Internet Jackass Day 2004

Like last year, I’ll be keeping a running list of my favorite examples of the web’s April Fools Day (aka “Internet Jackass Day”) silliness. (There’s another much more thorough list being updated constantly.) Wired has a roundup of the bigger pranks, with a confirmation by Google that Gmail isn’t a hoax. Gizmodo added a gadget-oriented list.

Disney's New York World's Fair Box Set

At the 1964/65 New York World’s Fair, Walt Disney and his team of technicians debuted several new attractions, each with a corporate sponsor: Ford’s Magic Skyway, General Electric’s Progressland, Pepsi’s It’s A Small World, and the State of Illinois’ Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.

I’ve posted a four-disc, 46-song collection of unreleased and rare audio from all four attractions, including outtakes and demos from the original recording sessions. The entire box set can be downloaded via BitTorrent from my new tracker.

Update – March 10, 2009: Disney’s going to be rereleasing this classic as a box set, so I’ve taken this download offline. Go buy it on Amazon!

According to one Disney fansite, the album was partially developed by Disney but never released because of conflicts with the outsourced record label. (Personally, I found it in alt.binaries.multimedia.disney on Usenet.) If anyone has more information about this collection, I’d love to hear it.

The complete track list is below.

Continue reading “Disney's New York World's Fair Box Set”

InfocomBot Update

Looking for the InfocomBot? Partly because of the Wired News article this morning, both bots are continually exceeding AIM’s rate limits and getting kicked off the network.

I’m trying to contact someone at AOL Instant Messenger’s Developer services to inquire about lifting the rate limits. (If you know anyone at AOL that can speed up this process, please let me know!) I’m not expecting much, so I’m trying to implement a new system that supports queued messages and several more bots.

In the meantime, you can play most of the Infocom collection in your web browser. (Java required.)

July 13, 2004: At some point, someone at AOL must have quietly flipped the switch that protects Infocombot, because it can no longer be warned or exceed rate limits! Whoever you are, thank you so much.

Also, I fixed a bug that prevented quote marks from working in the games. This affected two games, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (when typing the Vogon poetry) and Zork II (in the Riddle Room). This is resolved.

Nanniebots: Hoax, Fraud, or Delusion?

Recent news stories have covered the announcement of ChatNannies, conversational robots designed to locate and lure pedophiles in Internet chat rooms. Uncritical articles were recently published by New Scientist, BBC News, News.com, the skeptically-minded The Register, and many other news outlets.

Cameron Marlow managed to secure an exclusive interview with one of the “Nanniebots,” where he posted a complete transcript and some brief analysis. To anyone who knows anything about chatterbots and the history of artificial intelligence, the transcript represents either a revolutionary leap in technology or it’s clearly a human behind the keyboard.

So I did a little Usenet research on Jim Wightman, the 30-year-old UK-based software developer behind ChatNannies. His background is mostly in .NET and VB development, but I couldn’t find references to any interest or experience in artificial intelligence or chat technologies. One thread from 2002 critically discusses Jim’s claims of developing his own private Usenet newsreader software, even though his headers revealed he was using another popular newsreader. In another thread from mid-2002, he claimed to be writing a book on .NET for Wrox Press, but there’s no reference to him on their site. Update: I can confirm that Wightman was telling the truth, and was contributing to a book about ASP.NET controls that was later abandoned by Wrox UK through no fault of his own.

In Cameron’s comments, Jim himself stated that he has some psychological problems. But a bit more worrisome are his postings in alt.revisionism, a newsgroup largely centered around Holocaust denial. Someone posting under the pseudonym “Deaths Head,” with the exact same headers and IP address as Jim, regularly argued that the Holocaust never occurred. In another thread, he posted a graphic death threat to another user. (I can’t prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that these aren’t spoofed headers, but it seems very unlikely. Compare Jim’s message headers in alt.revisionism with a message by “Deaths Head” in the same group a couple days before.) Update: Jim only posted in the group for two months. He maintains he was only playing Devil’s advocate, and that these aren’t strongly held beliefs.

These personal beliefs suggest a skewed view of the universe, perhaps one in which he’s able to unleash 100,000 cutting-edge robots to save the world from pedophiles. The ChatNannies’ official Downloads page says the downloadable version of control panel for their chatbots will be available on April 2, conveniently one day after April Fool’s Day. So it’s either the prelude to an elaborate April Fool’s joke, an attempt at defrauding corporate sponsors and individuals of their money, or it’s the delusions of an arguably unstable person. Either way, the media bought it wholesale.

March 24, 2004: Things are getting interesting! In the comments on Cam’s site, Guardian UK science columnist Ben Goldacre mentions that Jim offered to give an in-person demonstration of the ChatNannies bot on an isolated, non-networked computer with an independent third-party observer. (I’m guessing Jim will conveniently schedule the demonstration just in time for April Fool’s Day.)

March 25, 2004: Ben Goldacre’s appropriately-titled “Bad Science” column covers the Nanniebots, and Jim Wightman’s attempts to avoid getting debunked. Essential reading. Also, a reader sent in pointers to several death threats that Jim made on Usenet, which are considerably more violent than the one I found. Read them here and here.

March 26, 2004: The Register and VNUnet both ran new articles about increased skepticism of the Wightmans’ continued claims. ChatNannies started a developers’ forum. And a commenter points to TivoMedia.org, another Jim Wightman project that appeared to be unfounded, unraveling in this long Tivo Community thread from April 2003.

March 31, 2004: Shortly after midnight on April 1 in the UK, the ChatNannies.com site went offline. Never mind, it’s back.

April 2, 2004: In the “News” sidebar on the ChatNannies homepage, Jim Wightman announces he’s closing down the site in a week. Here’s the announcement, removed a couple minutes ago:

“Due to being treated like criminals for trying to help save children, we are closing the ChatNannies website at 00:00:00 GMT 11-04-2004. Many thanks to those of you who have shown your support…after this time however your Children are once again at Maximum risk from Paedophiles. You can thank, amongst others, Ben Goldacre from the Guardian and Barnardo’s in helping us reach this decision.”

He’s referring to Ben’s new Bad Science column and Barnardo’s public statement about Chatnannies.

April 5, 2004: The Guardian UK wrote a new article about the recent criticism from children’s charities. (Strangely, the article doesn’t refer to the bots at all.) Wightman posted a response. VNUnet posted a similar article.

The Chatnannies discussion forum is getting interesting, as well. Jim Wightman is posting actively there.

April 8, 2004: New Scientist removed the text of the original story, replacing it with a temporary retraction. “Serious doubts have been brought to our attention about this story. Consequently, we have removed it while we investigate its veracity.” Good! BBC News also removed their story

April 13, 2004: Charles Arthur, the technology editor of the Independent UK, wrote a good column about the net’s skepticism.

June 16, 2004: New Scientist followed up with an amusing story of Wightman’s attempt to demonstrate the ChatNannies bot from his home. He couldn’t reproduce any of the intelligent conversation originally demonstrated in his transcripts, and analysis of the transcripts shows word-for-word dialogue from the freely-available ALICE bot, including typos from the AIML database. Their conclusion (and mine): still a big, fat fake.

June 17, 2004: Andy Pryke, one of the three observers of the Nanniebots demo for New Scientist, wrote up his observations and posted transcripts of the chats. It’s clearly an ALICE bot.

InfocomBot for AOL Instant Messenger

If you have an AOL Instant Messenger account, send an IM to InfocomBot, InfocomBot2, or InfocomBot3. I set up an automated bot to play classic Infocom text adventure games from your favorite IM client, T-Mobile Sidekick, or any other device that connects to AIM. It supports “save” and “restore” commands, so you don’t need to lose your place.

If you’ve never played a text adventure game before, Brass Lantern has a great introduction to basic gameplay. There are hints for all of these games on the InvisiClues website.

How’s it done? In short, it’s a Perl wrapper that glues the compiled game interpreter to the AIM network. I tweaked Tim’s excellent Zorkbot script to be a little friendlier, with better (and more secure) support for saving games and cleaner output. (If you want my changes, let me know.)

Thanks to Ilya, who modified dumb-frotz, a “dumb terminal” port of the popular Z-machine interpreter, to properly flush the output buffer after every line.

An example transcript is below. The bot may get overwhelmed, so check back in a couple hours if it gets kicked off AOL’s network.

Update: It was posted to Metafilter, so AOL is limiting the messages it responds with. I’m going to set up an additional couple bots you can use instead.

March 25, 2004: The bots are continually getting kicked offline because of the traffic from the Wired News article. I’m posting status updates in a new entry.

Continue reading “InfocomBot for AOL Instant Messenger”

Help Wanted

If you’re looking for full-time work and live in the Santa Monica (Southern California) area, I’m currently looking to hire two web geeks: a Perl/Mason/MySQL programmer and a front-end HTML/CSS coder. You’d be working for the most intelligent company in the financial industry, with a really great team.

If you’re interested, e-mail or IM me and I’ll send you details. Feel free to spread the word.

Radio Vox Populi

I’ve been listening to an unusual radio station recently, the just-launched Radio Vox Populi. Built by Blogdex creator Cameron Marlow, the site reads aloud the most recent entries from over a million weblogs, using a combination of Perl scripts, voice synthesis software, and web services. I was happy to help out by supplying the transitional sound effects, randomized from a set of six radio samples that complements the broadcast’s lo-fi style. (Read more about the tech behind the site, and the accompanying art installation.)

In lieu of my usual MP3s, I’ve kept the stream running in the background for the last week or so. I feel like I’m eavesdropping in on the general mood and attitude of the entire blogosphere, lovingly read to me by the computer from Wargames.

For more geeky fun, check out the archive of sound clips that accompanies Dennis Klatt’s 1987 paper on the history of speech synthesis. My personal favorites are the Voder, the first-ever electronic speech synthesis, demonstrated at the 1939 World’s Fair, and the first song in synthesized speech, Bell Labs’ “Bicycle Built for Two” from 1961.

120 Minutes Playlist Statistics

For over 15 years, from 1986 to 2003, MTV’s 120 Minutes was the most visible showcase for new and alternative music in the mainstream media. The two-hour time slot was terrible, starting at midnight on Sunday nights, but in the pre-Web days, you had to make sacrifices to find out about new music.

Altmusictv.com is trying to compile complete playlists from the 120 Minutes archives, which is interesting in its own right. Photographer David Hirmes e-mailed me earlier today with some analysis he did on the playlists. Below is a table of every band that appeared on 120 Minutes more than once, sorted by the number of videos/performances.

It looks like the playlists started getting more and more repetitive, starting in the late ’90s… When the playlist archive is more complete, I’ll try to chart the trend by breaking down the number of unique artists per year.

Continue reading “120 Minutes Playlist Statistics”

Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album MP3s

DJ/Producer Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album fused the vocals and beats from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” with music sampled entirely from the Beatles’ “White Album.” Not surprisingly, EMI served Danger Mouse with a cease-and-desist order yesterday, along with ordering stores and websites to stop selling the album.

As a big fan of borrowed/remix culture, that makes me sad. So I posted high-quality MP3s of the entire album below.

I probably won’t be able to host this very long, so please help out by mirroring the files as soon as possible. When you’re done, send me an e-mail or post the mirrored URL in the comments. Enjoy, and thank you!

February 12, 2004: I can’t host the files anymore, but these alternate mirrors still offer the MP3 DOWNLOADS: Illegal Art, Grey Tuesday mirrors.

February 13, 2004: I was cc’d on an e-mail from EMI’s lawyers to my ISP, stating that I’m in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. As such, I have removed all of the MP3s from my web server. The text of the EMI letter is below.

February 19, 2004: Downhill Battle is organizing Grey Tuesday, a day of coordinated civil disobedience in protest of EMI’s attempt to squash this album. Even if you don’t like this particular remix, or even hip-hop in general, remember what the album represents: the universe of creative works stifled by the United States’ archaic copyright laws and the corporations that lobbied for them.

February 23, 2004: The law firm of Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman (representing Capitol Records) has started e-mailing cease-and-desist notices to the websites that are participating in the Grey Tuesday protest tomorrow, whether they’re hosting the album or simply changing the colors of their homepage. The cease-and-desist demands that website owners “cease any plans or efforts to distribute or publicly perform this unlawful recording,” “identify the names and addresses of any third parties who have supplied you with physical or digital copies of The Grey Album,” and “provide Capitol with an accounting of all units of The Grey Album that have been distributed via your website.”

The most disturbing part of the letter, sent to people who merely stated their intent to participate is this: “In addition, to the extent that you have already commenced distribution of The Grey Album, you must make payment to Capitol in an amount to be discussed. We demand that you contact us immediately.”

Does this sort of preemptive cease-and-desists set a new precedent for record label action? Do website owners have to obey their demands, when they haven’t even posted the album yet?

February 24, 2004: Despite legal threats, many sites are participating in the protest. I’ll be keeping a running list today of some of my favorite responses so far: Matt Haughey, Ryan Gantz, Lawrence Lessig, Chris Komlenic, Edverb (and his open letter to EMI), University of Iowa professor Kembrew McLeod, Justin Hall, Brian Flemming, Michael Sippey (plus his reply to my comment), Andrew Raff, Joe Gratz, Matt Jones, Scot Hacker.

Jeff Lowenberg
Vice President Operations/Designated Agent
Everyone’s Internet
2600 Southwest Freeway, Suite 500
Houston, TX 77098

Re: Unauthorized Use of Sound Recordings Performed by the Beatles

Dear Mr. Lowenberg:

It has come to our attention that Andrew Baio is currently exploiting sound recordings that are owned and/or controlled by Capitol Records, Inc. (“Capitol”). In particular, it appears that Mr. Baio is using, without authorization, on his website, http://www.waxy.org/archive/2004/02/11/danger_m.shtml, (the “Website”), copies of sound recordings embodying performances of the Beatles, including but not limited to recordings of “Long, Long, Long,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Glass Onion,” “Savoy Truffle,” “Mother Nature’s Son,” “Helter Skelter,” “Julia,” “Happiness is Warm Gun,” “Piggies,” “Dear Prudence,” “Rocky Raccoon,” “Revolution 1,” “Revolution 9,” “I’m So Tired,” and “Cry Baby Cry” (the “Capitol Recordings”).

Andrew Baio’s unauthorized exploitation of the Capitol Recordings constitutes copyright infringement, and renders Andrew Baio, and any other company engaged in the unauthorized exploitation of the Capitol Recordings with Andrew Baio, liable for all of the remedies provided by the relevant laws occasioned by Andrew Baio’s unfair competition and dilution of our valuable property.

I am the agent authorized to act on behalf of Capitol, the complaining party. It is our understanding that Everyone’s Internet, Inc. is the Internet Service Provider for Andrew Baio and the Website, and as such, you are the authorized agent for service of this notice in accord with The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, 17 U.S.C. ยง 512 et seq. (the “DMCA Notice”) for Everyone’s Internet, Inc.

We request that following your investigation of this matter you provide us full remedy under the DMCA Notice requirement, including but not limited to, expeditiously removing or disabling access to our copyrighted material. Unless we receive full and immediate compliance with this demand within a reasonable amount of time, we will be forced to consider pursuing our other remedies at law and in equity.

This letter is written without prejudice to any of our rights or remedies, all of which are expressly reserved herein.

By placing my signature herein, I state under penalty of perjury that the information contained in this notification is accurate and that I am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right of the Copyright alleged to be infringed.


Sincerely,

/S/: Jonathan Campbell
This electronic signature is made and adopted with the intent to authenticate this written agreement.

Jonathan H. Campbell
Legal and Business Affairs
EMI Recorded Music, North America
150 Fifth Avenue
11th Floor
New York, NY 10011

Subscribe to Salon, Make $7

Salon.com is still putting out quality articles, but I personally don’t think it’s worth $30/year. (I put up with their daily clickthrough advertising instead.) But my friend Dave e-mailed me about a much better deal…

Apparently, if you sign up for Salon Premium, you get 1 year subscriptions to Wired and US News & World Report. But if you don’t want the subscriptions, Wired will send you a $12 refund and US News will send you $25. So take both refunds, and earn $7 plus a free year of Salon. Or keep the Wired subscription, scoring you a year of Salon and Wired for only $5.

The original e-mail is below.

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