Gay porn producer Titan Media's copyright infringement lawsuit against Veoh illustrates old-media's constant urge to fight the web. Our advice? Take what you can and get over it.

We're not in the habit of piling on the gaffes of other media, but we feel duty bound to share this gawker story about Bloomberg somehow publishing its work-in-progress obituary of the Apple CEO -- who, by the way, is very much alive.

A California court dismisses a copyright infringement case against Veoh, ruling that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act could not possibly require sharing sites to be solely responsible for vetting the content they host. This could be good news for YouTube, which is facing a $1 billion lawsuit with similar facts by Viacom.

Lots of people are leaving TiVo, and the total subscriber base is now down to 3.6 million.

This year, Carol Nissen's crops include mesclun, cherry tomatoes, strawberries, and assorted herbs. When she sits down to dine, she's often eating food grown with her own two hands.

But Nissen isn't tilling the soil on a farm. She's a Web designer who lives in Jersey City, New Jersey — one of the most cramped, concrete-laden landscapes in the nation. Nissen's vegetables thrive in pots and boxes crammed into her house and in wee plots in her yard. "I'm a micro-gardener," she says. "It's a pretty small townhouse. But it's amazing what you can do without much space."

The term for this is urban farming — the art of growing vegetables in cities that otherwise resemble the Baltimore of The Wire.It has become increasingly trendy in recent years, led by health-conscious foodies coveting just-picked produce, as well as hipsters who dig the roll-your-own vibe.

But I think it's time to kick it up a notch. Our world faces many food-resource problems, and a massive increase in edible gardening could help solve them. The next president should throw down the gauntlet and demand Americans sow victory gardens once again.

Remember the victory garden? During World Wars I and II, the government urged city dwellers and suburbanites to plant food in their yards. It worked: The effort grew roughly 40 percent of the fresh veggies consumed in the US in 1942 and 1943.

These days, we're fighting different battles. Developing nations are facing wrenching shortages of staples like rice. Here at home, we're struggling with a wave of obesity, fueled by too much crappy fast food and too little fresh produce, particularly in poorer areas. Our globalized food stream poses environmental hazards, too: The blueberries I had for lunch came from halfway around the world, in the process burning tons of CO2.

Urban farming tackles all three issues. It could relieve strain on the worldwide food supply, potentially driving down prices. The influx of fresh vegetables would help combat obesity. And when you "shop" for dinner ingredients in and around your home, the carbon footprint nearly disappears. Screw the 100-mile diet — consuming only what's grown within your immediate foodshed — this is the 100-yard diet.

Want to cool cities cheaply? Plant crops on rooftops. This isn't just liberal hippie fantasy, either. Defense hawks ought to love urban farming, because it would enormously increase our food independence — and achieve it without the market distortions of the benighted farm bill. You don't need tomatoes from Mexico if you can pluck them from containers on your office roof.

Better yet, urban farming is an excuse to geek out with some awesome tech. Innovations from NASA and garage tinkerers have made food-growing radically more efficient and compact than the victory gardens of yore. "Aeroponics" planters grow vegetables using mist, slashing water requirements; hackers are building home-suitable "aquaponics" rigs that use fish to create a cradle-to-grave ecosystem, generating its own fertilizer (and delicious tilapia, too). Experts have found that cultivating a mere half-acre of urban land with such techniques can yield more than $50,000 worth of crops annually.

But what I love most here is the potential for cultural transformation. Growing our own food again would reconnect us to this country's languishing frontier spirit.

Once you realize how easy it is to make the concrete jungle bloom, it changes the way you see the world. Urban environments suddenly appear weirdly dead and wasteful. When I walk around New York City now, I see the usual empty lots and balconies and I think, Wait a minute. Why aren't we growing food here? And here? And here?

In fact, that's precisely what occurred to me when I came home and looked at the window of my apartment. So now it holds three pots balanced on the ledge: One with herbs, one with lettuce, one with tomatoes.

I should have my first crop in about a month. And I expect my victory salad to taste very sweet indeed.

Email clive@clivethompson.net.

As the FCC pushes $40 coupons for digital TV converter boxes, complaints about the boxes have grown loud -- for many Americans, the device hasn't delivered an acceptable quality of television reception.

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Mike Pfeffer, a 26-year-old IT professional, was thinking about buying a Kindle, Amazon's pricey new digital book reader, but he wanted to look at the screen and touch the buttons before shelling out $359 for it.

So he went to the Amazon site and, through the See a Kindle in Your City message board, found a current Kindle owner in Manhattan who was willing to meet up. The woman worked in the building across the street from him and enthusiastically showed him everything from how the screen looked to how to turn pages on the device.

"I told her she should go work for Amazon," says Pfeffer, who wound up buying a Kindle the very next day.

To help sell its high-priced digital reading device, Amazon is relying more than ever on its tried-and-true sales strategies of word of mouth and customer reviews, and it appears to be working, although the total market for the device is questionable.

In August, Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney projected that Amazon would sell 380,000 Kindles this year, up from an earlier estimate of 190,000, adding in a report that "Kindle is becoming the iPod of the book world" since its release in November 2007. (However, Mahaney's estimate, based on a TechCrunch article that said 240,000 Kindles have been sold so far this year, was, by his own admission, based on fuzzy numbers. Amazon hasn't released any sales numbers for the Kindle, and Amazon has reportedly sought to distance itself from those numbers.) Another analyst, Tim Bueneman from McAdams Wright Ragen, reported last week that several new versions of the device are in development, including a textbook model.

Amazon says its approach to selling the Kindle—no outside advertising and just relying on the Kindle community and stumping by Jeff Bezos to drive sales—is deliberate. The Kindle currently has over 4,200 customer reviews on the Amazon website, more than for any other top-selling item in Amazon's electronics category, and the vast majority are positive.

"Customer reviews of Kindle have been terrific—that tends to help sell the product," says Ian Freed, the Amazon executive in charge of the Kindle. More than three quarters of the reviewers give the Kindle at least four stars out of five, with many using words like fabulous, must-have, and changed my life.

The See a Kindle in Your City program, which was started in May, is just another extension of that idea. Freed and members of his group saw that people were especially curious when they saw one in public and decided to capitalize on the phenomenon.

"We tapped right into that, allowing customers to create a space where potential customers could physically meet, like at a coffee shop or a restaurant, and show each other Kindles," says Freed. Since the Kindle is an expensive new technology, selling the device at retail outlets where customers could see and touch it would seem to make sense, but Freed says that would diminish the community-based marketing that's propelling sales. But there may be another reason for See a Kindle in Your City—it could be that stores just don't want to carry the device.

"Kindle is actually a tough product to sell at retail," says Michael Gartenberg, vice president of mobile strategy at Jupitermedia. Sony's e-book reader, a similar product, may have set the tone. It was released earlier than the Kindle in September 2006 and uses the same E Ink technology for its screen—and doesn't seem to have sold particularly well as a retail product at either Sony's own stores or at Borders, although Sony, like Amazon, has not released any kind of sales figures for its device. "It's going to take a fair amount of evangelizing to explain the product, and the best people to evangelize are the users of the products," says Gartenberg of the Kindle.

Among the features that Kindle users have been most enthusiastic about is the wireless-downloading feature that differentiates it from Sony's reader, which requires a computer to first receive the books. Digital books can be delivered almost anywhere to users in less than a minute using Sprint's nationwide high-speed wireless network, fulfilling users' desires for instant gratification. Indeed, instead of cannibalizing sales of physical books, Freed says Amazon's statistics show that Kindle owners more than doubled their overall number of book purchases after getting the device, and that they still bought just as many physical books after getting one as they had before.

Those avid Kindle users have become effective proselytizers, often talking up the device with the zeal of religious converts. Citigroup's Mahaney raves about the ease of taking e-books with him when he travels, and one journalist (who wished to remain anonymous) says that he was initially skeptical about the whole notion of e-books and only got a review copy of it to trash it. "But I love it," he says. "I couldn't find anything bad about it. I use it all the time."

Though the idea of Kindle get-togethers may sound suspiciously like Tupperware parties, Gartenberg thinks Amazon's strategy is different.

"There's a difference between selling and evangelizing," he explains. "Amazon is not asking its customers to sell, it's asking its fans to sell. And they're not making any commission on those sales."

To be sure, Amazon's call to Kindle fans to push the product has had its detractors.

"What an outrageous request from Amazon!" one respondent wrote when Amazon introduced its See a Kindle in Your City message forum. "Take your time, go out in public with your Kindle, and help us sell more Kindles and make more money. I appreciate the offer to become an unpaid pimp for the Kindle, but no thanks, Amazon."

Facebook pulled scrabulous from its sites throughout most of the world over the weekend. It was already banished from the United States and Canada. Scrabulous remains available in India, where its developers live and where Mattel has filed a lawsuit claiming violations of intellectual property.

Wired's Photoshop Experiment authorName= Mathew Honan -->

Would society have reacted differently to the O. J. Simpson trial had he been white? That was the question John Plunkett, Wired's founding creative codirector, wanted to raise with the September 1995 cover — a photo altered to make Simpson appear Caucasian. "At the time," Plunkett recalls, "Photoshopped imagery still had the capacity to surprise in a way that's difficult to imagine today."

The picture was widely mistaken for a critique of the infamous Time cover that darkened Simpson's face, but that wasn't Wired's intent. Rather, we hoped to make readers examine their assumptions about race.

To the staff's chagrin, the manipulated image caused little stir: "It struck us that technology had rendered that debate moot," Plunkett says. "All images are manufactured to one degree or another."

: Photo: Steve Peterson/Wired.com

The four-day 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver this week is not just a political event -- it's a celebration of social media, high-definition video and really kick-ass internet connectivity.

"This is America's convention, and we're using new technology this time, like text messaging and Google and YouTube, to really break down these walls to make this [convention] more open and interactive," says Brook Colangelo, the DNCC's director of technology.

This year's convention sees multiple firsts in technological innovations for the quadrennial political party gathering. For starters, the Democratic National Convention Committee is providing bloggers (and floor delegates) with "video-upload booths" where they can upload their footage to YouTube or any other online-video platform.

The DNC is using text messaging and streaming video to keep delegates (and those following along at home) up to date.

Separately, an alliance of groups, including progressive group blog the DailyKos, ProgressNow and the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, are hosting and sponsoring an 8,000-square-foot "bloggers tent," where attending bloggers, vloggers and podcasters will have a place to work with a high-bandwidth internet connection.

Here's a look at some of the tech inside the Pepsi Convention Center, where the event is taking place.

High-Tech Podium

The convention committee hired top talent to design its futuristic-looking stage: Designer Bruce Rodgers came up with the idea for the Democrats' flashy podium. Rodgers' other clients include Madonna, Mötley Crüe, the Dave Matthews Band and the National Football League. The DNC convention setup features 8,000 square feet of video-projection surfaces, and that includes three 103-inch Panasonic Plasma HD screens, the largest of their kind.

The screens will project daily themes of the convention and other relevant pictures as events unfold.

The DNCC says that more than 50 technicians and 70 local stagehands have worked more than 25,000 hours to create the 70-foot-wide and 60-feet-high stage and podium.

:

Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark is blogging and vlogging about the Democratic National Convention for his personal blog cnewmark.com, Reuters and The Huffington Post. He's one of more than 120 bloggers who have been credentialed to "cover" the convention.

On Monday, Newmark worked in The Big Tent, an 8,000-square-foot space for bloggers. His gear: A Lenovo ThinkPad x300, an iPhone 3G, a Flip Video, a Nokia n95, a Nikon P80 and a pedometer.

He plans on streaming and shooting video during the convention, as well as writing, and he has plans to attend tech round tables taking place at the convention, as well as several parties with celebrities.

"I've never been to a convention, and I've never done anything political before," he says.

Newmark is a surrogate for Obama and speaks about technology issues.

: Photo: Steve Peterson/Wired.com

CNN chief national correspondent John King, at the "Mini Magic Wall." The touchscreen is a smaller version of the "Magic Wall" that CNN has used in election coverage. It is produced by Perceptive Pixel, a company founded by multitouch pioneer Jeff Han.

: Photo: Steve Peterson/Wired.com

Josh Braun, CNN Producer of New Media, works on a map of the convention floor, which will be geo-referenced to real-time voting data. His computer is connected to the nearby giant touchscreen used by John King.

: Photo: Steve Peterson/Wired.com

CNN uses a "Polecam" system on one corner of the floor for correspondent Candy Crowley. The monitor and controller at the opposite end of the pole holding the camera are shown here.

: Photo: Steve Peterson/Wired.com

A state-delegation voting kiosk with internet connectivity for bloggers is shown here. There are a total of 56 of these kiosks in the convention hall. The foreground computer is used to tally delegate votes. The monitor at right is for those who are sight- or hearing-impaired. A phone is on each side of the voting computer: one connected to Obama for America and one to the DNC secretary, both used to coordinate issues on the floor. The connection is hardwired so as not to compete with RF devices (such as video cameras) from the news media. The yellow cable gives internet access to bloggers.

: Photo: Steve Peterson/Wired.com

In background is the DNC network hardware and in foreground is an OC-192 circuit, providing 10 Gbps of bandwidth -- enough, convention organizers say, to connect 220,000 homes to the internet.

: Photo: Steve Peterson/Wired.com

With 56 blogging kiosks, a massive OC-192 internet connection, blogger-friendly amenities, streaming video and 8,000 square feet for bloggers nearby, the Pepsi Center is about to host the most-blogged event ever.

: Photo: Steve Peterson/Wired.com

DNC Committee technology director Brook Colangelo holds a cable at a state-delegation voting kiosk. The connection is hardwired so as not to compete with RF devices (such as video cameras) from the news media -- plus, it will provide a more reliable connection than WiFi could in an environment where so many people want internet access.

: Photo: Steve Peterson/Wired.com

Joe Silber and Lysandra Nelson from San Francisco mug at the podium for a photo op. Behind them are three Panasonic 103-inch HDTV displays; 8,000 square feet of video projection area is behind that.

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Have Google and Verizon Communications finally kissed and made up?

The two heavyweights, last seen sparring over opening up the wireless spectrum, are in talks over a deal that would make Google the default search on Verizon devices and give the search giant a piece of the ad revenue, the Wall Street Journal reports.

A deal could eventually cover Verizon's web portal and its FiOS TV service, the Journal says.

Any agreement would be a turnaround from their public clashes after Google lobbied the government to open up access to the wireless spectrum. Verizon fiercely fought back that effort.

In June, Russ Mitchell noted that with the acquisition of Alltel and with an agreement with the Federal Communications Commission, Verizon looked prepared to keep throwing its weight around.

Wireless providers are looking for an edge in services amid fierce competition. Verizon Wireless—a joint venture between Verizon Communications and Vodafone of Britain—has talked to other possible search partners in the past, including Microsoft, the Journal says.

A deal is equally important to Google.

"Google wants closer integration with carriers like Verizon so it can enhance the relevance of the ads it shows—for example, by making them sensitive to a user's location," the Journal says.

Rival Yahoo has deals with several wireless providers.

But Rafat Ali on mocoNews.net says that such deals offer only short-term gains: "As phones open up, users will be able to use whichever search engine they desire, not the ones deemed official by the carriers."

And for those who are worried about Google's crushing dominance in search and its inroads into media, there is now a modified search engine that lets you search without getting results from Google sites like Knol, Blogger, and YouTube.

Yes, it's Google minus Google.