Freenet/Locutus creator Ian Clarke will be speaking at 7pm this Sunday at Chinatown’s C-Level, the neat art/tech collective co-founded by my friend Mark Allen.

Freenet was the first of the next-generation P2P applications, more concerned with anonymous and decentralized content redistribution than with swapping the latest Shania Twain single. Locutus is the commercial arm of Freenet, allowing people to search shared files in controlled groups. Following the lecture, there will be an open meeting of the spanking-new Los Angeles Art and Technology Hackers club. Should make for an interesting evening.

Matthew Ostrowski tacks MP3 headers onto random files, listening for interesting patterns in the raw data. According to Matthew’s friend, super-librarian Brewster Kahle, he found that .exe files sounded more interesting that plain .txt or .doc documents. So, courtesy of the Internet Archive and Etree.org, here’s Microsoft’s Word.exe file as an MP3.

Not easy listening, by any means, but a strange comfort to anyone waxing nostalgic for the music of synchronizing modems.

You might remember the sad story of Richard Goddard Jr. and David Winkleman, the stepfather/stepson that sued an Iowa radio station for failing to pay them each $125,000 to permanently tattoo the station’s logo on their foreheads (photo!).

According to a new article, Richard Goddard Jr.’s problems didn’t end with the unfortunate tattoo. Unable to find a job because of his tattoo and a history of legal trouble, Goddard was “really upset,” his grandmother said.

After several weeks of hearing him complain, his roommates at the Kershaw Trailer Park did something about it. They tried to kill him; first by hanging, then by beating his face with a ball-peen hammer.

Continue reading “The $125,000 Tattoo” →

The Audioscrobbler plugin for Winamp/XMMS aggregates listening habits by tracking the artists/songs you’ve listened to, and comparing that information with all of the other users in the database. If this catches on, a system like this would be a really effective way to discover new artists and find people with similar tastes. (My personal stats.)

A simple idea, but brilliant. (Thanks, Cameron.)

Update: Audioscrobbler’s service provider took the site offline because of increased bandwidth usage. The site’s creator is looking for a new host.

This Washington Post article, published 32 minutes before mission control lost contact with the Space Shuttle Columbia, offers a sad glimpse into a parallel ending to today’s disaster (via Mefi).

“We’ve taken all reasonable measures, and all of our landings so far since 9-11 have gone perfectly,” said Lt. Col. Michael Rein, an Air Force spokesman. …

Some of Columbia’s crew members didn’t want their time in space to end.

“Do we really have to come back?” astronaut David Brown jokingly asked Mission Control before the ride home.

NASA’s next shuttle flight, a space station construction mission, is scheduled for March. The next time Columbia flies will be in November, when it carries into orbit educator-astronaut Barbara Morgan, who was the backup for Challenger crew member Christa McAuliffe in 1986.