hypnosec writes "Google+ made a landmark move and opened itself to users who are over the age of 13. Google+ did not initially target the younger crowd and kept itself available only for users above the age of 18. Besides, opening up to youngsters over the age of 13 the social network also added improved safety features to keep the younger crowd protected. Now it features more rigid default settings for privacy but, they can be overridden none the less. Vice president Product management at Google+, Bradley Horowitz, in a Google+ post stated, 'With Google+, we want to help teens build meaningful connections online. We also want to provide features that foster safety alongside self-expression. Today we're doing both, for everyone who's old enough for a Google Account.'"

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dutchwhizzman writes "The surviving members of Monty Python have announced they will make a new movie. It will be titled Absolutely Anything. Graham Chapman won't be there to join them anymore, but they think the movie will still be in the spirit of Life of Brian, The Meaning of Life and other movies they made in the past."

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pigrabbitbear writes "Iconic comic book writer (Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Red), cult novelist (Crooked Little Vein), futurist intellectual, and beloved Internet curmudgeon, Warren Ellis, known for his impassioned arguments for space travel, talks to Motherboard about Newt Gingrich's presidential plans for lunar colonies and conquering Mars." Warren Ellis does not mince words.

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sweetpea86 writes "Cloud providers based in the European market could turn the fear, uncertainty and doubt around data protection and the U.S. Patriot Act to their advantage, according to Andy Burton, chairman of the Cloud Industry Forum. The only way that European companies can absolutely guarantee that their data doesn't end up in the hands of U.S. authorities is by choosing a provider that not only has a data centre within their jurisdiction, but is also owned by an organisation based in that jurisdiction."

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Frankie70 writes "'Siri's dirty little secret is that she's a bandwidth guzzler, the digital equivalent of a 10-miles-per-gallon Hummer H1.' A study by Arieso shows that users of the iPhone 4S demand three times as much data as iPhone 3G users and twice as much as iPhone 4 users, who were identified as the most demanding in a 2010 study. 'In all, Arieso says that the Siri-equipped iPhone 4S "appears to unleash data consumption behaviors that have no precedent."'"

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bonch writes "A massive Android malware campaign may be responsible for duping as many as 5 million users into downloading the Android.Counterclan infection from the Google Android Market. The trojan collects the user's personal information, modifies the home page, and displays unwanted advertisements. It is packaged in 13 different applications, some of which have been on the store for at least a month. Several of the malicious apps are still available on the Android Market as of 3 P.M. ET. Symantec has posted the full list of infected applications."

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New submitter Required Snark writes "UC Davis researchers have found a mechanism where the sodium in sea water can cause uranium nano-particles to be released from nuclear reactor fuel rods. Normally the uranium oxide compounds composing the rods are very resistant to leaching into water. This could have serious consequences for the Fukushima disaster, since sea water was used for emergency cooling."

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New submitter MikeatWired writes "If you're like most people, you're annoyed by passwords. So who's to blame? Who invented the computer password? They probably arrived at MIT in the mid-1960s, when researchers built a massive time-sharing computer called CTSS. Technology changes. But, then again, it doesn't, writes Bob McMillan. Twenty-five years after the fact, Allan Scherr, a Ph.D. researcher at MIT in the early '60s, came clean about the earliest documented case of password theft. In the spring of 1962, Scherr was looking for a way to bump up his usage time on CTSS. He had been allotted four hours per week, but it wasn't nearly enough time to run the detailed performance simulations he'd designed for the new computer system. So he simply printed out all of the passwords stored on the system. 'There was a way to request files to be printed offline by submitting a punched card,' he remembered in a pamphlet (PDF) written last year to commemorate the invention of the CTSS. 'Late one Friday night, I submitted a request to print the password files and very early Saturday morning went to the file cabinet where printouts were placed and took the listing.' To spread the guilt around, Scherr then handed the passwords over to other users. One of them — J.C.R. Licklieder — promptly started logging into the account of the computer lab's director Robert Fano, and leaving 'taunting messages' behind."

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An anonymous reader writes "A bit early, but just a reminder that January 28 is international Data Privacy Day in the U.S., Canada, and many European countries. Various events are being held around the globe: the head of the FTC opened a weekend forum on the topic by calling out Facebook and Google, the Ontario Privacy Commissioner is holding a symposium on 'Surveillance by Design', and of course Google recently announced they'll be tracking you more thoroughly in the future."

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sighted writes "This week's huge solar storm will benefit future astronauts, thanks to the rover Curiosity, now on its way to Mars. The rover is equipped with an instrument that measures the radiation exposure that could affect a human astronaut en route to the Red Planet. Scientists are just starting to pore over the data from the blast of particles. Don't worry about the poor robotic geologist, though: 'No harmful effects to the Mars Science Laboratory have been detected from this solar event,' says NASA."

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Product round-up Net set and catch up

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Rage over high fees and SOPA support

The ongoing world protests against SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA have helped inspire a revolt among scientists over the role of academic publisher Elsevier and its business practices.?

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Enough is enough: 'I'm gonna go for a swim, have a little lunch..."

Jon Rubinstein, late of NeXT, FirePower, Apple, and Palm, has resigned from his position at HP, where he endured the mismanagement and eventual overboarding of Palm's webOS mobile operating system.?

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'Very bright kids' too bright for their own good

Three high school juniors have been arrested after they devised a sophisticated hacking scheme to up their grades and make money selling quiz answers to their classmates.?

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Logs out for possible political career

The first US government chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra has announced he?s leaving the job.?

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Spanning more devices and hypervisors

Gale Technologies, one of the many companies that wants to manage your private and public clouds, has revved up its GaleForce cloud control freak to 6.0, and is improving its support for XenServer-based clouds and adding KVM to the mix.?

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Thousands roil Polish streets ? more protests planned for Friday

Over 30 Polish lawmakers held up paper replicas of the Guy Fawkes mask, made famous by both Anoymous hacktivists and the Occupy movement, during a protest in parliament of their country's signing of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the EU's highly controversial online-piracy legislation.?

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Turning the corner

Revenues for the third quarter of fy2012 were $173m, 2 per cent down on the $176m of a year ago. Net income was $3.94m, down from the $5.8m recorded a year ago. These earnings exceeded the Street's expectations so why did investors decide to sell the shares??

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Dash to fibre as people abandon twisted copper

ADSL connections to US homes are on the slide as companies and consumers turn to cable and fibre for faster connectivity.?

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Little numbers, big software and the data deluge

Open ... and Shut The winning game plan for enterprise software has long been to "play it safe."?

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Founded in England in 1989, Creation Books has long existed as one of a small handful of independent publishers in the UK and US that specialize in releasing deliberately shocking and provocative literary and artistic material (of debatable quality). Recently the company has been publicly accused of fraud, breach of contract, and intellectual property theft by eight of its former authors, including the likes of: The British Film Institute's Head of Content Jane Giles, industrial music forbear and prankster Boyd Rice, Sid Vicious biographer and filmmaker Alan Parker, University of Central Arkansas writing professor Mark Spitzer, Another Man Magazine editor Ben Cobb, and Sydney-based transgressive novelist Matthew Stokoe (whose books are now published through Dennis Cooper's imprint Little House On The Bowery).

In a series of letters to the FBI (made public as .PDFs) the authors allege that not only have they not been paid royalties on their book sales, but also that the company's owner, James Williamson, has created fake email accounts of non-existent Creation Books employees, so as to give authors the runaround. One author claims to have been threatened with a libel suit for complaining about his poor treatment by the company, and another alleges that Williamson threatened to "rip his head off" when he demanded unpaid royalties. In response to the fraud allegations, the catalogue at www.CreationBooks.com has been rapidly downsized; and in an apparent move to quash further public criticism, Williamson now seems to be trying to have his own company's Wikipedia page deleted.

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Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, Disney, Pixar, Intuit and Lucasfilm are facing a lawsuit for their for their "no poaching" agreements (Bloomberg, TechCrunch).

These companies settled an anti-trust case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2010 after the DOJ found "no overarching conspiracy". The DOJ investigations did expose extensive evidence of pairwise agreements designed to limit employee mobility.

Adobe's SVP for HR wrote "Bruce and Steve Jobs have an agreement that we are not to solicit ANY Apple employees, and vice versa."

Pixar's VP for HR wrote "I just got off the phone with [Apple's] Danielle Lambert, and we agreed that effective now, we'll follow a Gentleman's agreement with Apple that is similar to our Lucasfilm agreement."

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First recorded 50 years ago, Peter Paul and Mary's Puff the Magic Dragon has a rather sad ending: Puff 'sadly slips into his cave' while little Jackie Paper grows up and puts his childhood behind him. But in 2007, Peter Yarrow published a book, Puff, the Magic Dragon, in which the classic song remains the same, but whose illustrations give us a new glimpse into Puff's future. Here is Mr. Yarrow, performing the song with his daughter Bethany at Woodstock's Bearsville Theatre, in '07.

Alternate version of the video. (The Google Books preview of Puff has only a couple of pages available.)

Wikipedia. The song was based on a poem written by Lenny Lipton in 1959, and then adapted to music by Peter Yarrow. When Yarrow joined Peter, Paul and Mary in 1961, the group played the song at appearances for a year, and then recorded for their first album in 1962.

Peter Yarrow:

"Over the years hundreds of people have submitted a last verse to me [about Puff playing with another child]. I was keenly aware of that idea."

One of the main points of the song is that you have to put aside childish things to take your place in the world. You have to live with differences and do your part to do good works and it's a sad time to leave those childish things behind . . . but you can also carry your dragon into your adult years, because that dragon becomes your hopes, your refusal to be cynical. That is your new dragon.

It's about taking that sweetness of your life and not just saying "Okay, I'm off the hook and someone else is going to go off and play with Puff." Your job is to recreate your belief in Puff as an adult. It's up to you to find your Puff the Magic Dragon in the world.

It was an important gesture to have the ending include Jackie Paper's daughter, because I'm giving my world over to my daughter, I'm saying "It's yours now, sweetheart, carry it on." That's what I'm doing with the record and the book."

A fan's possible alternate final verse, from this thread at the mudcat cafe:
"Many summers later as Puff walked along the strand
He looked down and saw some small footprints in the sand.
A voice said, "Mr. Dragon, please don't be so sad.
My name is Jenny Paper and I was sent here by my dad."


A number of recordings of Peter, Paul and Mary (and Peter Yarrow) singing Puff are available on YouTube:

1966, Tonight in Person
Early 1980's: (terrible video quality) Includes an amusing Yarrow monologue before the song debunking a Newsweek story that said Puff was all about drugs. (See Snopes for more.)
1980's, Yarrow explains at the beginning that PP&M learned to play the song early in their program, because otherwise the children in the audience would fall asleep before getting to hear it.
1988, Live in Concert, PBS
1988, Yarrow, Live at Telluride Opera House
1990, Live in Japan
2001, Peter Yarrow with The Klezmatics at the New Synagogue Berlin (Has a jazz feel.)
2007, Benefit Concert for Operation Rescue (Also on DailyMotion)
2010, Noel Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow appearing at a Barnes and Noble. (Shaky video taken by someone in the audience. Watching the kids indignantly correct them is kinda adorable.)

Lenny Lipton singing Puff. In 2009, he posted an entry entitled "Thank you, Puff the Magic Dragon" to his blog.

In 1978, a Puff the Magic Dragon cartoon was released, with Burgess Meredith voicing Puff and Jackie's last name changed to Draper, for some reason. / IMDB

And finally: previously on MeFi: Mary Travers' obituary thread.

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Photographs of the Prison Chess series were taken in 2008 and 2009 in a maximum security facility of the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton.

A chess set made by a GULAG prisoner - on display in the Riga Occupation Museum.

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Problem: There haven't been enough electronica genres clumsily co-opted by pop! Also, we need more modern interpretations of awkward '80s fashions. Solution: Party Rock Anthem.

By LMFAOVEVO [NSFW], the equal and opposite polar force to Portlandia.

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Play ChatChat.
Description: A multiplayer game about being a cat.
Instructions: Be a cat.
(By Terry Cavanagh, who brought you VVVVVV).

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Let me introduce you to Kai Davis and her poem "Truth" (NSFW); a powerful commentary, on racism and perceived intelligence, which has been quietly circulating the web since December 2011. While the poet herself does not seem to have a web page, Davis' slam poetry is being noticed in slam poetry circles as well as on Tumblr.

More of this young woman's amazing and powerful poetry.

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