A mighty ship that has so far sailed the digital waves says that the future will be filled with physical objects, or as they are calling them , physible. The Pirate Bay is known throughout the web as the go-to destination for pirated content, from software, games, music, books, to movies, and have been publicly leading the fight against copyright, much to the consternation of copyright holders across the world. Paying attention to the trends sweeping the cultural and technological world, the Pirate Bay has announced a new category of content that users will be able to upload and share, physible.
We’re always trying to foresee the future a bit here at TPB. One of the things that we really know is that we as a society will always share. Digital communication has made that a lot easier and will continue to do so. And after the internets evolutionized data to go from analog to digital, it’s time for the next step.
Today most data is born digitally. It’s not about the transition from analog to digital anymore. We don’t talk about how to rip anything without losing quality since we make perfect 1 to 1 digital copies of things. Music, movies, books, all come from the digital sphere. But we’re physical people and we need objects to touch sometimes as well!
We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.
The benefit to society is huge. No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour. We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal. We’ll be able to actually copy that floppy, if we needed one.
We believe that the future of sharing is about physible data. We’re thinking of temporarily renaming ourselves to The Product Bay – but we had no graphical artist around to make a logo. In the future, we’ll download one.
At first this may seem a bit odd, especially for people who have followed 3D printing for some time. There have been resources and communities based around uploading and sharing 3D printable files for some time, including the incredibly active Thingiverse community built around the Makerbot. Maker Culture is becoming increasingly popular, to the point where 3D Systems, who makes many of the expensive high end 3D printers, have come out with their own budget, home 3D printer.
So how can The Pirate Bay have influence on scene that already has an active community? Easy, by allowing people to shared items that would be banned from other forums, and this is not just copyright infringement.
AR-15 Magazine and Lower Receiver
This is a near fully printable 5.56mm X 45mm or .233 REM AR-15 magazine. It is current only a 5 round magazine. I left my printed spring design out on purpose for saftey reasons. However, with a little printing experimention and some range time it can be made easily.
The Lower Receiver is the frame that holds together all the other pieces of the firearm. In the States, all the other pieces can be purchased without a permit – over the counter or through the post. The Lower Receiver is the only part which requires a background check or any other kind of paperwork before purchase. Typically this part is made of aluminium. A rifle with a Lower Receiver made of plastic can be perfectly functional.
In the one day that the category has existed, 11 items have been uploaded, including one anonymous (obviously) poster giving out a part file to allow users to print out and then assemble untraceable, background-check-free guns. Another involves 3D printing porn. Right there, you have the internet, and now in (real) 3D. With the all of the talk of SOPA and PIPA, and the recent shutdown and arrests around Megaupload, it clear that there is a growing battle between different realms of the internet, but not matter which side you take, you will now be able to print your own weapons.
We have recently talked about the concept of gamification as a method of crowd sourcing human input to solve complex problems, but games can be used for other purposes as well, such as raising awareness. If you are not familiar with Minecraft, which we have mentioned before, it is a wildly popular game where you navigate through an environment made of cubes, which you can break apart, transform, and build with. One of the key aspects of the game is the gathering and consuming of supplies to power other transformations, such as chopping down trees to make wood, to make planks, which you burn to melt metal. In the real world, these types of processes produce greenhouse gasses, and now, thanks to a hack by James Smith, it has the same effect in Minecraft.
Smith went to work on this hack at the Stockholm Green Hackathon in October. He states that Minecraft — a game in which you can make things and in which that making often includes burning things — is a perfect platform for overlaying carbon emissions data. He used AMEEconnect to get real scientific data from IPCC which is then used to calculate the carbon footprint of your actions as a player, from adding carbon emissions to the atmosphere by burning things to taking it out of the atmosphere by planting trees.
“When you burn some wood in a furnace, the mod calls out to AMEEconnect to do a calculation, and adds the result to a tracker in-game. As the carbon ticks up, the environment gets more and more polluted as the skies go dark and the clouds come down. OK, not entirely accurate, but an effective visual indicator!”
Smith notes that his hack supports the burning of pretty much anything in Minecraft — so if you light a fire, you won’t escape the carbon ticker.
“After a long day of mining and smelting, you’ll have to go plant a few trees to keep the weather nice.”
Now, whether this will make people live a more conscientiously environmental life is debatable, but it could most certainly raise awareness, and at least make players conscious of the impact that their actions would have on the real world. It also makes videos like this all the more gruesome.
Most likely your college living situation looked like some variation on the image above, barring varying levels of cleanliness. Now imagine under those discarded liquor bottles and empty takeout containers beautiful granite countertops. This is now becoming part of our ever increasing bizarre reality, as formerly foreclosed McMansions get rebirthed as student housing. In many ways, the shoddy balloon construction of cheap 2x4s and tainted drywall of your average cul-de-sac subdivision is more appropriate for rambunctious college students than the century old, old growth wood trimmed, beautiful houses that are used as student housing here in Syracuse. This is happening right now in Merced California, solving the concurrent problems of skyrocketing foreclosures and student housing shortages.
The New York Times reports that in Merced, Calif., college students and realtors have found a solution to address both the shortage of on-campus housing at the local state university and the abundance of luxurious McMansions sitting vacant and in foreclosure. You guessed it: The college kids are moving into the oversized homes in overbuilt, “Desperate Housewives” type neighborhoods, making them seem desperate in a completely different way.
This is probably not the scenario dreamed up by developers years ago. Merced, however, is the third-ranked city in the U.S. for metropolitan-are foreclosures. Property values have plummeted: One homeowner in a development that now hosts college student renters paid over $500K for a house that’s worth around $220K. It’s no surprise that so many owners found it in their best interest to walk away from their mortgages.
What is surprising, though, is the current scene in these neighborhoods of luxurious newly built single-family homes. Six-bedroom houses are now split among a half-dozen or so students, who pay $200 to $350 apiece in monthly rent—and who often get their own bedrooms and bathrooms, as well as access to pools, hot tubs, and kitchens that are nicer than the ones in their parent’s homes.
The UC-Merced free transit system even does pickups at many of the subdivisions where students now rent.
What do the non-student neighbors think? Naturally, this is hardly the scenario owners envisioned when they bought their homes years ago—not only are their properties worth a fraction of what they paid, the presence of beer-pong-playing neighbors will ensure that property values don’t rebound anytime soon.
In fact, it is said that University neighborhoods are one of the few areas that were not hit by the housing bubble, because there was always need of more housing, and a constant flow of tenants. Honestly, if you were 19, off at college on your own, wouldn’t you choose to live with your friends in a huge house with a pool? It sounds like the party scene from every 1980s teen movie, for nine solid months. Sounds like frat row just moved up a notch, though the suburban American dream probably just went down three.
Next time you are perusing the web, searching for your next box of paper to fill your ever hungry printer’s mouth, why settle for Georgia Pacific, when you can have genuine Dunder Mifflin paper instead? Because it isn’t real, you may answer, which up until recently, would have been true. Now, through the miracle of branding, you can use paper produced by the fictional company at the center of the wildly popular show The Office. While consumers have become weary of product placements littering TV shows and movies, this is something different. This is not a company shelling out lumps of cash so that the action star is drinking their soda, driving their car, or wearing their underwear. It is a fictional artifact, a contemporary Necronomicon, an item that exists in a fictional, parellel universe, that has then stepped over into our realm. While a cinematic close up of a logo comes across as pandering, the appearance of fictional item in the real world has an element of magic. Dunder Mifflin paper is not the first, and will definitely not be the last, product to make the leap across the fictional line, and Fast Company has a curated a nice selection of some of these.
These are not just idle manufactured goods (though many are), but some take real, honest effort, such as creating real novels written by the fictional main character of the show Castle. We have talked a lot about the future (and immanent death) of brands, and the consumer’s search and desire for authenticity. What is interesting is that we find authenticity in fictional media, when we have become cynically skeptical of real brands. It turns out that reality is not a necessary prerequisite for authenticity.
First, I am well aware of the liberties I am taking with the English language by making “analog” into a verb, but who knows, it may be the next “benchmark”. This is not that ludicrous of an idea though, since we have the term “digitize” to describe the transition of information from analog to digital, but no specialized term for the reverse. As more content is originating in the digital sphere, the transfer of that content into analog formats is something that will become a more common occurrence. People are rediscovering their love of physical media, and realizing the short comes of purely digital interaction. Stepping into this developing space is The Little Printer, a cloud connected printer that prints out receipt size digests of content that you have subscribed to, such as news headlines, the weather, your to-do list, or other useful chunks of information.
When noodling through a puzzle such as a sudoku, or checking things off of your to-do list, there is something deeply satisfying about pen and paper that is lost when translated to the touchscreen. In many ways, it is almost like a Nabaztag which uses words instead of interpretive dance.
The group behind The Little Printer is BERG, who we have talked about on many occasionsbefore, and is the initial product of what will be a full line of devices and services based around their new BERG Cloud. It is supposed to be available for beta run pre-order in 2012, though their site seems to hint that there are some alpha printers out there in the wild. The impressive list of media partners that they have already also makes this seem like it has a solid chance of success, and shows that many people are realizing that there is still something special about reading something on flat dead trees.
Game mechanics are incredibly powerful tools for engaging users. Their use is spreading across fields quickly, especially in the last few years, as we see a plethora of companies use rewards based on engagement, such as receiving badges or becoming mayor in foursquare. So far, most of these have revolved around geting people to become active participants, so that they can be advertised or sold to, though it has also been used for more positive purposes, such as motivating students to learn through tools like The Khan Academy. A recent project to arrise out of MIT uses this logic to build a game system that helps towards social and environmental good. Greenbean recycling rewards people for every item they recycle, and allows a healthy dose of competition to get people recycling more than they may have otherwise.
The new company, which won an innovation prize this week from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, has converted a beefy recycling machine on MIT’s campus into a point tabulator of sorts. When students approach the high-tech trash can to dump in their recyclables, they punch their phone number on a touch screen. A bar-code reader in the machine counts the number of cans, bottles and the like that the person has dropped off – and then uploads that data to Greenbean’s website.
Recyclers can track their progress online, and even engage in competitions with fellow students.
“We want to be like the Zynga of recycling,” said CEO Shanker Sahai, 38, referring the maker of such social games as “FarmVille.”
Competitions between fraternities at MIT have been particularly fruitful, he said, with the houses trying to compete against each other to get the top spot on an online recycling leaderboard.
Is is almost a more specific version of RecycleBank, who gives rewards based on doing environmentally positive acts, which may have the benefit of a narrowness of focus. While points are great, and people do like rewards, getting achievement just for achievement’s sake can be fairly hollow, especially if the end result is just another way to try and sell you something. One trend that we have talked about recently is that people are looking for rewarding engagement, where their achievements have a positive impact on themselves and the world around them. This is exemplified by the communities of people who dedicate their time to sites like Wikipedia, or working on opensource software projects, where they are contributing not because of financial gain or some other type of traditional reward for hard work, but because they want to contribute to a project bigger than themselves. Carnegie Mellon computer science profesor Adrien Treuille has combined game mechanics with the pursuit of a higher goal, and has helped create two games, Foldit, and EteRNA.
What is impressive about this is not just that people are dedicating their time to gamified scientific research, but that they are making groundbreaking discoveries in the process.
His aim is to make super-boring-sounding scientific mysteries like “protein folding” and “RNA synthesis” fun and challenging for gamers.
The results have been staggering, as Foldit and EteRNA players — there are about 430,000 of them between those two games, most of them playing Foldit — continue to make discoveries that had eluded scientists and their supercomputers.
Earlier this month, for example, Foldit players helped solve a puzzle about proteins that could further research into HIV/AIDS. Their work was co-published in the journal Nature. [...]
“Proteins are these esoteric things that most people don’t know very much about, but through computer graphics and interaction we were able to make them something you can play with and wiggle and pull — and make them physically real for people. And I think that realness — that toy-like aspect of proteins — is what made it ultimately comprehensible to our players, and allowed them to solve problems that elude computer programs.” [...]
“What we actually do is give the players very simple tasks like build a circle, build a star,” he said. “These are tasks that are beyond the limits of science today, but through trial and error and being able to play with real molecules through this computer game, people have been able to figure out how to solve these tasks, which is sort of extraordinary.”
Treuille has high hopes for gaming’s potential to unlock good in humanity — and impact the real world.
“People can solve much more complex problems online at the edge of human knowledge,” he said in a PopTech speech, “and I think we’ve just scratched the surface.”
Imagine if a fraction of the collective energy that is currently invested in playing World of Warcraft or creating YouTube response videos was instead targeted at solving these puzzles that are out of the reach of computers or the manpower of the scientific community. Distributed computing has been around for a while, where you can donate your computer’s idle processor time to chugging through blocks of data, but this is very passive. This new model allows people to make real discoveries, and make tangle, discreet contributions to the scientific community, all while engaging through an entertaining, non-intimidating game interface. Going by the reactions of people so far, it seems like there are people out there who would rather spend their time playing games that fight Cancer and AIDS than Orcs.
When it comes to Bitcoins, do you like the “crypto” part, but hesitate at “currency”? Does Ven still seem a little too reminiscent of legal tender? Are you afraid the Tabs you open with Square are just trying to make you forget how much you just paid for that coffee? There is a new solution, that combines the pre-currency sensibilities of bartering, with the convenience and trackability of Twitter and social networking. It is called #PunkMoney, a transferable promise system, where people exchange Tweet vouchers for goods and services, based on the punk diy ethic. It works completely within Twitter, relying on consistent and agreed upon nomenclature rather than software or programming.
It is incredibly simple, but has a degree of disruptive potential, especially within communities that want to break from traditional systems.
Soon after I arrived in New York, my curiosity led me to Zuccotti park, the site of the Occupy movement which seems to have captured the world’s imagination. A couple of hundred protestors were crowded into a small square, camping, talking, eating and waving placards. In the middle of all of this activity, I noticed a woman who was enacting a quiet revolution by herself. Leaning over a chair, she was giving free haircuts to anyone who wanted one. Perhaps you had to be there, standing between large skyscrapers dedicated to a financial system predicated on greed, to appreciate the significance of this simple gesture. It seemed to me that this was the spirit of the Occupy movement: not just protesting one world, but experimentally leading us to a new, better one with a different premise.
Before I left to go to New York, I had been thinking about #PunkMoney, a type of money which anyone can print, circulate and redeem on Twitter, using a simple set of rules. I felt like I had stumbled on an interesting idea – and it took the following weeks of discussions and reflection to boil it down to its essence. #PunkMoney, it seems, is not like ordinary money. For one, it isn’t fungible. It doesn’t provide you with an abstract unit of measurement to compare the value of two things, like normal money does. Secondly, it isn’t centralised – anyone can print it, much like anyone can speak a language. It’s underpinned by trust between people, rather than the coercion of states or the power of banks. In this sense, #PunkMoney embodies punk’s anti-establishment, do-it-yourself attitude.
You can also follow the transactions using the #PunkMoney Tracker, so you can see what vouchers are out there, if they have been transfered, and whether they have been redeemed. It seems like it is just in its beginning stages, but it will be really interesting if this gathers momentum, and seems like the #Occupy movement could be the catalyst to get it widespread.
The world recently hit an important milestone, a global population of 7 billion people. We did not reach one billion people until about 200 years ago, but we rose from 6 billion in just the last 12, and if things do not change, we are just going to keep growing, faster and faster.
According to the U.N. Population Fund, it took the whole of human history until the early 19th century to reach a population of one billion people, and it was not until 1927 that the figure doubled to two billion.
Now, the U.N. calculates that the global population will reach nine billion by 2050 and, by the end of the century, it says there could be up to 16 billion people on the planet.
You can see the impact that this is having on the planet, just by looking at the proliferation of manmade technologies, or the shear amount of goods being shipped around the world.
The problem is that in a world of dramatic change, we are surrounded by systems that are stagnant, solving problems we no longer have, or trying to influence or control us in ways we find to be negative. Some of these systems used to work, some of them have devolved into something negative, but all are causing frustration. What this means is that we are crowded, unsatisfied, and have a healthy level of cynicism about the whole situation. Governments that were formed to help protect and serve us have instead chosen to benefit the highest bidders while failing the programs that help everyone. In The Story of Stuff’s latest video, The Story of Broke, Annie Leonard talks about how subsides and other tools to prop up broken systems with our tax dollars instead of building and maintaining the better future that people want.
The problem is that we are surrounded by institutions, companies, and governments all powered and motivated by greed. Not only does this hurt everyone that is not on the winning side of the equation, it is actually different than how we personally want to be motivated.
If you are broke, money matters. If you have enough money that you do not have financial worries, then money is no longer a motivating factor, and actually does more productive harm than good. What we are looking for in our lives is quality in achievements, we want to make the world a better place, not just help ourselves. We have been told for generations that we are greedy and selfish, but that does not seem to be the case. It has made us bitter and cynical though, since being a good person is almost a way of fighting the system, but it is starting to change. A collective sense that things have to change is spreading. We do not trust companies who are trying to sell to us, we know that their brands are stylized lies, and all we really care about is what good that company can actually do to make us better people or help the greater world.
We interact with brands almost every moment of our day. From the moment we wake up, we’re being bombarded with logos, advertisements, and products, all designed to make our lives easier but also to make us feel a connection to companies. But most of that work is totally meaningless: most people don’t care about brands, and think that only a few positively impact their lives. More importantly, brands that are perceived as irresponsible or just creating products with no meaning are in danger of being severely punished by consumers.
The state of brands and how they affect well-being was measured by media consultancy Havas Media. Umair Haque, the director of the Havas Media Labs and Harvard Business Review blogger who writes frequently on how business can create real value, says that the study is about discovering how people are interacting with businesses in a world where many people feel that institutions are crumbling: “In an age where institutions are failing and contracts are broken, and people are clamoring for more-pounding their fists for better-we’re asking: What is the role for a brand? And how is the relationship between people and boardrooms changing? People are beginning to say: ‘What you’ve been able to give us in the past isn’t good enough.’”
This same sentiment, the desire for transparency and authenticity, is what we are seeing play out politically as #Occupy Wall Street. We are smarter and more connected that at any point in the past, and what we have learned is depressing. We now know that the systems we once suspected to be corrupt are in fact. We know that government cares about big business, and that big business cares about money. The only part that we play in the equation is being one of the sources of money, through taxes, labor, and purchases. What is happening now though is people are angry, fighting back, and are choosing to try and change the systems that no longer serve us.
One of the most ubiquitous structures in the post World War II urban landscape is the monolithic residential apartment block, massive towers built to meet the post war housing shortages. These are especially common throughout Europe, lying just on the outskirts of the main metropolitan areas of cities. These structures are also present throughout Toronto, a city heavily modeled off of the architectural and urban planning trends of European cities. The problem is that now, sixty years later, these buildings are falling into disrepair, and are largely viewed as a failed experiment, a modernist design concept that proved unworkable in real life. Now, cities across the globe are trying to figure out what to do with these buildings, whether it is to tear them down, leave them to decay, or some how breath life back into them. In Toronto, they are trying to figure out how to turn the city’s many high rises into desirable places to live, that enliven a sense of community, pulling inspiration from other successful projects in other cities. The result of their exploration is One Millionth Tower, and interactive documentary which shows you a collection of ideas and they imagined impact, all through an innovative interface.
ONE MILLIONth TOWER re-imagines a universal thread of our global urban fabric — the dilapidated highrise neighbourhood. Over a billion of us live in vertical homes, and most are falling into disrepair. A group of highrise residents, together with architects, re-envisions their vertical homes, then animators & computer programmers magically bring their sketches to life in this documentary for the contemporary web-browser.
The result of this unique collaboration is a lush, visual story unfolding in a 3D virtual environment. Visitors explore how participatory urban design can transform spaces, places and minds.
Additional Features include behind the scenes documentary videos and a spectacular interactive feature which takes users to highrise neighbourhoods in almost any country in the world, thanks to Google Streetview and satellite imagery. It’s based on our own original reseach to find and understand highrise communities in every country around the world.
One Millionth Tower is a story with global implications about how, with the power of imagination, we can transform the urban and virtual spaces that belong to all of us.
While the content of the documentary is very interesting, one of its most striking aspects is how you experience it, where you explore the content through a 3D environment.
The movie, which makes its online premiere above, was carefully crafted to be watched on the internet. It uses interactive tools to illustrate the Toronto residents’ ideas about how to improve the decaying high-rise in which they live. Powered entirely by HTML5, WebGL, and other open source JavaScript libraries, One Millionth Tower is loaded with photos and information from all over the web, and exists in an online environment that is about as close to three-dimensional as something on a flat screen can get.
Here is the trailer for the documentary, which is a great introduction, but really you need to visit it directly to appreciate it in full.
This way of exploring the information is so intriguing that it would be great to see it used in other contexts, included some more metaphorical. In fact, it combined with the recent Deleted City project, an interactive archive of the final days of Geocities, would be pretty magical.
Actually, the idea of exploring information stored in the metaphor of a 3D landscape of buildings reminds of something else, something that was laughed at 18 years ago.
We have talked many times before about the disruptive power of Square, a way of paying that eliminates many of the credit card processing middlemen, and easily empowers individuals to pay each other with credit cards. This included this summer’s introduction of the Card Case, which turns the concept of buyer loyalty cards into a new, card free method o paying. The way Card Case worked was allowing users to open a tab via their smart phone, which synced with the store’s Square Register app, so that you could order, tell them your name, and the transaction was automatically billed to the credit card you connected to your account. This was groundbreaking because it eliminated the need to swipe a magnetic strip on a plastic card to verify identity and account, and instead used your phone and proximity. Credit and debit cards have already been losing their conceptual connection to cash, and this heralded to be another nail in the coffin of money, if you consider money something that you can hoard in coffee cans buried in your back yard. Now Square has updated Card Case taking advantages provide by the recently released iOS 5, and has possibly crossed the line between innovative and invasive.
Use iOS 5 geofences, the app will now know when you are close to a Square powered store, and you can have it automatically open tabs for you.
With Square’s most recent update, merchants who accept Square are bound by geofences with 100 meter perimeters. If you’ve got Card Case and pass through one of those fences, the app automatically opens a “tab,” essentially a way to check in to a business and have your name and payment info show up on the merchant’s Register app (which is also made by Square). Merchants see your open tab through their Register app, and your tab becomes your active account if you decide to visit the store.
While on the one hand, this could be a brilliant advance in user interface design, where all you have to do is say your name, and you are charged automatically, never having to touch your phone or wallet, basically turning your body (as long as you are carrying your iPhone) into a mobile credit card and identification system. The problem though is that if you have this turned on, you are allowing yourself to be tracked, and to have your name and photo appear on the screen of every Register app you have allowed if you happen to be within a football field’s length. Do you really want the local coffee shop to know that you are driving by? If you work within the 100 meter geofence of a store, you will constantly have an open tab, which honestly has a bit of creepy vibe to it. There is also the basic fact that you are then implicitly trusting these stores and restaurants. If you stop at a particular coffee shop almost every day, will you notice one or two extra charges a month? What if you walk past, or even walk past a block away, and an enterprising worker takes it upon themselves to order you that latte. Realistically, this would not happen very often, and there may be other safeguards in place, but my gut reaction to a system based on wide sweep geofencing and verbal agreements is one of unease. If it does catch on though, it would turn Card Case’s nail in money’s coffin into a screw.
This is a 2D-barcode containing the address of our mobile site.If your mobile has a barcode reader, simply snap this bar code with the camera and launch the site.
We have recently talked about the concept of gamification as a method of crowd sourcing human input to solve complex problems, but games can be used for other purposes as well, such as raising awareness. If you are not familiar with Minecraft, which we have mentioned before, it is a wildly popular game where you navigate through an environment made of cubes, which you can break apart, transform, and build with. One of the key aspects of the game is the gathering and consuming of supplies to power other transformations, such as chopping down trees to make wood, to make planks, which you burn to melt metal. In the real world, these types of processes produce greenhouse gasses, and now, thanks to a hack by James Smith, it has the same effect in Minecraft.
The Future is Physible
At first this may seem a bit odd, especially for people who have followed 3D printing for some time. There have been resources and communities based around uploading and sharing 3D printable files for some time, including the incredibly active Thingiverse community built around the Makerbot. Maker Culture is becoming increasingly popular, to the point where 3D Systems, who makes many of the expensive high end 3D printers, have come out with their own budget, home 3D printer.
In the one day that the category has existed, 11 items have been uploaded, including one anonymous (obviously) poster giving out a part file to allow users to print out and then assemble untraceable, background-check-free guns. Another involves 3D printing porn. Right there, you have the internet, and now in (real) 3D. With the all of the talk of SOPA and PIPA, and the recent shutdown and arrests around Megaupload, it clear that there is a growing battle between different realms of the internet, but not matter which side you take, you will now be able to print your own weapons.
Via Gizmodo and Core77