mike

Playing a building like an instrument, using flashlights

The list of installations for next month's Beam electronic and analog music festival in West London has brought a playful and mysterious piece of art to our attention -- a surprising cocktail of high and low tech.

Sound artist Mike Blow is on the Beam bill, and his recent piece "Torch Song" combines a microphone-and-laptop setup with light sensors to create a control panel that lets its user "play" a building -- using flashlights.… Read more

Hewlett-Packard just whacked the wrong executive

If Meg Whitman has a clue about how to restore a one-time Silicon Valley legend, she's doing a great job of keeping the plan to herself.

Nine months after her appointment as Hewlett-Packard's CEO, the Whitman era began in earnest today with the announcement that HP would fire 27,000 employees.

Twenty seven thousand employees.

And among the casualties is one Mike Lynch, the brilliant English computer scientist who founded Autonomy, a company once described by the Financial Times as "the doyen of European software." Autonomy's software sifts through and categorizes patterns found in unstructured … Read more

Was Apple protest leader Mark Shields an 'accidental activist'?

Apple fans were seething.

In January, they heard actor Mike Daisey describe during a radio broadcast the intolerable working conditions he witnessed at Chinese factories where iPads and iPhones are assembled. Many found their way to an online petition started at Change.org by a man named Mark Shields. The petition demanded Apple improve safety at these facilities, and it would eventually include 256,000 names.

At first, the petition appeared to have simply bubbled up from an outraged public.

Not quite. Apple fan or not, the 36-year-old Shields is a professional advocate and activist. The public-relations firm that has … Read more

Apple critic Mike Daisey is as hot as ever

NEW YORK -- The next stop on Mike Daisey's career path was supposed to be obscurity.

Instead, the monologist and Apple critic has never been hotter.

Daisey is the monologist who wrote and stars in the one-man show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs." In January, he went on "This American Life" radio show and told a compelling story about how he saw great suffering among the workers who assemble iPads and iPhones in China. Unfortunately, many of the most compelling details of his story were embellished or flat-out fictional.

Critics predicted that … Read more

House approves CISPA despite last-minute push by opponents

The U.S. House of Representatives today approved a controversial Internet surveillance bill, rejecting increasingly vocal arguments from critics that it would do more to endanger Americans' privacy than aid cybersecurity.

By a vote of 248 to 168, a bipartisan majority approved the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, which would permit Internet companies to hand over confidential customer records and communications to the National Security Agency and other portions of the U.S. government.

CISPA would "waive every single privacy law ever enacted in the name of cybersecurity," said Rep. Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat, … Read more

Homeland Security Internet monitoring dropped from CISPA

Rep. Mike Rogers, the author of a controversial Internet surveillance bill and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, isn't exactly a card-carrying civil libertarian.

The Michigan Republican has called for the execution of accused Wikileaker Bradley Manning. His CISPA bill, which passed the House of Representatives this afternoon, has been savaged as obliterating "any semblance of online privacy" for Americans and, by fellow Republilican Ron Paul, as "Big Brother writ large."

But Rogers strode onto the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives this afternoon to invoke the same Big Brother epithet to denounce … Read more

Mike Daisey disappears, then reappears

Disgraced Apple commentator Mike Daisey's new show appears to be a disappearing act -- possibly a recurring one.

The performer, who stars in a one-man play he wrote called "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," briefly disabled his Twitter account and made his public blog private, as first noted by The Next Web. Daisey has been keeping a low profile after it was revealed in March that he had made up details for his play, which purported to be an eyewitness account of suffering at the factories in China where iPads and iPhones are assembled. … Read more

The 404 1,022: Where we get all of our news on the toilet (podcast)

It's always fun to have a first timer on the show with us, and today we welcome Chenda Ngak, CBSNews.com technology and lifestyle blogger. She's a big videogamer and proud geek, so she's the perfect guest to help us talk about the recent backlash against "fake" geek girls.

Speaking of girls, we don't have them on the show very often so it's great to finally get a female perspective on the Reply Girls phenomenon.

If you haven't heard about them before, Reply Girls are a group of a dozen women dressed in low cut tops that post video replies to trending YouTube videos, exploiting their sexuality to earn money via YouTube's revenue-sharing program. While certainly a symbiotic relationship between Reply Girl and the weirdos clicking on them, we'll discuss the real victims in the scam and how YouTube is putting an end to it.… Read more

Group seeks recall of Daisey-inspired petition on iPad labor

A petition circulated on Change.org in January that targeted Apple -- demanding that it do more to protect workers in China who help build iPads -- was based on discredited claims and should be recalled, says a new petition.

More than 255,000 people signed the original petition posted to Change.org in early January by Mark Shields following a report about the human cost of Apple's labor practices on the radio show This American Life. The report has since been retracted by the show's producers.

Shields' petition, which called for Apple to create "a worker … Read more