A few years ago, the EFF discovered the serial tracking system that printer makers had been secretly adding to printers at the behest of the government. They’ve just produced this great instructable, with a funny video to boot:

– More cool how to projects

This is an interesting strategy for eliciting online action that I’ve been seeing, lately: Have a video where the talking head actually sits around and waits for you to do something. It creates an artificial social pressure to act.

Here’s MoveOn’s latest email to me, asking for small donations to contested Senate races. Eli Parisier is basically just waiting around for the whole second half of the video. It was weird, but it worked on me:

Here’s a similar tact that I saw, recently: