Techdirt. Stories filed under "mythbusters"

DailyDirt: Flying With The Greatest Of Ease

Michael Ho — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 17:00:00 PDT

The Segway was originally billed as a revolutionary new way to travel, but after it was revealed, it didn't seem anywhere near as cool as a flying car (or hoverboard). While everyone is more concerned about gas mileage nowadays, there are still some dreamers out there working on personal flying vehicles. Here are just a few examples of some ways to get yourself off the ground.

Personal planes that can take off and land in water are almost ready to ship to their first 35 customers. Prototypes of these electric planes have been flown in successful test runs, and FlyNano expects to start production in the next year. [url]
A personal helicopter is becoming a bit cheaper and more practical -- just imagine 4 or 5 toy quadcopters linked together with a chair in the middle. The volocopter VC1 is the first all-electric manned helicopter, and all those redundant rotors allow for a few to fail without causing too much trouble. [url]
Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame) tells everyone how to build their own hovercraft using a leaf blower, some duct tape and a 4 foot diameter circle of plywood. Warning: make sure you have enough gas in the leaf blower so you don't sink in the middle of a lake.... [url]

If you have some more free time, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

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How Toy Story 2 Almost Got Deleted... Except That One Person Made A Home Backup

Mike Masnick — Fri, 18 May 2012 05:01:00 PDT

Here's a random story, found via Kottke, highlighting how Pixar came very close to losing a very large portion of Toy Story 2, because someone did an rm * (non geek: "remove all" command). And that's when they realized that their backups hadn't been working for a month. Then, the technical director of the film noted that, because she wanted to see her family and kids, she had been making copies of the entire film and transferring it to her home computer. After a careful trip from the Pixar offices to her home and back, they discovered that, indeed, most of the film was saved:
Now, mostly, this is just an amusing little anecdote, but two things struck me:

How in the world do they not have more "official" backups of something as major as Toy Story 2. In the clip they admit that it was potentially 20 to 30 man-years of work that may have been lost. It makes no sense to me that this would include a single backup system.
I wonder if the copy, made by technical director Galyn Susman, was outside of corporate policy. You would have to imagine that at a place like Pixar, there were significant concerns about things "getting out," and so the policy likely wouldn't have looked all that kindly on copies being used on home computers.

The Mythbusters folks wonder if this story was a little over-dramatized, and others have wondered how the technical director would have "multiple terabytes of source material" on her home computer back in 1999. That resulted in an explanation from someone who was there that what was deleted was actually the database containing the master copies of the characters, sets, animation, etc. rather than the movie itself. Of course, once again, that makes you wonder how it is that no one else had a simple backup. You'd think such a thing would be backed up in dozens of places around the globe for safe keeping...

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Mythbusters Crew Accidentally Fire Cannonball Through Suburban Neighborhood... Quickly Start Deleting Tweets Of The Evidence

Mike Masnick — Wed, 7 Dec 2011 12:53:46 PST

Well, well. Slashdot points us to this bizarre and slightly scary story about how everyone's favorite TV show, MythBusters, had an experiment that went really, really wrong yesterday. Apparently, it fired a home-made cannon at the Alameda County Sheriff's Department bomb disposal range. The idea was to shoot the cannonball into huge water containers.

But they missed.

Instead, the cannonball went hurtling through the suburban northern California town of Dublin, at 4:15, just as kids were getting home from school. According to the SF Chronicle report on this:

The cantaloupe-sized cannonball missed the water, tore through a cinder-block wall, skipped off a hillside and flew some 700 yards east, right into the Tassajara Creek neighborhood, where children were returning home from school at 4:15 p.m., authorities said.

There, the 6-inch projectile bounced in front of a home on quiet Cassata Place, ripped through the front door, raced up the stairs and blasted through a bedroom, where a man, woman and child slept through it all - only awakening because of plaster dust.

The ball wasn't done bouncing.

It exited the house, leaving a perfectly round hole in the stucco, crossed six-lane Tassajara Road, took out several tiles from the roof of a home on Bellevue Circle and finally slammed into the Gill family's beige Toyota Sienna minivan in a driveway on Springvale Drive.

Wow. Amazingly (and thankfully) no one got hurt in all of this. CBS has some astounding video of the carnage, including showing how the cannoball bounced around that house on Cassata Place putting holes in a bunch of places: But, perhaps equally interesting is that the Mythbusters themselves, appear to have done a little post accident tidying up. After hearing about the whole mess, Jon Laslow went and checked out the various Mythbusters' Twitter feeds and noticed that a bunch of photos of Kari, Grant and Tory posing next to cannons had been deleted. Oops. But, of course, you can't delete anything online... So, the photos & tweets have been preserved:
"Heavy Artillery"

"Canon Envy"

Tory and his Canon Like many folks around here, I'm a big fan of the show, but this seems like quite a mishap.

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Louis Vuitton Strikes Again: Shuts Down Art Exhibit That Commented On LV Trademarks

Mike Masnick — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:28:00 PDT

Earlier this year, you may recall that we wrote about a bizarre and ridiculous lawsuit that luxury goods retailer Louis Vuitton had filed against Hyundai, because for a couple of seconds in a Hyundai commercial, a basketball is seen with markings that sorta kinda mimic (though, not exactly) LV's handbag design. This is the same Louis Vuitton that had sued a fundraiser who had made t-shirts to raise money for Darfur, which included an illustration of a "pimped out" Darfur victim who was holding a bag that also mimicked LV's designs.

I was reminded of both of these cases recently when I was catching up on recent episodes of the TV show Mythbusters. In one episode, the myth being tested is whether or not you can build a cannon out of leather. In the final attempt, Mythbuster Kari Byron decides to "decorate" the cannon, and does so with symbols that, again, mimic the LV design, turning it into a "designer cannon." Unfortunately, it looks like Discovery doesn't let you embed clips (why, Discovery, why?), but here's a quick screen shot that I took: All I could think of was whether or not (a) Mythbusters/Discovery had cleared that and gotten a license from LVMH or (b) if LVMH was going to sue. I have no idea if anything has happened there, but you can rest assured that LVMH is busy on the legal front elsewhere.

ChurchHatesTucker points us to the news that LVMH has shut down an art exhibit in Japan that involved sculptures of nine locusts, that were each made from counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags: The sculptures were clearly meant to act as commentary on the nature of luxury brands and counterfeiting, as they were named Batta Mon, which the article linked above says is:

a play on the words batta ("locust") and battamon (slang for "knockoff"). According to the artist, the works are meant to raise questions about the relationship between authenticity and imitation in a consumer-driven society.

It seems like that's a perfectly good subject for commentary through art, and it seems ridiculous that LVMH is stifling the artist's work. Nothing in this exhibit is going to make anyone think that it was endorsed by LVMH. It certainly isn't doing anything to create consumer confusion. The artist is pissed off, but the museum said it didn't want to deal with a legal fight, so this artist's work gets taken down as yet another company abuses trademark law. Watch out, Mythbusters, you may be next...

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Mythbusters' Adam Savage Discovers Insane Roaming Fees: $11,000 iPhone Bill For A Few Hours Surfing

Mike Masnick — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:48:25 PDT

Every few months or so there's an article somewhere about an insane phone bill that someone gets because they took their phone out of the country without recognizing the insanity that is international roaming rates. This time, it appears to be Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage, who's been doing a bit of traveling lately. He was recently up in Canada, and used his iPhone to do a little web surfing. And now he got the bill. Apparently AT&T wants somewhere around $11,000 for Adam's surfing and have turned off his phone until he pays. Now there will be some who say that he should have read the fine print, but considering just how often these sorts of stories pop up, at some point it's worth noting that the fine print isn't working. And... even if you grant the "fine print" premise, it's hard for anyone to figure out how these international roaming rates make any sense whatsoever. They're so far off the charts as to be unbelievable.

Anyway... next week on Mythbusters... the insanity of mobile phone bills? Can we see Jamie and Adam try to decipher hidden fees, while Grant, Tory and Kari search for the elusive accurate mobile phone coverage map? Maybe Buster can figure out what the real limits are on unlimited data plans? Hmm... maybe not.

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Texas Instruments Denies Adam Savage's Story About Killing RFID Mythbusters Episode

Mike Masnick — Wed, 3 Sep 2008 13:12:00 PDT

In a followup to the story about credit card company lawyers killing an episode of Mythbusters concerning RFID vulnerabilities, Daniel Terdiman got a response from Texas Instruments, who had organized the call that Mythbusters host Adam Savage had described. TI's spokesperson tells a somewhat different story:

"In June 2007, MythBusters was interested in pursuing some great myth-busting ideas for RFID. While in pursuit, they contacted Texas Instruments' RFID Systems, who is a pioneer of RFID and contactless technology, for technical help and understanding of RFID in the contactless payments space," TI spokesperson Cindy Huff said. "Some of the information that was needed to pursue the program required further support from the contactless payment companies as they construct their own proprietary systems for security to protect their customers. To move the process along, Texas Instruments coordinated a conversation with Smart Card Alliance (SCA) who invited MasterCard and Visa, on contactless payments to help MythBusters get the right information. Of the handful of people on the call, there were mostly product managers and only one contactless payment company's legal counsel member. Technical questions were asked and answered and we were to wait for MythBusters to let us know when they were planning on showing the segment. A few weeks later, Texas Instruments was told by MythBusters that the storyline had changed and they were pursuing a different angle which did not require our help."

This bit of he-said/she-said could actually be true from both ends, with each side having a rather different perception of the call in question. The folks on the call may have been a bit combative over certain issues, and that resulted in Discovery producers getting worried about the episode and "changing the storyline." Either way, if what Huff says is true, is Texas Instruments willing to get the credit card companies to publicly agree that Mythbusters and Discovery should move forward on a story about RFID vulnerabilities? Update: Now Savage is backing down and saying he got the facts of the story wrong...

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Credit Card Companies Gagged Mythbusters Over RFID Vulnerabilities?

Mike Masnick — Tue, 2 Sep 2008 08:33:00 PDT

It's amazing to watch just how sensitive some companies are concerning the rather well-known security vulnerabilities associated with RFID tags and smart cards. We've seen time and time again, companies try to suppress such research from getting published -- and every single time, those efforts to suppress the publication of the vulnerabilities backfires, often badly.

But that never seems to stop companies from flexing their legal muscles.

The latest example comes to use via the Consumerist blog, who dug out a clip of Adam Savage from the TV show Mythbusters talking about what happened when the show tried to do an episode on RFID vulnerabilities:

Texas Instruments comes on along with chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else... They were way, way outgunned and they absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was, and Discovery backed way down being a large corporation that depends upon the revenue of the advertisers. Now it's on Discovery's radar and they won't let us go near it.

Check out the video of him saying this (while admitting he's probably not supposed to talk about it) here: Perhaps it's an exaggeration by Savage, but do the credit card companies really think that security through obscurity (with a healthy dose of legal threats) is the best way to protect their customers?

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