Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and Representative Dianne Watson will be getting a call from me.

I’m a Pandora addict. I’m tired of the repetitive playlists of the local broadcast stations. After about 3 months, I’ve “trained” Pandora to mix about 30 “stations” into the kind of music sampling that keeps me happy all day while I slave over my keyboard.

A Day of Silence

Hi, it’s Tim from Pandora,

I’m sorry to say that today Pandora, along with most Internet radio sites, is going off the air in observance of a Day Of Silence. We are doing this to bring to your attention a disastrous turn of events that threatens the existence of Pandora and all of internet radio. We need your help.

Ignoring all rationality and responding only to the lobbying of the RIAA, an arbitration committee in Washington DC has drastically increased the licensing fees Internet radio sites must pay to stream songs. Pandora’s fees will triple, and are retroactive for eighteen months! Left unchanged by Congress, every day will be like today as internet radio sites start shutting down and the music dies.

A bill called the “Internet Radio Equality Act” has already been introduced in both the Senate (S. 1353) and House of Representatives (H.R. 2060) to fix the problem and save Internet radio–and Pandora–from obliteration.

I’d like to ask you to call your Congressional representatives today and ask them to become co-sponsors of the bill. It will only take a few minutes and you can find your Congresspersons and their phone numbers by entering your zip code here.

Your opinion matters to your representatives - so please take just a minute to call.

Visit www.savenetradio.org to continue following the fight to Save Internet Radio.

As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support.

-Tim Westergren
(Pandora founder)

Thanks, Tim. I’ll get right on it!

No more “digital Visine”, software to eliminate red eyes from photos!

Kodak camera sensor may eliminate flash

NEW YORK (Reuters) — Eastman Kodak said Thursday it has developed digital camera technology that nearly eliminates the need for flash photography, part of the company’s effort to make money from its deep patent portfolio.

The world’s biggest maker of photographic film says its proprietary sensor technology significantly increases sensitivity to light. Image sensors act as a digital camera’s eyes by converting light into an electric charge to begin the capture process.

Kodak, which is in the last year of a lengthy and expensive transformation into a digital photography company as its film business shrinks, intends to lean on its wealth of intellectual property to boost its bottom line, expecting up to $250 million this year alone in royalties and related revenues.
…
Kodak said the new technology advances an existing Kodak standard in digital imaging. Today, the design of almost all color image sensors is based on the “Bayer Pattern,” an arrangement of red, green and blue pixels first developed by Kodak scientist Bryce Bayer in 1976.

In this design, half of the pixels on the sensor are used to collect green light, with the remaining pixels split evenly between sensitivity to red and blue light.

After exposure, software reconstructs a full-color signal for each pixel in the final image. Kodak’s new proprietary technology adds “clear” pixels to the red, green and blue elements that form the image sensor array, collecting a higher proportion of the light striking the sensor.

Manufacturing customers interested in the design will likely get a chance to sample it in early 2008, but Kodak’s McNiffe was unsure when devices using the technology would be in stores. The technology could be used at first in consumer gadgets such as cell phones and eventually in products made for industrial and scientific imaging.

Long before Bill Nye had his Science Guy show on Disney and Nye Labs and Ms. Frizzle led the Magic School Bus, there was Mr. Wizard.

The Mr. Wizard website reports:

It is with deep sadness that we regret to announce the passing of Don Herbert - the one and only “Mr. Wizard”. Don lost his battle with cancer today, June 12, 2007, at 9 AM Pacific Daylight Time - slightly more than one month shy of his 90th birthday. He was lovingly surrounded by his family, who are at once, saddened by his passing, and relieved that he is no longer suffering.

We all feel extremely lucky to have had him in our lives and to have known and worked with Don over the years. We have also been tremendously honored to carry on his legacy as an original and truly legendary figure in the worlds of both Television and Science Education. He has been inspirational and influential in so many ways and on so many lives and we are comforted in the fact that his ground breaking work and legacy will continue to inspire many more people for years to come.

Thank you so much to all of you for your support and sympathy.

Sincerely, The Family

The Los Angeles Times Obit:

Don Herbert, who explained the wonderful world of science to millions of young baby boomers on television in the 1950s and ’60s as “Mr. Wizard” and did the same for another generation of youngsters on the Nickelodeon cable TV channel in the 1980s, died Tuesday. He was 89.

Herbert died at his home in Bell Canyon after a long battle with multiple myeloma, said Tom Nikosey, Herbert’s son-in-law.

A low-key, avuncular presence who wore a tie and white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, Herbert launched his weekly half-hour science show for children on NBC in 1951.

Broadcast live from Chicago on Saturdays the first few years and then from New York City, “Watch Mr. Wizard” ran for 14 years.

Herbert used basic experiments to teach scientific principles to his TV audience via an in-studio guest boy or girl who assisted in the experiments.

“I was a grade school kid in the ’50s and watched ‘Mr. Wizard’ Saturday mornings and was just glued to the television,” said Nikosey, president of Mr. Wizard Studios, which sells Herbert’s science books and TV shows on DVD.

“The show just heightened my curiosity about science and the way things worked,” Nikosey said. “I learned an awful lot from him, as did millions of other kids.”

By 1955, there were about 5,000 Mr. Wizard Science Clubs nationwide, with more than 100,000 members.

And as Mr. Wizard, Herbert was a true TV star, featured in an array of magazines, including TV Guide, Life, Time, Newsweek, Science Digest, Boy’s Life and even Glamour.

Herbert was taken aback by the show’s success.

“What really did it for us was the inclusion of a child,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2004. “When we started out, it was just me up there alone. That was too much like having a professor give a lecture. We cast a boy and girl to come in and talk with me about science. That’s when it took off.

“The children watching could identify with someone like them.”

In explaining how he brought a sense of wonder to elementary scientific experiments, Herbert told the New York Times in 2004 that he “would perform the trick, as it were, to hook the kids, and then explain the science later.

“We thought we needed it to seem like magic to hook the audience, but then we realized that viewers would be engaged with just a simple scientific question, like, why do birds fly and not humans? A lot of scientists criticized us for using the words ‘magic’ and ‘mystery’ in the show’s subtitle, but they came around eventually.”

“Watch Mr. Wizard” garnered numerous honors, including a Peabody Award, four Ohio State awards and the Thomas Alva Edison Foundation Award for “Best Science TV Program for Youth.”

And Herbert had a lasting effect.

“Over the years, Don has been personally responsible for more people going into the sciences than any other single person in this country,” George Tressel, a National Science Foundation official, said in 1989.

“I fully realize the number is virtually endless when I talk to scientists,” he said. “They all say that Mr. Wizard taught them to think.”

Herbert’s experiments on the show typically used household items.

As a 1951 Time magazine story noted: “Herbert’s object is to show his audience what goes on in the world — why the wind blows, what makes a cake rise, how water comes out of a kitchen tap.

“To explain rain, he boils water in a coffee pot, compares the steam to clouds, and shows how ‘rain’ will condense on the sides of a glass held over the spout.”

Not every Mr. Wizard experiment went according to plan.

In “Saturday Morning TV,” a 1981 book by Gary H. Grossman, Herbert recalled pouring two colorless solutions into one glass and then announced that the solution would turn black before he counted to nine.

“I got up to 20 and decided I’d better stop,” he recalled. “I explained that apparently other factors like temperature and acidity had interfered with the experiment.”

But as he finished his explanation, the liquid changed color.

“It was embarrassing, certainly, but I discovered the answer,” he said. “We hadn’t used a fresh solution, so the reaction was slower than expected.”

After “Watch Mr. Wizard” ended its 14-year-run in 1965, Herbert showed up frequently on talk shows, including “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night With David Letterman.”

“Watch Mr. Wizard” was revived in 1971 for a season, and “Mr. Wizard’s World” ran on Nickelodeon from 1983 to 1990.

Born July 10, 1917, in Waconia, Minn., Herbert later moved to Minneapolis and then La Crosse, Wis. He graduated from LaCrosse State Teachers College in 1940 and could have taught English or general science — his majors — but he recalled later that he was more interested in the theater.

He worked as an actor and stagehand in a Minnesota theater group before moving to New York City in 1941.

A year later, he volunteered for the Army Air Forces. As a B-24 bomber pilot, he flew 56 missions over Italy, Germany and Yugoslavia and received the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with three oak-leaf clusters.

Herbert wrote several books, including “Mr. Wizard’s Supermarket Science” and “Mr. Wizard’s Experiments for Young Scientists.”

In recent years, he helped set up his website, http://www.mrwizardstudios.com .

He is survived by his wife of 34 years, Norma; his two sons and a daughter from his first marriage, Jay and Jeffrey and Jill Rogers; his stepdaughters Kendra Jeffcoat and Kris Nikosey; his stepson, Kim Kasell; and 13 grandchildren.

The family plans to hold a private memorial service.

Ars Technica reports:

A new report puts Google in last place when it comes to privacy protection. Despite recent moves to anonymize server logs and other pro-privacy gestures, Privacy International called the company “an endemic threat to privacy.”

Only Google earned the dismal “black” color bar from the group, which has just issued a report on Internet privacy that took six months to assemble (see the rankings [PDF]). The current report is preliminary; final results will be released in September.

See earlier TechTalk report Google, Do No Evil?

If you notice tomorrow that your inbox is a little less crowded, it might be because a Seattle jail cell is a little more full.

Federal authorities today arrested Robert Alan Soloway for mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft, money laundering, and impersonating the licentious wife of a Nigerian oil minister. (okay, we made that last one up) But they did slam him with a 35 count indictment.

The young internet entrepreneur alledgedly crossed over to the dark side when he used hijacking viruses to take over the computers of unsuspecting internet users. Hunting down vulnerable pcs on local cable networks and DSL, he would (alledgedly) load a remote email module which could be activated at his discretion. This allowed him to steal bandwidth from various ISPs, cable companies. etc. and use their networks to distribute his marketing materials. In his scheme, he not only stole bandwidth, time, attention and resources of his recipients, but also the network resources of his unconscious slave mailers.

“He’s one of the top 10 spammers in the world,” said Tim Cranton, a Microsoft Corp. lawyer who is senior director of the company’s Worldwide Internet Safety Programs. “He’s a huge problem for our customers. This is a very good day.”

Soloway pleaded not guilty Wednesday afternoon to all charges after a judge determined that — even with four bank accounts seized by the government — he was sufficiently well off to pay for his own lawyer.

He has been living in a ritzy apartment and drives an expensive Mercedes convertible, said prosecutor Kathryn Warma. Prosecutors are seeking to have him forfeit $773,000 they say he made from his business, Newport Internet Marketing Corp.

He continued his activities even after Microsoft won a $7 million civil judgment against him in 2005 and the operator of a small Internet service provider in Oklahoma won a $10 million judgment, prosecutors said.

U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan said Wednesday that the case is the first in the country in which federal prosecutors have used identity theft statutes to prosecute a spammer for taking over someone else’s Internet domain name. Soloway could face decades in prison, though prosecutors said they have not calculated what guideline sentencing range he might face.

The investigation began when the authorities began receiving hundreds of complaints about Soloway, who had been featured on a list of known spammers kept by The Spamhaus Project, an international anti-spam organization.

The Spamhaus Project rejoiced at his arrest.

“Soloway has been a long-term nuisance on the Internet — both in terms of the spam he sent, and the people he duped to use his spam service,” organizers wrote on Spamhaus.org.

Our own Aaron G. has volunteered to serve on the Jury, but will likely be declined due to his regular calls for the death penalty for spammers

Tune in for our upcoming broadcast segment on protecting YOUR PC from zombie overlords.