- when the kids' section in the store was just picture books and some 400-volume sharecropped series like Sweet Valley High. No longer -- practically every bookstore now sports a large (and growing) YA section filled with some of the most amazing work being done in any literary genre today.

Indeed, a quick browse through Boing Boing's archives turned up this (incomplete) set of links to my YA section, the young adult books I've loved and blogged here -- most of them are not available on the science fiction shelves of your local store, only in the YA section:

Scott Westerfeld: Pretties/Uglies; Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm: Good As Lilly; Daniel Pinkwater, Scott Westerfeld, Peeps, Jonathan Strahan (ed), The Starry Rift; John Varley: Rolling Thunder, John Varley: Red Thunder; John Varley: Red Thunder; Scott Westerfeld: Uglies, Michael de Larrabeiti: The Borribles; Justine Larbalastier: Magic's Child; Justine Larbalastier: Magic or Madness; Ragnar: Got Your Nose!; Philip Pullman: Northern Lights trilogy; Scott Westerfeld: So Yesterday; Scott Westerfeld: Midnighters trilogy; Kathe Koja: Going Under; Ellen Klages: Portable Childhoods; Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Jane Yolen (eds): The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens; Changeling, a fairy tale of contemporary New York;

Living in a space that no one watches too closely is one of the secret ways that people get to do excellent stuff. Science fiction's status for decades as a pariah genre meant that writers could do things with literary style, theme, and political content that their mainstream counterparts could never get away with (games, comics, early hip-hop, mashups, and many of the other back laneways of popular culture have also enjoyed this status). These days, a lot of the coolest stuff in the universe is happening in the kids' section of your bookstore (and yes, I'm aware of the irony of calling attention to a field that has prospered because it wasn't receiving too much attention to blossom).

So while there's a personal motive to this post -- letting you know where to find Little Brother at your bookstore -- there's also a general tip for living the happy mutant life: check out the YA section at the bookstore and see what's been going on under your nose!

Here's a little more on the subject from Patrick:

We've all been neglecting to include a very important piece of information: *if you want to buy a printed copy, you're going to have to go into the YA section.*

Some copies may wind up shelved in regular SF or general-fiction sections, but most bookstores are pretty rigorous these days: if it's published as YA, it goes into the YA section. As you know, Bob, we made a deliberate decision to publish it into the YA channel, not least because it's the kind of book we know *we* would have loved when we were 15. But it suddenly occurs to me that there are probably a lot of people who now have it in their heads to keep an eye out for *Little Brother* the next time they go into a bookstore...but that doesn't mean they're going to actually go into the section with all the chapter books, Narnia displays, Percy Jackson endcaps, and so forth.

Of course, if they do actually venture over that threshold, they may well discover a whole bunch of outstanding SF and fantasy that's been published onto those shelves in the last decade or so. Powerful SF novels like *Uglies* and *Peeps* by Scott Westerfeld, who John Scalzi calls "the most important contemporary SF author that most of the SF field has never heard of." Fantasy like Garth Nix's brilliant Abhorsen trilogy, or sui-generis novels of science and human character like Ellen Klages' *The Green Glass Sea*. It's almost as if there's an entire alternate world of good reading over there.

posted in: Book , Kids
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Boing Boing tv - Tokyology
Posted by Xeni Jardin, May 1, 2008 8:18 AM | permalink

Today on Boing Boing tv, a sneak peek inside TOKYOLOGY, a new documentary exploring contemporary Japanese pop-culture hosted by Carrie Ann Inaba. Oh, what adventures await: sneak behind the scenes at a Japanese Rock TV show that pretends it's shot in Los Angeles, cruise Harajuku, go clubbing with goth girls in Shinjuku, shop for shoes with Lolitas, experience the madness of the Tokyo Anime Fair, visit a video game company, browse the streets of Akihabara, and meet anime creator Yoshitoshi Abe.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

DVDs are available in retail stores and online, tokyology.tv has details. (Special thanks to Tokyology co-producers Felix and Julian Mack of Nightjar.)
posted in: Art , Comics , Games , Video
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DHS grounds air marshalls for having names similar to the no-fly list
Posted by Cory Doctorow, May 1, 2008 8:10 AM | permalink
Tim sez, "According to this article in the Washington Times, some air marshals are being forbidden entry to the airplanes they are supposed to protect, as they have similar names to people on the no-fly list. Another nugget from the article- Chertoff says just one airline is seeing some 9,000 false positives EVERY DAY from this list."

Federal Air Marshals (FAMs) familiar with the situation say the mix-ups, in which marshals are mistaken for terrorism suspects who share the same names, have gone on for years — just as they have for thousands of members of the traveling public.

One air marshal said it has been "a major problem, where guys are denied boarding by the airline."

"In some cases, planes have departed without any coverage because the airline employees were adamant they would not fly," said the air marshal, who asked not to be named because the job requires anonymity. "I've seen guys actually being denied boarding."

A second air marshal said one agent "has been getting harassed for six years because his exact name is on the no-fly list."

Link (Thanks, Tim!)
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HOWTO anonymize your digital photos
Posted by Cory Doctorow, May 1, 2008 7:52 AM | permalink
Instructables has just posted the latest installment in its ongoing series of HOWTOs inspired by my young adult novel Little Brother, which tells the story of a teen underground that uses technology to fight back against surveillance and control.

This week's HOWTO is "Avoiding Camera Noise Signatures" -- AKA, anonymizing your photos before you post them online:

If you take enough images with your digital camera, they can all be compared together and a unique signature can be determined. This means that even when you think that you are posting a photo anonymously to the internet, you are actually providing clues for the government to better tell who you are. The larger the sample size of images they have, the easier it is them to track down images coming from the same camera. Once they know all the images are coming from the same camera, all they then have to do is find that camera and take a picture to confirm it beyond a reasonable doubt.

It is important to remove this noise signature so that you cannot be tracked down. I cannot guarantee any of these methods will work beyond the shadow of a doubt because the woman doing research for the government on how to find the signature is very good. I can only promise that this will make their work more difficult.

Link, Link to feed of Little Brother Instructables
posted in: Civlib , Gadgets , Photo
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EFF and security experts to Congress: We need hearings on Customs laptop seizures and snooping
Posted by Cory Doctorow, May 1, 2008 7:46 AM | permalink
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Rebecca Jeschke sez, "Bruce Schneier and Whitfield Diffie join EFF and and others in calling for oversight hearings on the Department of Homeland Security's search and seizure of electronic devices at American borders."

"Our computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices hold a vast amount of personal information like financial data, health histories, and personal emails and letters," said EFF Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann. "In a free country, the government cannot have unlimited power to read, seize, and store this information without any oversight."

So far, the Department of Homeland Security has refused to release its policies and procedures for conducting these intrusive searches. EFF and the Asian Law Caucus have filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security to obtain the information through the Freedom of Information Act.

"Your privacy could be at risk even if you don't travel yourself. Your financial institution, your insurer, and other enterprises hold extensive personal data about you and your family," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien. "If agents of those groups travel internationally, your information could be exposed to officials at the border or potentially copied and stored in government databases. Americans should know how and why electronic data is seized and kept by the government, and who is able to access it at the border and in the years afterwards."

Link (Thanks, Rebecca!)
posted in: Civlib
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