It's like, Really?

Maker Faire Bay Area is this weekend, in San Mateo, California! Pesco, Mark and I will all be there, and I’m sure many of you reading Boing Boing will be, too. Mark has been posting some great behind-the-scenes snapshots on his Instagram. And of course, the #makerfaire hashtag is a good way to peek at the flood of tweets, videos, and images attendees and organizers will be sharing today.

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Among the most recent video posts you will find on our all-new video archive page:

• Child sneaks camera into school to document gross food.
• The art of brain hacking.
• Grizzly bear eats video camera.
• 11 year old and his 3D printer.
• HOWTO make glowing Converse.
• Monkey shares lollipop with puppy, then beats him with it.
• Woman smacks cop so she can go to jail and quit smoking.

Boing Boing: Video archives

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About this video, which shows a Pygmy Marmoset noshing on a macaroni, Meredith Yayanos says: “The tinier the primate, the deeper the Uncanny Valley.” I don’t know anything about the conditions under which this video was shot, but obviously monkeys belong in their natural habitat, not in someone’s home eating macaroni. Still, wow: how amazing and adorable the creature is.

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I reviewed Ronald Diebert’s new book Black Code in this weekend’s edition of the Globe and Mail. Diebert runs the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and has been instrumental in several high-profile reports that outed government spying (like Chinese hackers who compromised the Dalai Lama’s computer and turned it into a covert CCTV) and massive criminal hacks (like the Koobface extortion racket). His book is an amazing account of how cops, spies and crooks all treat the Internet as the same kind of thing: a tool for getting information out of people without their knowledge or consent, and how they end up in a kind of emergent conspiracy to erode the net’s security to further their own ends. It’s an absolutely brilliant and important book:

Ronald Deibert’s new book, Black Code, is a gripping and absolutely terrifying blow-by-blow account of the way that companies, governments, cops and crooks have entered into an accidental conspiracy to poison our collective digital water supply in ways small and large, treating the Internet as a way to make a quick and dirty buck or as a snoopy spy’s best friend. The book is so thoroughly disheartening for its first 14 chapters that I found myself growing impatient with it, worrying that it was a mere counsel of despair.

But the final chapter of Black Code is an incandescent call to arms demanding that states and their agents cease their depraved indifference to the unintended consequences of their online war games and join with civil society groups that work to make the networked society into a freer, better place than the world it has overwritten.

Deibert is the founder and director of The Citizen Lab, a unique institution at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. It is one part X-Files hacker clubhouse, one part computer science lab and one part international relations observatory. The Citizen Lab’s researchers have scored a string of international coups: Uncovering GhostNet, the group of Chinese hackers taking over sensitive diplomatic computers around the world and eavesdropping on the private lives of governments; cracking Koobface, a group of Russian petty crooks who extorted millions from random people on the Internet, a few hundred dollars at a time; exposing another Chinese attack directed at the Tibetan government in exile and the Dalai Lama. Each of these exploits is beautifully recounted in Black Code and used to frame a larger, vivid narrative of a network that is global, vital and terribly fragile.

Yes, fragile. The value of the Internet to us as a species is incalculable, but there are plenty of parties for whom the Internet’s value increases when it is selectively broken.

How to make cyberspace safe for human habitation

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace

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Here’s a clip from an upcoming documentary on the enormous gap between the food described by a fourth grader who snuck a camera into school to document his horrible school lunches and the vast distance between the food that the school claims to serve and food he and his friends end up eating.

Zachary is a fourth grader at a large New York City public elementary school. Each day he reads the Department of Education lunch menu online to see what is being served. The menu describes delicious and nutritious cuisine that reads as if it came from the finest restaurants. However, when Zachary gets to school, he finds a very different reality. Armed with a concealed video camera and a healthy dose of rebellious courage, Zachary embarks on a six month covert mission to collect video footage of his lunch and expose the truth about the City’s school food service program.

Yuck: A 4th Grader’s Short Documentary About School Lunch (via Reddit)

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