The Electronic Frontier Foundation has unveiled a new search tool to sift through their collection of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

"Until recently, documents obtained under FOIA often gathered dust in filing cabinets," said David Sobel, EFF Senior Counsel and director of the organization's FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government (FLAG) Project. "We believe that government information should be widely available and easy to research, and our new search engine makes that a reality."

I recommend the material on the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse and DCS 3000 surveillance program, and the Department of Homeland Security's Automated Targeting System and ADVISE data-mining project.

Try it here... [press release]

 -- via Slashdot

Be sure to catch Jenny Holzer's new retrospective at the Whitney, and next week get off at Grand Central and take in three gas-guzzling canvases by Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg.

While I've Never Played Braid before, after this glowing recommendation from Grammy-nominated goofball, Soulja Boy, I can't wait to get back to NYC next week and get downloadin'.

 

Until then, I'm entertaining myself with Everyday Shooter, a game that is truly for game designers. All sorts of addictive, chain-driven gameplay. The game changes every level, and is maddeningly difficult. Don't download from the Playstation store (PS3/PSP) if you plan to get any sleep tonight.

Esquire e-ink cover a pathetic disappointment -- Boing Boing Gadgets

A 1,600 part Electromechanical Computer built inside the nifty physics-engine-tastic PS3 game, Little Big Planet. Simulacrum!

--via [Opposable Thumbs]

--via [Opposable Thumbs]

Before literacy, we were mere listeners. We heard stories read to us as a group. After the printing press, we were elevating to individuals, each with our own, acknowledged perspective on what we read. (The Renaissance, if anything, was a celebration of individual perspective - just like the paintings.) This reading phase took us right through the reading equivalent of cheating: postmodernism, cut-and-paste, and other personal deconstruction of the author's original intent.

Finally, computers have changed our relationship to the text again. Instead of just reading the publications of others, we are free to write and distribute our own - on a relatively level playing field. We become authors.

--Link [boingboing]

Overdrive, the company serving up e-books for New York's public libraries drives across the country in a big Semi, uses a variety of DRM, primarily Windows Media. In Central Park on Sunday, a rep. told me "they are working on getting Windows Media DRM working on Macs." (wtf?)