Geek Gestalt

Twitter users are urging each other to change their location settings to confuse censors in Iran.

(Credit: Twitter)

Yesterday, I got an e-mail from a reader who had seen my story about Twitter users slamming CNN for its initial absence on the post-Iranian election protests, urging me to remove an image in the story.

The rationale? The image was of Twitter results and included users' account IDs, and the reader was worried that the Iranian government might seek out and punish any users who were employing Twitter for potentially subversive purposes.

We decided not to remove the image, in part because it had been up for more than 24 hours, and also because we suspected that the Iranian government knows how to use Twitter and how to find people in that country using the microblogging service as a way to spread news about the protests.

But now, Twitter users across the world are attempting to turn that dynamic on its head. The best way that the Iranian government could discover which tweets were from Iranians is to look and see whose accounts are registered to people who identify themselves as being from that country. That's possible because users' profiles allow people to define which city they're from and which time zone they're in.

There's a new thread spreading quickly across Twitter--I found more than 1,300 such posts--urging people around the world to change those settings in order to make themselves appear to be in Tehran.

Under the profile setting, the plea goes, people should change their location to Tehran, and their time zone and home city to GMT +03:30 Tehran. The idea--and it's not entirely clear if this would work--is that this will simply overwhelm the censors with people who look like they're posting potentially subversive tweets from Iran, and hopefully, protect the actual Iranians who are doing so.

Twitter, of course--as well as other social media services, has been the front line for news about the massive protests--perhaps the biggest in Iran since the revolution in 1979 that toppled the Shah. The service's users--using the hashtag "#IranElection"--have consistently been ahead of the news media on the story. And Twitter convinced its host, NTT America, to delay scheduled downtime in order to keep the service up and running so as to continue to give users a way to spread and receive news about what's going on in Iran.

The question has come up, again and again, about what would have happened in China in 1989 if protesters in Tiananmen Square had had Twitter at their disposal. I think China is more adept at censorship than Iran, but it seems clear that where there's a will, there's a way. And users of the Internet are a lot more clever than bureaucratic censors. I think the word would have gotten out.

PALM DESERT, Calif.--If a major earthquake hits San Francisco, where CBS Interactive (CNET News' parent) is based, how would everyone in the company communicate with each other in the aftermath?

If the folks at Transformyx, a Baton Rouge, La., company, have anything to say about it, we'd all be using their technology, an online service called RallyPoint.

The idea behind the service is to make it possible for everyone in an organization to stay in touch with each other and to get all the relevant information they need after any kind of significant disaster strikes, be it an earthquake, a tornado, a flood or anything else.

Being from Louisiana, Transformyx was inspired to create RallyPoint by 2005's Hurricane Katrina. But the lessons learned in that crisis were that companies need to be able to get their employees--especially managers--as much information as possible about what's going on, both with the people involved, and with any mission-critical data.

Transformyx, which presented Monday morning at Demo 09, is positioning RallyPoint as the first end-to-end crisis recovery and communications system. The idea is that by using the online system, anyone in a company affected by a disaster can get simple access to whatever he or she needs to ensure that everyone is accounted for, and to disseminate communications to relevant people.

The service is designed to handle a wide range of data: text, voice, video, and even communications from government agencies.

In any company using RallyPoint, all employees would be given a card they can carry around that provides instructions on how to use the system, meaning that no one has to memorize instructions. That's important given that in a crisis, people are often unable to remember even the most mundane details of their lives.

The system provides employees with a way to check in, notifying managers of their whereabouts, and similarly, gives those managers all the information they need to know about the discrete group of people they're responsible for. Employees and managers alike can upload messages to the system. Managers using the system can use up to 1GB of storage for documents or video.

Like many Web-based services, RallyPoint has a dashboard interface, and one of the things managers handling a crisis will like is that that interface shows the real-time status of their employees, and even a map showing their locations.

Furthermore, any two members using the system can communicate with each other once they've signed in, meaning that no one has to remember any phone numbers or any other ways to get in touch with each other.

Certainly, this system seems valuable, though it obviously relies on everyone using it to have power and Internet access. In a real disaster, like a Katrina-level hurricane or a major earthquake, that kind of access may not be available.

Still, communications are often available even in a crisis, and even when power disappears. And with most people using laptops, it's likely that people would have enough battery life to at least log in to the system.

What would be nice to see with RallyPoint is a personal widget, allowing family members to use it for their own purposes as well.

It appears that an agreement has been reached between Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories and Klutz, the publisher of a book called the 'Invasion of the Bristlebots,' to give credit for the creation of the concept of a bristlebot to the original makers.

(Credit: Windell H. Oskay, www.evilmadscientist.com)

A kerfuffle that exploded online in the past few days over who created the concept of a "bristlebot," a small robot mashed up with a toothbrush, looks like it has a happy ending after an agreement between a New York publisher and two Silicon Valley "makers."

The controversy arose when a forthcoming book called "The Invasion of the Bristlebots" was discovered at the recent New York Toy Fair, raising the hackles of many who were deeply familiar with the concept of bristlebots, which had first been spread in late 2007 by the Silicon Valley makers, Lenore Edman and Windell Oskay, otherwise known as Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

In a post on how to create a bristlebot on the Make magazine blog in December, 2007, Edman and Oskay wrote:

The BristleBot is a simple and tiny robot with an agenda. The ingredients? One toothbrush, a battery, and a pager motor. The result? Serious fun. The BristleBot is our take on the popular vibrobot, a simple category of robot that is controlled by a single vibrating (eccentric) motor. Some neat varieties include the mint-tin version, as seen in Make Magazine...and the kid's art bot: a vibrobot with pens for feet.

Since that post, Edman said, bristlebots have become one of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories' most popular creations, one that has spurred people all over the world to work on their own bristlebot projects, a development that Edman said was "fantastic." The original post also linked to a video (see below) on making one of the little robots that has since been viewed on YouTube more than 2.1 million times.

Given that, and the fact that the book from Klutz publishers (a division of Scholastic) had neglected to offer any credit to Edman or Oskay, or any acknowledgment that someone else had previously worked on bristlebots, upset a lot of people.

In a post on the Make magazine blog Thursday, senior editor Phil Torrone called the Klutz book project, which was authored by Pat Murphy, a "sad day for makers." And Edman and Oskay wrote on their own site: "We were never contacted by Klutz (or Scholastic), which we find surprising, being that we are the instigators of the current brush-based vibrobot movement, and the coiners of the term bristlebot."

For its part, Scholastic initially took a wait-and-see attitude. Kyle Good, vice president of corporate communications, told CNET News in an e-mail: "Klutz is genuinely surprised by this reaction to our book. The development of 'Invasion of the Bristlebots' by the Klutz creative team dates back to at least early 2007 and was developed internally, like other Klutz products. In light of this misunderstanding, we're contacting the folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories in the interest of addressing the concerns that have been raised."

On Friday afternoon, the two sides talked, and according to Edman, it appears that a resolution was reached.

The book 'Invasion of the Bristlebots,' by Pat Murphy, will be published by Klutz and Scholastic in April. While the publisher says the book was already in the works prior to the December, 2007 blog posts in which Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories first wrote about bristlebots, it will give credit to the original makers.

(Credit: Scholastic/Klutz)

"I think they want to do the right thing," Edman told CNET News. "It sounds like they want to give us acknowledgment and work with us to make things right."

Edman said that there were still details to be worked out with Klutz, and that she couldn't go into specifics of the agreement, but she characterized the conversation as a "good call."

In a statement issued by Scholastic late Friday, Murphy, the book's author, also said that the discussion with Edman had been "good" and productive.

"We spoke about our shared commitment to making science and technology accessible to children," Murphy's statement began. "We began a discussion of ways that Klutz could acknowledge the exceptional work that Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories had done in bristlebot research--starting with this message and continuing with acknowledgment in the next printing of the book and on the Klutz Web site."

Murphy also said that her bristlebots project did begin inside Klutz.

"At Klutz, the toothbrush robot evolved from the work of another editor and content developer on vibrobots....Sometime in early 2007, his efforts to shrink a vibrobot to a size that would fit on a book led him to strap a pager motor on a well-worn toothbrush. When he left Klutz, I worked on a tight deadline to refine his work and develop ways that kids ages eight and up could play with these Bots. Unfortunately, when working on a tight deadline, I tend to focus inward, rather than looking outward for others who might be able to help. And publishers, unlike the maker community--or the education community, where I spent many years--tend to keep their research under wraps until we're ready to publish."

Still, many in the maker community will find it improbable that bristlebots were created by anyone except Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. Yet, even if true, Edman and Oskay didn't have much, if any, of a legal complaint against the publisher, said Michael Barclay, an intellectual property attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

"Concepts are kind of fuzzy things," said Barclay, who was speaking generally and not about the specifics of the bristlebots controversy. "The generic concept of putting a robot together with a toothbrush would be pretty hard to protect....It's very hard to protect an idea."

But to Edman, the dispute was never about the law.

"I'm not at this point concerned with any legal situation," Edman said. "I'm much more concerned with the maker community, and that their rights are protected to continue to do projects like this and not feel that if they put a project out there that somebody's going to come along and use that project for financial gain without contacting the maker. So, is it a legal right? It's more a community ethos, the morals of the community and the community behavior that I'm interested in."

To people like Torrone, who is a passionate advocate for the maker community, the apparent resolution between Klutz and Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories seems like a good thing.

"This is great news for makers," Torrone said. "It means there are huge companies interested in what makers create. I'm sure (Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories) will show how traditional business can work with the maker community to the benefit of both."

Torrone added that he, like Edman, hadn't been looking at the dispute from a legal perspective. Rather, he too had been concerned that the situation might mean that makers can see their work appropriated by others without proper credit, something that might shut off the inspiration of future creators.

"My concern...was about what type of company Scholastic and Klutz wants to be, what world they want kids to grow up in," Torrone said. "They can credit makers and work with them or they can choose to hijack unique inventions without crediting makers. I'm pleased to see Scholastic and Klutz re-evaluated their position once they rediscovered the overwhelming clear-cut evidence that bristlebots came from (Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories)."

For Edman, the agreement with Klutz is an example of "an opportunity for a company like Klutz to collaborate with a community...and develop ideas with them, rather than the other way around. If we can work in concert, it will be much more successful."

A 'bristlebot' is a combination of a small robot and a toothbrush. There is now a controversy over who created the concept, as an inventor called Evil Mad Scientist first wrote about bristlebots in late 2007, and there now comes a book from Klutz and Scholastic titled 'Invasion of the Bristlebots,' which makes no reference to Evil Mad Scientist.

(Credit: Windell H. Oskay, www.evilmadscientist.com)

When it comes to whimsy, there's no doubt that the concept of a "bristlebot," a combination robot and toothbrush, is dripping with it.

But there's little whimsy going on right now over a controversy that has arisen with the appearance at the recent Toy Fair in New York of a book from Klutz publishing called "Invasion of the Bristlebots."

That's because in December 2007, the inventors at Evil Mad Scientist posted a how-to entry on the Make blog about something they called "BristleBots," a combination of a robot and a toothbrush:

The BristleBot is a simple and tiny robot with an agenda. The ingredients? One toothbrush, a battery, and a pager motor. The result? Serious fun. The BristleBot is our take on the popular vibrobot, a simple category of robot that is controlled by a single vibrating (eccentric) motor. Some neat varieties include the mint-tin version, as seen in Make Magazine (check the video) and the kid's art bot: a vibrobot with pens for feet.

But as was discovered at the Toy Fair, a new book from Klutz and Scholastic publishing by author Pat Murphy, called "Invasion of the Bristlebots," is covering what seems to be exactly the same ground.

The book 'Invasion of the Bristlebots,' by Pat Murphy, is set to be published by Klutz and Scholastic in April. The publisher says the book was already in the works prior to the December 2007 blog posts in which Evil Mad Scientist first wrote about so-called BristleBots.

(Credit: Klutz/Scholastic publishing)

So far, it's unclear what the true origin of the bristlebot is.

In response to a request for comment on this story, Kyle Good, Scholastic vice president of corporate communications, wrote in an e-mail on Thursday that "Klutz is genuinely surprised by this reaction to our book. The development of 'Invasion of the Bristlebots' by the Klutz creative team dates back to at least early 2007 and was developed internally, like other Klutz products. In light of this misunderstanding, we're contacting the folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories in the interest of addressing the concerns that have been raised."

Afterwards, Scholastic put the same statement up on its public blog.

However, the folks at Evil Mad Scientist seem to be insisting that the bristlebot was their invention. As they wrote on their site Thursday, "We were never contacted by Klutz (or Scholastic), which we find surprising, being that we are the instigators of the current brush-based vibrobot movement and the coiners of the term bristlebot."

For now, this is all the information that is available. Stay tuned, however, as I plan to have a more in-depth story on this controversy on Monday morning.

Facing a federal complaint from a leading privacy advocacy organization and a revolt of tens of thousands of its users, Facebook on Tuesday night backed down from what many have seen as an onerous privacy policy.

Facebook informed all its users that it has, temporarily at least, reverted its terms of service to the previous version.

(Credit: Screenshot by CNET Networks)

The policy had seemed to grant Facebook perpetual rights to users' uploaded content, and the threatened complaint from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) had demanded, essentially, that the social-networking service return to its previous terms.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post late Tuesday that the company had decided to do just that:

Many of us at Facebook spent most of today discussing how best to move forward. One approach would have been to quickly amend the new terms with new language to clarify our positions further. Another approach was simply to revert to our old terms while we begin working on our next version. As we thought through this, we reached out to respected organizations to get their input.

Going forward, we've decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don't plan to leave it there for long.

Zuckerberg also said that the company would be adopting a new set of terms that would more carefully take users' rights into consideration:

More than 175 million people use Facebook. If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world. Our terms aren't just a document that protect our rights; it's the governing document for how the service is used by everyone across the world. Given its importance, we need to make sure the terms reflect the principles and values of the people using the service.

Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the governing document that we'll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms.

The move came after Facebook had, earlier in the day, polled its users as to whether it should revert to its previous terms. And in his blog, Zuckerberg said that the company would be asking users to get involved in crafting the next set of terms.

"If you'd like to get involved in crafting our new terms," Zuckerberg wrote, "you can start posting your questions, comments and requests in the group we've created--Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. I'm looking forward to reading your input."

Certainly, we'll have more on this as it develops.

But in the meantime, as blogger Leo Laporte put it on Twitter this evening, "Put down the pitchforks and call off the rabble."

A leading privacy advocacy group is preparing to file a federal complaint against Facebook's new privacy policies, a published report said Tuesday.

According to PC World, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is getting ready to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, demanding that the massively popular social networking service return to its previous policies.

It appears that the major thrust of EPIC's--and many others' anger--at Facebook stems from new language in the privacy policy that grants the company seemingly perpetual control over content users post there:

"You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings....

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

There are currently more than 46,000 members of a Facebook group set up to protest the new policies.

In a blog post defending the new language, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg argued that it wasn't as onerous as people were claiming, and that:

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they've asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn't help people share that information.

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created--one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

In reality, we wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want. The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work. Our goal is to build great products and to communicate clearly to help people share more information in this trusted environment.

But, wrote PC World, other online services, like MySpace, Twitter and YouTube, all have less strict controls over users' content.

Parents trying to figure out what video games are appropriate for their kids have a new tool at their disposal.

Already, they've been able to look at games' ratings--"E" for everyone, "T" for teen, "M" for ages 17 and up, and "AO" for adults only. But now, the agency that decides which games are right for which age groups, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, will be offering what it calls "summaries" of each game's rating.

The idea, the ESRB said in a release Wednesday morning, is to allow parents to see some of the thought process behind the agency's decision.

"The new rating summaries explain in objective terms," the release stated, "the context and relevant content that factored into a game's ESRB rating assignment."

Beginning Wednesday, parents and others will be able to view these summaries for all new games, as well as those the ESRB has rated going back to July 1, 2008. The information will be available on the agency's main Web site, on a mobile site (m.esrb.org) or through a special "rating search widget."

To be sure, many games are bought on impulse, so this service will go unnoticed and unused much of the time. But by making the information available via a mobile site, the ESRB is ensuring that parents aware of the program will be able to check the summaries while at retail outlets. Many others will be able to look into the games that their children are asking for, allowing them to make the decision about whether to buy the titles based on more information than just the rating itself.

All in all, this is probably a good move by the ESRB, which has taken heat in the past for its ratings--and which is clearly striving to be seen as more transparent, and therefore more relevant.

The ESRB is an arm of the video game industry's organizational body, the Entertainment Software Association and all major (and most smaller) publishers agree to subject their titles to the ESRBs ratings.

Executives throughout the video game industry may be breathing a big sigh of relief. That's because it looks like one of the industry's biggest critics, Florida lawyer Jack Thompson, has had his voice cut off at the knees, to mix a metaphor or two.

According to a Thursday report on the popular video game blog Kotaku, Thompson has been disbarred by a Florida judge who ruled he has been guilty of some seriously unbecoming conduct.

Essentially, according to Kotaku, the court ruled that Thompson "made false statements of material fact to courts and repeatedly violated a court order...communicated the subject of representation directly with clients of opposing counsel...engaged in prohibited ex parte communications...publicized and sent hundreds of pages of vitriolic and disparaging missives, letters, faxes and press releases to the affected individuals...targeted an individual who was not involved with (Thompson) in any way, merely due to 'the position (the individual) holds in state and national politics'...falsely, recklessly and publicly accused a judge of being amenable to the 'fixing' of cases," and so on.

Thompson might best be known for his withering attacks of Rockstar Games for the sexual content that was hidden in its hit game, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. But he has also been vocal in his criticism of countless other games for what he saw as too much violence and sexual content.

This post was updated at 1:50 p.m. PDT to correct the spelling of Tory Belleci's name.

MythBusters co-host Adam Savage is stepping back from public comments suggesting that legal counsel from several credit card companies led the Discovery Channel to pull the plug on an episode dedicated to security holes in RFID.

At the Last HOPE conference in New York in July, Savage told a crowd of several thousand people that his theory on why MythBusters had not gone forward with a planned episode on RFID (radio frequency identification) hackability was that on a conference call to discuss the matter with technicians from Texas Instruments, the lawyers for the credit cards companies had put the hammer down on the show.

"Texas Instruments comes on along with chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else (co-host Tory Belleci and a MythBusters producer) were way, way out-gunned," Savage told the crowd, "and (the lawyers) absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was, and Discovery backed way down, being a large corporation that depends upon the revenue of the advertisers. Now it's on Discovery's radar and they won't let us go near it."

But Texas Instruments spokeswoman Cindy Huff told CNET News on Tuesday that things had gone a bit different than Savage had said.

"In June 2007, MythBusters was interested in pursuing some great myth-busting ideas for RFID. While in pursuit, they contacted Texas Instruments' RFID Systems, who is a pioneer of RFID and contactless technology, for technical help and understanding of RFID in the contactless payments space," Huff said. "Some of the information that was needed to pursue the program required further support from the contactless payment companies as they construct their own proprietary systems for security to protect their customers. To move the process along, Texas Instruments coordinated a conversation with Smart Card Alliance (SCA) who invited MasterCard and Visa, on contactless payments to help MythBusters get the right information. Of the handful of people on the call, there were mostly product managers and only one contactless payment company's legal counsel member. Technical questions were asked and answered and we were to wait for MythBusters to let us know when they were planning on showing the segment. A few weeks later, Texas Instruments was told by MythBusters that the storyline had changed and they were pursuing a different angle which did not require our help."

And now, even Savage is saying that he got his facts wrong.

In a statement from Savage--who was speaking for himself at the conference and not appearing on behalf of the show--provided to CNET News by Discovery Channel on Wednesday, the MythBusters co-host retracted the substance of what he'd told the Last HOPE audience.

"There's been a lot of talk about this RFID thing, and I have to admit that I got some of my facts wrong, as I wasn't on that story, and as I said on the video, I wasn't actually in on the call," Savage said in the statement. "Texas Instruments' account of their call with Grant and our producer is factually correct. If I went into the detail of exactly why this story didn't get filmed, it's so bizarre and convoluted that no one would believe me, but suffice to say...the decision not to continue on with the RFID story was made by our production company, Beyond Productions, and had nothing to do with Discovery, or their ad sales department."

From his statement, it's also logical to conclude that when he told the Last HOPE audience that co-host Belleci was on the conference call, he had meant Grant Imahara, another MythBuster co-host.

Further, a Discovery Channel representative told me that MythBusters did end up running an episode, last January, on RFID, but that the issue of the technology's security holes was not addressed.