Culture jamming

UPDATED! Is Microsoft Taking Credit for “Kinect Hacking”…?

UPDATED! Is Microsoft Taking Credit for “Kinect Hacking”…?

Yes, it does seem the Microsoft PR machine & (new) Kinect studio team is trying to take credit for the open source “Kinect hacking” community and says they purposely “allowed” hacking – the report ignores the efforts from all the open source Kinect hackers out there and how this all happened. They also left out the threatening and intimidating when Johnny Lee, Limor “Ladyada” and myself first started the Kinect bounty and got the open source drivers out there with Hector. When then all watched an amazing open source community flourish. It’s also a little confusing because Kinecthacks.net is not part of Microsoft in any way… WIRED has a full write up on the real story from the most recent issue.

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Why Every Maker Should Learn Chinese

Why Every Maker Should Learn Chinese

If you’re a maker you might want to consider learning a new language! In this week’s article I’ll talk about why I think it’s a good idea for any maker to consider picking up some new language skills and specifically what I’m doing. A lot of my articles tend to be about the future (I can’t wait to look back on these 5 years from now). So, yes, I think a lot of us are going to find speaking, reading, and writing the language of the soon-to-be biggest economy in the world and, who makes almost everything, is a good idea. It’s something to consider learning, starting now, particularly for makers, especially the ones who run maker businesses.

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Moral Suasion

Moral Suasion

The life of a modern-day maker is greatly eased by the abundance of free or cheap services for hosting communities, files, communications, and computation. But for all the promise of cloud computing, there’s plenty of peril, too, especially for anyone doing anything disruptive. Will your “cloud” evaporate the second your project starts attracting legal threats? […]

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Congrats to SONY – Now 50% of the DMCAs on GitHub AND German Kid Who Installed Linux on PS3 Going to Prison

Congrats to SONY – Now 50% of the DMCAs on GitHub AND German Kid Who Installed Linux on PS3 Going to Prison

Congrats to SONY – Now 50% of the DMCAs on GitHub, a milestone to be proud of for sure. But wait, there’s more! Alexander Egorenkov, known as ‘Graf_Chokolo’ on the internet, was targeting by Sony after hacking the PS3 last year in an attempt to restore OtherOS to the system. Egorenkov was subsequently sued by […]

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