Tag this under general WTF-ery. During slow news days, and you need to get stuff, you start looking for the weird. This bit of "news" basically ties in with anything relating to copyright, intellectual property rights, and piracy. That means this touches upon anything you download online, from game demos to and homebrew goodies... well sort of.

Get this: Boy Scouts in the Los Angeles area will now be able to earn a patch for learning about the evils of downloading pirated movies, music, and other material on the internet. What does the patch look like? Look at the image on the right.

The scouts will be instructed on the basics of copyright law and learn how to identify five types of copyright works and three ways copyrighted stuff can be stolen. Activities for the scouts include visiting a movie studio (to see how much money employees lose due to piracy) and creating public service announcements urging others to be good copyright observing people.

So will kids carrying PSPs that have questionable media in it or gamers with mod-chips in their consoles start saying "Run! Here comes the boy scouts!" ...or something like that?

We know, we know, there are arguments as to whether or not things like mod-chips, hacks, emulations, homebrews, and even plain YouTube videos infringe on intellectual property rights. It just came to mind that given recent news - the ones about console companies filing lawsuits left and right on grounds of infringed intellectual property rights - perhaps instead of them spending money filing law suits, they could just send creepy Boy Scouts to the offending party to "weird them into submission."

Ergh. We should stop eating bad pizza before. I'm ending this before anyone thinks I'm drunk.

Michael Arrington, just like millions of other people in the world, likes keeping up to date with technology, browsing YouTube, and maintaining his blog. That fact alone would have made anyone else just shrug him off as another techie, but what makes him a little more special is that he caught Apple's attention. Their lawyers, that is.

What exactly did this man do? Well, horror of horrors, he decided to embed in his blog a YouTube video that is supposedly a demo of Apple's upcoming operating system, the Mac OS X 10.5 a.k.a. Leopard.

In his blog, Arrington posted the Apple lawyer's letter for the world to see. It basically states what we already know, that the Leopard was given to developers and only they are allowed to tinker with it, and that no one is supposed to know about Apple's next big secret besides those chosen few. And there's a bit there about copyright.

Then the next paragraph asks Arrington to "remove this video from your website and take steps to prevent any further distribution of videos or screenshots of Apple software without AppleÂ?s authorization. If you are represented by counsel, please provide me with the identity of that counsel."

Arrington was of course quick to point out to the said lawyer that they should be asking YouTube to take the video down instead of hunting individual sites (a blog, at that) who happened to use YouTube's material. That, as well as the fact that almost the same material is posted on Apple's website.

Though Apple has been known for taking drastic, even exaggerated, steps in protecting their cats (a.k.a. Operating Systems) before the date of unveiling, one can't help but wonder just how far is enough.

We came across this Youtube video posted by seanm5 claiming to be that of the Safari 3 Beta version. So we went on our web safari trying to pin down this elusive animal of a browser. We came up empty handed. Even the official Apple site went only as far as Safari 2.0 (aka Safari RSS). Anything else about Safari 3.0 were either rumors or wish-list of features.

According to one Safari 3 rumor, the new browser version will incorporate Spotlight and would allow users to group web sites into search channels. Users would then be able to perform web searches across a predefined set of web sites, (e.g. Apple News,  Sports, Finance). Other Safari 3.0 rumors include a new tab-based bookmarks management interface and the ability to save and later search through web histories. Until proven genuine, this video goes into our rumor file.

Apple Company is making things a bit easier for users of video iPod, MAC and PlayStation Portable (PSP) who want to amp their playlists. It does so by acknowledging a new shareware application from Stinkbot.com.

Internet utility TubeSock grabs online YouTube Videos and damps them into your system. The software is no-hassle as it converts the videos on its own, choosing the best codecs and bitrates for each device. Those who don't have video iPod can also use TubeSock as it allows grab audio only option as well. And since it already uses MP3 format, loss in audio fidelity should not be a problem.

Other features include Preview Playback, Safari and Firefox integration, and Front Row compatible. Below, a trial version is available for download that converts the first 30 seconds only. Registration and payment for the product is $15.

Download: [TubeSock]

Wacky Stephen Colbert announced yet a new challenge for digital video enthusiasts: integrate Stephen and his lightsaber skills into a digital environment. No relation to Lucasfilm's Star Wars though. Since Colbert issued his green screen challenge, there has been a explosion of videos in different media sharing websites like Youtube.

Here's one of them from brassrocket, an interesting 24-second video of a man with an iPod for a lightsaber. Oh yeah, we dig the cool music background and nice editing of the sequences.

A nifty application was released that allows Mac OSX 10.3.9 (or later) users to Convert any Youtube video into iPod Video at the click of a button. It works in cooperation with the Safari browser so that you can convert YouTube videos into quality iPod video with a simple operation, even allowing you to add videos to your iTunes library.

The simple interface works great, and according to reviewers gives a great video output perfect for any iPod. The only limitations with this version of the program (v1.0) is that you cannot use this application to convert flv files (what YouTube uses) stored on your local computer, and that it doesn't have a progress meter to tell you how much of the video has been converted. Besides that, this program works really well and hopefully requested features such as a progress meter and local flv file support can be added in a later version.

Download: [PodTube v1.0]

A couple weeks ago I posted about my Boot Camp Fantasy. It seems that someone has hacked a similar functionality. Linked below is the video of it on YouTube. Basically they used Parallels to run the 'other' operating systems within their OS X environment. Then they fiddled with Virtue - an open source Virtual Desktop app - so that a cubed transition to a next desktop would reveal the operating system they want to work with.

Looks pretty sweet! I wonder what the hardware specs are on the Intel Mac Mini they're using. I'd imagine the RAM is way up there... Anyhow - looks cool, and I bet it works pretty nicely for them as well. Thanks for making my fantasy a reality (sort of)!