Under Prop D, signs ranging from digital billboards, like the one seen heading into Oakland from the Bay Bridge, to "dancing inflatable men" would be allowed along Market from Fifth to Seventh streets, according to the Planning Department.

Web-monitoring software gathers data on kid chats

Parents who install a leading brand of software to monitor their kids' online activities may be unwittingly allowing the company to read their children's chat messages -- and sell the marketing data gathered.

Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games. The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids.

In June, EchoMetrix unveiled a separate data-mining service called Pulse that taps into the data gathered by Sentry software to give businesses a glimpse of youth chatter online. While other services read publicly available teen chatter, Pulse also can read private chats. It gathers information from instant messages, blogs, social networking sites, forums and chat rooms.

According to the agreement, the software passes along data to "trusted partners."

Industry-Backed Label Calls Sugary Cereal a 'Smart Choice'

A new food-labeling campaign called Smart Choices, backed by most of the nation's largest food manufacturers, is "designed to help shoppers easily identify smarter food and beverage choices."

The green checkmark label that is starting to show up on store shelves will appear on hundreds of packages, including -- to the surprise of many nutritionists -- sugar-laden cereals like Cocoa Krispies and Froot Loops. [...]

Dr. Kennedy, who is not paid for her work on the program, defended the products endorsed by the program, including sweet cereals. She said Froot Loops was better than other things parents could choose for their children. "You're rushing around, you're trying to think about healthy eating for your kids and you have a choice between a doughnut and a cereal," Dr. Kennedy said, evoking a hypothetical parent in the supermarket. "So Froot Loops is a better choice." [...]

Despite federal guidelines favoring whole grains, the criteria allow breads made with no whole grains to get the seal if they have added nutrients. "You could start out with some sawdust, add calcium or Vitamin A and meet the criteria," Mr. Jacobson said.

I love the comments at the bottom -- apparently Fourth and Mission is a terrifying place where civilized people should never go without armed guards.

"They mostly come at night. Mostly."

Previously.

Metreon closing Playstation and Sony Style stores. Remember, "It's not a mall, it's an urban entertainment destination." I still like Sanraku, but the video arcade is dead to me since they took out Hyperbowl and most of the residual Mobius art. And what the hell is up with the Claw Game Graveyard that takes up half of the second floor now? Previously.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 064b!

That's right, I said 064b! I built and approximation of mixtape 064 out of Youtube videos, like I did for mixtape 047. Some entries on 064b have been replaced by other tracks by the same band, and a few are missing, because I couldn't find any videos...

Update, 19-Sep-2009: Youtube seems to have broken something. If the embedded player doesn't work, try this link.

Also, I have some Youtube hate:

• Dear Warner Music Group, please die in a fire.

• Dear nearly-every-record-label, why do you post all your videos with "embedding disabled"? All that does is make it so that I cannot include your videos in a playlist, and thus cannot promote your artists for you. It also doesn't really work, since I just have to go three pages deep in the search results to find someone else who posted a crappy television rip of it. Instead of your almost-as-crappy rip of it.

• Dear teenagers who post still-frame video as a way of sharing the audio: knock that shit off! There are real videos of all of these songs, and you're just cluttering up the damned search results.

• Dear Youtube: add some god damned options to your search engine, so I can search for only videos that are embeddable, and/or only videos that are high quality. (Bonus points if there's a checkbox for "videos that contain video"! Omit the ones where the frame rate is less than 1 FPS.)

  A checkbox for "leave out the ones where 80% of the audio is clipping" would be cool, too.

Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls says:

if you hadn't noticed, all of the dresden dolls and amanda palmer official videos have been taken off youtube.

yes, folks...girl anachronism, coin-operated boy, shores of california, almost everything from who killed amanda palmer....pretty much the whole deal. all gone. go look for yourself. and you ask...wtf? this is why: nytimes, wired.

basically: "Unable to reach new licensing terms, the Warner Music Group has demanded that thousands of its videos be removed from YouTube, which is owned by Google. Warner Music's videos, the source of a billion views on YouTube, gradually began disappearing from the site on Saturday, although many remained online Sunday evening."

in other words, roadrunner is a subsidiary of warner and i'm stuck in hell with madonna and the other poor bastards, because warner wants more money. even worse, warner has almost no bargaining power...they're not even in the top ten of labels who have huge artists with material streaming on youtube. they're just starving for cash right now and they're doing anything they can think of to come up with cash. it's abSURD. they are looking for money in a totally backwards way.

money that, i should point out, i would NEVER see as an artist. if they got their way and youtube decided to give them a larger revenue share of the videos, it;s very unlikely it would ever make it's way into the artists' bank accounts.

damn, man. this shit is fucked UP.

...on the grounds that Asshole Godzilla is an awesome name for a band.

This month, Toho ordered Arizona rock band Asshole Godzilla to forfeit its internet domain and stop using Godzilla in its name. "We gotta change the name of our band, because we're so scary hard that Godzilla and the people surrounding Godzilla want nothing to do with us," lead vocalist Nick Danger writes on assholegodzilla.com, which is being shuttered.

Toho was only the second lawsuit against Netscape that was my fault! Oh, the good old days...

Apple brings HDCP to a new aluminum MacBook near you

"When a high school teacher attempted to play Hellboy 2 on his classroom's projector with a new aluminum MacBook over lunch, he was denied by the error you see above. John's using a Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA adapter, plugged into a Sanyo projector that is part of his room's Promethean system."

Previously.

Ignore That Logo Under the Tape!

To ensure that only the companies that pay millions of dollars to be official Olympic sponsors enjoy the benefits of exposure in Olympic venues, organizers have covered the trademarks of nonsponsors with thousands of little swatches of tape.

In media centers, dormitories and arena bathrooms, pieces of tape cover logos of fire extinguishers, light switches, thermostats, bedroom night tables, soap dispensers and urinals. The Taiden Industrial translation headsets in a large conference room have had their logos covered, as have the American Standard faucets in the bathrooms nearby, and the ThyssenKrupp escalators down the hall.

The International Olympic Committee says that such "brand protection" is essential for the Games to raise the corporate money that keeps them going and growing. The Games get 40% of their revenue from sponsors, with the rest coming from broadcast rights, ticketing and licensing. Sponsors of China's Games, believed to be the most lucrative ever, have contributed some $1.5 billion in cash, goods and services, estimates sports-marketing group Octagon.

The IOC says the brand-protection practices here in Beijing are consistent with procedures at past Olympics. Actual enforcement of IOC sponsorship-protection rules falls mostly to whichever city is hosting the Games, however, and by some indications no host has taken that role more seriously than China. In many cases, even products that don't compete with anything made by official sponsors are having their logos covered.

Previously, previously.

At domains.aol.com you can now register email addresses ending in... "mcom.com".

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

So yeah, I re-claimed jwz@mcom.com. But I don't see a way to make that forward out of their webmail system, so don't bother sending me mail there.

I still can't get "jwz@aol.com" or the AIM handle "jwz" however.

Remember how they wouldn't give me the mcom.com domain for my "re-host the old web sites and browsers" project? Yeah. I guess this is the "several hundred thousands of dollars" value for which they really needed this domain.

This outfit is too naughty to be allowed on Southwest Airlines:

Southwest explained its treatment of Ebbert in a letter to her mother, saying it could remove any passenger "whose clothing is lewd, obscene or patently offensive" to ensure the comfort of children and "adults with heightened sensitivities."

They walked out onto the jet bridge, where Keith told Ebbert her clothing was inappropriate and asked her to change. She explained she was flying to Tucson for only a few hours and had brought no luggage. "I asked him what part of my outfit was offensive," she said. "The shirt? The skirt? And he said, 'The whole thing.'

Keith asked her to go home, change and take a later flight. She refused, citing her appointment. The plane was ready to leave, so Keith relented. He had her pull up her tank top a bit, pull down her skirt a bit, and return to her seat.

Dear Lazyweb, is there yet anything better than PearLyrics for getting lyrics into your ID3 tags in bulk?

In case you don't remember, there was this handy program that would display the lyrics of the currently-playing track, and if it didn't have any, would do some searches.

Then, the author got a C+D from Warner and panicked.

Then, in a marketing coup, Warner sent and "apology" for the "tone" of their letter -- but, notably, never told him that he could continue distributing his program. So they got a lot of credulous good press from the bloggoweenies, and still got what they wanted: fewer people having easy access to lyrics.

(Yeah, I'm looking at you, Boing Boing: they didn't change their behavior one whit, and you passed along their insincere press-release apology anyway without ever noting the nakedness of that emperor.)

Anyway.

My copy of PearLyrics seems not to work so well any more, presumably because whatever hardcoded searches are built in to it have gone somewhat stale. Source was never made available, and the author hasn't stopped hiding under his rock.

Is there anything better?

(Yes, I know there are rumors of Apple building this into the iTunes store, but those rumors are two years old, so I'm not holding my breath. Also the current Yahoo offering is worse than useless, which does not bode well for that in any case.)

Music industry attacks Sunday newspaper's free Prince CD

The eagerly awaited new album by Prince is being launched as a free CD with a national Sunday newspaper in a move that has drawn widespread criticism from music retailers.

One music store executive described the plan as "madness" while others said it was a huge insult to an industry battling fierce competition from supermarkets and online stores. Prince's label has cut its ties with the album in the UK to try to appease music stores.

The Entertainment Retailers Association said the giveaway "beggars belief". "It would be an insult to all those record stores who have supported Prince throughout his career," ERA co-chairman Paul Quirk told a music conference. "It would be yet another example of the damaging covermount culture which is destroying any perception of value around recorded music.

"The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday."

(The other hilarity aside... there's a covermount culture?)

Billboard ban in São Paulo angers advertisers

[...which gets my vote for most shocking! headline of the year.]

The law is "a rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash," Roberto Pompeu de Toledo, a columnist and author of a history of São Paulo, wrote in the weekly newsmagazine Veja. "For once in life, all that is accustomed to coming out on top in Brazil has lost."

But advertising and business groups regard the legislation as injurious to society and an affront to their professions. They say that free expression will be inhibited, jobs will be lost and consumers will have less information on which to base purchasing decisions. They also argue that streets will be less safe at night with the loss of lighting from outdoor advertising.

"This is a radical law that damages the rules of a market economy and respect for the rule of law," said Marcel Solimeo, chief economist of the Commercial Association of São Paulo, which has 32,000 members. "We live in a consumer society and the essence of capitalism is the availability of information about products."

"What we are aiming for is a complete change of culture," said Roberto Tripoli, president of the City Council and one of the main sponsors of the legislation. "Yes, some people are going to have to pay a price. But things were out of hand and the population has made it clear it wants this."

Previously.

Watch the Hacking Democracy democracy documentary playing on HBO this month. It's also available for download from Google video.

As documentaries go, it's not great -- they had about 40 minutes of material that they padded out to 80 minutes with long, lingering pans across rows of machines while the music swells -- but the content is important and infuriating.

Please watch this, because I'm constantly amazed at how many of my friends don't understand the problem with electronic voting machines, and don't know what I'm talking about when I bring this up in person. I've been posting links about this ongoing disaster for years, but I guess all of you are just here for the poop jokes.

The Day That Nothing Happened

The Wal-Mart in the basement of my building sells live frogs in a big aquarium, for eating. I don't know what surprised me more when I moved here - the frogs, or the Wal-Mart. [...] In addition to the frogs there are live turtles, plastic bar code tags threaded through little holes in their shells. [...] This being China, any employee handling food inevitably wears a gauze mask and sanitary outfit that gives the deli counter the feel of a level-3 containment facility.

There are two Chinas - a small urban China that is getting richer, and an enormous rural one that remains desperately poor. Imagine cities in the United States surrounded by rural Mexico and you have the dynamic. [...] What makes the situation exceptionally weird is that this is happening in a country that still professes to be Marxist. And the new Chinese capitalism feels like it was introduced by people whose understanding of it came solely from reading Marx: it is ruthless, exploitative, and contains the seeds of its own destruction. The only hitch is that the inevitable finale - proletarian revolution - is supposed to have already happened.

Wal-Mart's Data Center

Behind a fence topped with razor wire just off U.S. Highway 71 is a bunker of a building that Wal-Mart considers so secret that it won't even let the county assessor inside without a nondisclosure agreement.

Wal-Mart's ability to crunch numbers is a favorite of conspiracy theorists, and its data centers are the corporate counterpart to Area 51 at Groom Lake in the state of Nevada. According to one consumer activist, Katherine Albrecht, even the wildest conspiracy buff might be surprised at just how much Wal-Mart knows about its customers - and how much more it would like to know.

"We were contacted about two years ago by somebody who runs a security company that had been asked in a request for proposals for ways they could link video footage with customers paying for their purchases," Albrecht said. "Wal-Mart would actually be able to view photos and video of customers paying, say, for a pack of gum."

Today's happy fun news comes from bruce_schneier, wired_27b_6, & so_very_doomed:

• Major Vulnerability Found in Diebold Election Machines: Armed with a little basic knowledge of Diebold voting systems and a standard component available at any computer store, someone with a minute or two of access to a Diebold touch screen could load virtually any software into the machine and disable it, redistribute votes or alter its performance in myriad ways. "This one is worse than any of the others I've seen. It's more fundamental." (See also Voting Machines versus Slot Machines.)

• NSA Creating Massive Phone-Call Database: The NSA is collecting a massive traffic-analysis database on Americans' phone calls. This looks like yet another piece of Echelon technology turned against Americans. "The agency's goal is 'to create a database of every call ever made' within the nation's borders." Note that this database does not just contain phone calls that either originate or terminate outside the U.S. This database is mostly domestic calls: calls we all make everyday. AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth are all providing this information to the NSA. Only Quest has refused.

• Fun With Surveilance: It's important to link this up to the broader chain. One thing the Bush administration says it can do with this meta-data is to start tapping your calls and listening in, without getting a warrant from anyone. Having listened in on your calls, the administration asserts that if it doesn't like what it hears, it has the authority to detain you indefinitely without trial or charges, torture you until you confess or implicate others, extradite you to a Third World country to be tortured, ship you to a secret prison facility in Eastern Europe, or all of the above. If, having kidnapped and tortured you, the administration determines you were innocent after all, you'll be dumped without papers somewhere in Albania left to fend for yourself.

• Domestic spying inquiry killed: The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers security clearance. "Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation."

• US energy research is declining: Given the decades-long warnings about a looming world energy crisis - punctuated by the recent spike in crude oil prices - you'd assume the U.S. has been ramping up its research and development spending on energy. Think again. Since 1980, energy research has fallen from 10 percent to 2 percent of total R&D spending. And while the Bush administration lists energy research as a "high priority national need" and points to its recent energy bill as evidence, the 2005 federal budget cuts another 11 percent from energy programs.

Have you encountered this "Verified by Visa" bullshit?

Some web sites now have this extra page their foist on you after you have already entered all your credit card info, where before completing the transaction, you have to fill out a second form with your name, email address, CCV, expiry, and a password. "For your protection." And they make it be a hard password, meaning none of my throwaway don't-give-a-shit passwords work.

It says "your card has been enrolled in Verified by Visa -- at no extra charge!" (Emphasis theirs.) Oh thanks ever so fucking much.

The last time I encountered this, I called Visa and asked them to "de-enroll" my card from it, but this time, the monkey on the phone, as well as the monkey's supervisor, said that if the vendor had signed up for it (TicketWeb in this case) that it was not optional.

Is this true? Do I have to switch banks now? Or do they all have a similar program "for my protection"?