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Boing Boing Blog
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New twist in Bikram Yoga copyright feuds. Bikram Choudhury, the eccentric Beverly Hills yoga master who once said in a Business 2.0 interview, "I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me," has been suing practitioners he accuses of illicitly teaching his particular style of yoga (26 postures, done twice each in a >105-degree-hot room). Now, one group of yoga enthusiasts is suing back.
Choudhury, America's best known and most controversial yogi, opened one of his first yoga schools in San Francisco in 1973 and now boasts 900 studios worldwide. He copyrighted, trademarked and franchised his poses, breathing techniques and dialogue, creating the first chain of its kind. He also hired lawyers who set loose a flurry of cease-and-desist letters warning yoga teachers in the Bay Area and beyond not to teach his yoga or anything "derivative" if they haven't graduated from his $5,000-per-person training program and are not paying a studio franchise fee. His letters threaten a penalty of $150,000 per infringement.
Now, a San Francisco nonprofit organization of yoga enthusiasts from San Rafael to Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., is countering with a federal lawsuit attacking the guru's claim that yoga is proprietary. They say that yoga is a 5,000-year- old tradition that cannot be owned. The suit is asking the judge to determine whether Choudhury is entitled to copyright and trademark his material under federal copyright laws. A trial date has been set for next February.
Link to SF Chron story, Link to Reuters story |
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Snitchpix as photojournalism. 
These pictures of moron vandals trashing cars on the Northeastern University campus after the SuperBowl have been posted by the campus cops in order to garner snitch-tips that will help them bust these guys; but the pictures themselves are actually pretty compelling when considered as pieces of photojournalism.
Link
(Thanks, Vandal!)
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Geek love poem. Here's a lovely, pithy geek poem written by KillerHamster, a Slashdot poster. Select from here --> roses are red, violets are blue, all my base are belong to you <-- to here for a white-on-white translation.
Roses are #FF0000
Violets are #0000FF
chown -R you ~/base
Link
(Thanks, Mozai!) |
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Virus writers profiled. Clive Thompson's written a lyrical and evocative article profiling several European virus-writers, coders who write and post proof-of-concept malware to demonstrate security flaws in Microsoft products.
Benny, clean-cut and wide-eyed, has been writing viruses for five years, making him a veteran in the field at age 21. ''The main thing that I'm most proud of, and that no one else can say, is that I always come up with a new idea,'' he said, ushering me into a bedroom so neat that it looked as if he'd stacked his magazines using a ruler and level. ''Each worm shows something different, something new that hadn't been done before by anyone.''
Benny -- that's his handle, not his real name -- is most famous for having written a virus that infected Windows 2000 two weeks before Windows 2000 was released. He'd met a Microsoft employee months earlier who boasted that the new operating system would be ''more secure than ever''; Benny wrote (but says he didn't release) the virus specifically to humiliate the company. ''Microsoft,'' he said with a laugh, ''wasn't enthusiastic.'' He also wrote Leviathan, the first virus to use ''multithreading,'' a technique that makes the computer execute several commands at once, like a juggler handling multiple balls. It greatly speeds up the pace at which viruses can spread. Benny published that invention in his group's zine, and now many of the most virulent bugs have adopted the technique, including last summer's infamous Sobig.F.
Clive touches on, and dismisses the free-speech arguments for publishing malware code (interestingly, he does so without any quotes from legal scholars and impact litigators who work on First Amendment issues, and so ends up eliding the nuance in the argument and presenting a somewhat cartoonish picture of the issue) but misses the far more important notion of legitimate security research.
If, as Schneier says, "Any person can create a security system so clever s/he can't think of a way to defeat it," then the only experimental methodology for evaluating the relative security of a system is publishing its details and inviting proof of its flaws -- proof readily embodied in malware.
Codebreakers and worm-writers are the only mechanism we know about for reliably strengthening systems, and the idea that they should refrain from publishing their research in order to keep us safe is fundamentally flawed, since it depends on the idea that malicious people will never be clever enough to independently reproduce their techniques, and that the public is better served by remaining ignorant of the potential risks in the systems they've bought than by being exposed to the evidence of the rampant flaws in those systems.
This notion falls flat when considered in light of the real world. If a developer was building condos whose doors could all be unlocked with an unbent paper-clip, this line of reasoning demands that the person(s) who discover this should keep mum about it, in the hopes that no bad guy ever catches on. In the real world, the best answer is usually to scream about this to high heaven, so that the bad developer can't silence you and cover his ass, and so that his customers can get their locks fixed.
Link |
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New York Times: Technology
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The Pornography Industry vs. Digital Pirates. The copyright rumble is playing out a little differently in the red-light districts of cyberspace. By John Schwartz. |
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As Newcomers Swarm, Sony Girds for a Fight. For a company that has long flexed its muscles and built a reputation on being first, Sony is now in the awkward position of having to play catch-up. By Ken Belson. |
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The Virus Underground. Young people around the world spend their Saturday nights writing fiendishly contagious computer viruses and worms. Are they artists, pranksters or techno-saboteurs? By Clive Thompson. |
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The Gear. For hip-hoppers, sound equipment is all about ease and portability. By Sasha Frere-jones. |
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Yahoo! News - Technology
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We'd Like a Bit More, For a Little Less (washingtonpost.com). washingtonpost.com - It used to be easy to tell the difference between regular and high-speed Internet: The latter ran 10 times faster than the former, and it was the only kind worth bragging about. |
11:37:26 PM 
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Saturday, February 07, 2004
Interesting New York Times article on the adult industry's take on file sharing and digital piracy, with responses ranging from legal threats (Titan Media) to a regulated "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach (Playboy.com). (For the record: we here at Fleshbot believe that porn wants to be free, but also think that people deserve to be credited and/or compensated for their creative efforts. How's that for a diplomatic response?)
