Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Death by cell phone, a new development

Life imitates pulp spy fiction: the cell phone gun appears.

Italian police officers recently seized a tiny gun that's disguised as a cellphone. It can hold four bullets and is powerful enough to kill somebody.

More bad news for cyberfear: most European gamer "addicts" aren't

Ninety percent of gamers who turned themselves in to a European gaming addiction clinic aren't actually addicted, according to a BBC story.

"This gaming problem is a result of the society we live in today," Mr Bakker told BBC News. "Eighty per cent of the young people we see have been bullied at school and feel isolated...
For Mr Bakker the root cause of the huge growth in excessive gaming lies with parents who have failed in their duty of care.

So it's not games which are to blame, but authorities and bullies?  Let's see if this story remains in popular awareness for long.

Sending coded messages via Google SearchWiki

You can send coded messages through Google's new SearchWiki.  Much potential for game designers, ARGists, hackers, storytellers.

Recently released, the SearchWiki lets users add text comments to search results.  Users can share those publicly, which then appear on the results page of other users.  There are worries about this being abused by spammers.

But what if I leave bits of messages spread across different searches?  They might not be comprehensible on a case by case basis:

Without knowing the exact search query used to "aggregate" the comment set in any specific case, outside parties who might stumble across individual message fragments (as comments on arbitrary URLs) would be extremely unlikely to recognize them as parts of a coherent message, and would have no simple technique to locate the other parts of the message in any case. This is a key attribute of the described technique -- a message that is dispersed in this manner is unlikely to even be recognized as a message worthy of attention or log-based analysis.

The creator offers a proof of concept, which is also one storytelling intro:

Only one word in each of the ten comment sentences for this basic example is part of the actual secret message. Your mission is to derive the complete secret message, which is currently dispersed across the space of Google's search database.

(via Slashdot)

Civilian occupation warfare playset

Here's a horror toy for children, a happy civilian home in a war zone.  Occupation forces included.  Bullet holes, structural damage, burn marks pre-rendered.  Weird psychological problems resulting: user-generated.

(links fixed)

(via Esquire)

British radio cannibalism call-in

A British radio show gets a cannibalism confession call-in:

"What's the most unusual thing you've ever eaten?"
"I've eaten human beings."

It's a fun microfiction (although one wonders at the title: why "former" cannibal?).

"We always went to the same butcher.  Then suddenly the meat started getting so much better."

Ah, it would be Africa, wouldn't it? 

(thanks to Jesse Walker and other foodies)

Amero wins

Social panics about fearsome digital media have real-life, personal consequences.  Case in point: Julie Amero, whose case we blogged last year, who faced decades in prison for allegedly inflicting Web-based porn on schoolchildren, pled guilty to a single charge and avoided prison time.

She's in bad health, her career has been trashed, her name soaked in bad reputation.  And note that the local authorities maintain they were right.

(thanks to Ed Webb and everyone else)

Power collectors upon the dead

Solar power receives a Gothic touch in Spain:

In row after row of gleaming, blue-gray, the panels rest on mausoleums holding five layers of coffins, many of them marked with bouquets of fake flowers. The panels face almost due south, which is good for soaking up sunshine, and started working on Wednesday...

Imagine ways this could become more Gothic, down the road.  For instance, perhaps children explore the area in a few years, and come up with stories - urban legends - about the connection between power and the dead.  Evil people provide more watts, maybe.  Or saints do.

(thanks to Nick Ernst over at Group Action)

Coffin as murder weapon

Death by coffin: machine translation ahead -

A Brazilian woman was killed Monday at a bizarre traffic accident. The 67-year-old Marciana da Silva Saturday Barcelos front next to a hearse driver when another car from behind on them inreed. The coffin in which her husband was shot by the collision hard to advance against the woman. She was en route from the southern town of Tapes, where the couple lived, to a cemetery in Alvorada. That Brazilian media reported.

(translation from Dutch via Ubiquity)

(via Arnaud Leene via Twitter)

Piano player for the rabbit hole

Is it an ARG trailhead, a prank, an art project, or some weird bit of crime?  An upright piano was discovered in a southern Massachusettes forest.

Near the mystery piano -- serial number 733746 -- was a bench, positioned as though someone was about to play.

Oh, that number twigs my ARG instincts.

And I wonder if there was any sheet music in the bench top, in classic Tin Pan Alley style.

No word on what was found under the piano, once it was moved aside.

(thanks to Steven Kaye)

Bad news for fearing the net

I'm going to get to the new Digital Youth report about teens and digital media, but wanted to share David Weinberger's comment:

Internet not the child-devouring swamp many adults fear