Lost on the path of least resistance

Sometimes we need to set reminders for ourselves because we have a tendency, and even tenacity for droning on day in and day out. Some changes in life occur so slowly that we don't even notice them. Night becomes day, day becomes night, and there's been bad news on every channel for so long that unhorrendous news is now the good news, and it's still worse than the bad news was just a few years ago. Unless it's just a rehash of the exact same news that went nowhere any other time it's been in the news.

protecting the children and other sexual deviances

It appears we will soon have a choice put to us in the U.K. and Canada. That choice is the one where we willingingly 'op in' to having our names on the sexual deviant list, or we shut up and drink the kool aid... It hardly seems like a choice, but then neither does letting a bureaucrat decide what is art and what is porn when they are already so awesome at deciding what is rape, and what is 'sex outside of marriage'. I know they simply want to 'protect the children' because that's what things like this are always labelled, and well, we've seen how much they like to protect children. They love to protect children in the missionary, and protect them doggy style, or, their favorite: the curled angel. They protect them on the playground, and even have special harnesses to keep them from falling off the swing-set for their protection... Oh, yeah! They'll protect the children 20 times a day and up their rectum if they have to.

the Jay-Z wifebeater and other good or bad news

I would like to take a minute to thank society for this gem... To say that I am not a fan, would be the most ludicrous understatement I have ever made. There is one thing baffling me in all of this, where do all these people who can afford $120 plain white T-shirts live? Anyway, I have already dedicated more time to this than it was worth. Moving on...

Before we rejoice too hard over MySatan leaving Europe, let's recall that they left the wheat market years ago too, and that did not appear to work out as planned. In fact, it seems that so much 'good news' finds it's way into the 'bad news' side of the ledger with so little time delay that there is almost a refractory effect causing it to appear that I penned it in on the good side while it actually landed on the bad side... I'm not suggesting witchcraft, but something more simple, like when you plop the net into a fish tank and the handle appears to be bent from a variety of angles.

have a nice day†

The amazing legal caveats of not owning your data has started to cause a backlash against cloud services... I did see this one coming, though I did not foresee it's catalyst. Whatever the cause, the effect might mean I get a job soon... But like anything I've ever said, we'll see. Some of this hinges on how things are interpreted locally, and whether or not Montreal companies feel naked with all the recent spying and other breaches of privacy. There have been other developments in the technology space, I'd cut up my Visa or Master Card in protest, if I were owned by either such thing.

death of a used condom salesmen

I'll admit it... I've fallen behind in my reading in the last 24 hours and now find myself trying to make heads or tails of things... Some things have presented some great irony:

Funny, but I find the irony of Kosher bacon double cheeseburgers to be even funnier

It always stresses me out to find hundreds and hundreds of unread items, and it tends to lead me to feel like I have to rush my decision making process (or forgo it altogether), and often leads to making bad judgement calls.

monkey-wrenches in the machine don't work

The following is an email I received on October 19th 2012 regarding signing a petition:

Good news! Because of you, Big Telecom was stopped in its tracks yesterday.

The CRTC (Canada’s media/telecom authority) just blocked Bell’s takeover of Astral Media. If it hadn’t been for you speaking out, Bell and other big telecom giants would have had more power to price-gouge Canadians and restrict access to the open Internet.

We’re now taking steps to fix Canada’s broken telecom market and it’s thanks to all of you who have spoken out, donated, or joined our allies program. Give yourselves a pat on the back.

Simply put: THANK YOU

Let’s keep going,

Steve, Shea, Lindsey, and Reilly—your OpenMedia team

P.S. Seriously, our community of supporters constantly inspires us. Thanks.

I remember it well, because I posted 'sometimes the system works' to Facebook.

It's too bad it doesn't actually work, otherwise, what the hell is this? "CRTC approves Bell-Astral merger". Sure it says 'merger', but this one doesn't: "CRTC approves Bell's $3.4B acquisition of Astral Media" (CTV is owned by Bell). So, all I got out of this signing a petition was to be a brief monkey-wrench in the systems gears, followed by a bunch of unsolicited email from open media. Some prize...

the ingredients of a bureaucracy induced security flaw

But who does represent these people? America?

It appears somebody has launched the holy hand grenade of Antioch. Sorry, I couldn't resist that one, especially after reading how ridiculous certain churches are getting. Don't worry too much about the 5-year-old, because she's been indoctrinated enough to know where she'll be if she protests. That's why we no longer have special classes for special needs children, because we want them to feel like they have a place in society as a whole.

Now that I've covered some of the varied topics that are bugging me, I guess I will focus on something for a while...

The exciting new game of unbroken telephone

Well, in keeping with my apparent theme, and because technology is my most practiced expertise, it only seems fitting that I call attention to some of the same things I've been calling to attention in the past few days. First I'd like to repeat "what happens there, if successful, shall be the model of what happens here". Of course, here they claim to only have 'metadata' (Which I will explain further down), and not the whole recorded conversation, but then again, there, they made that claim too, until there was proof of that being false.

Colouring outside the lines

As I walk among the sleeping world around me realizing the horror of it all, the sheer evil genius at work which keeps everyone seemingly docile and disinterested and even silently complicit, it is not with a smug sense of superiority but with an aching sorrow. Things that have found the open air of scrutiny should have caused a mutiny but the actors have played their parts so well that today is a day just like all those that went before them.

The actors got all up in arms that the information somehow got out there, not that the information existed and for some reason everybody else seems to be paying along. Bait, and switch, hook line & sinker. Why do we fall for and follow this charade? The cold calculated truth that big brother is real should be a slap in the face to every person who has used the internet or made a phone call in the last decade, yet because it's for our safety and security against the terrorist of the week we should be angry at the one who exposed the truth.

Shoot the messenger. Then forget the message.

The myth of TOR

This video claims, quite outrageously and erroneously, that 'It scrambles web addresses into a jumbled series of characters" then they display a 'startpage' search for leucochloridium paradoxum as some form of proof of this random shit they are speaking of... Ironic that a parasitic flatworm should be their chosen example of random text.

What it can be used for is obscuring your IP address while you surf the web, which does mean that criminal activities on a forum or message board are harder if not outright impossible to trace back to your ISP account. So the 'add an an ounce of truth to ten pounds of bullshit' equation does rear it's ugly head.

There are sites operating in a .onion domain and the silk road they mention is one of them, These sites are not easy to find and they are not accessible from your main browser. These sites are slow and do not give me a warm and cozy feeling that I would like to send off my bit-coins in hopes of actually receiving a box of cannabis seeds. But I can still see how they might be useful in a freedom of speech context, though, I am not about to start hosting a blog there as I doubt I would ever find any readership that way.

I'd post examples of what I saw there, but, in all honesty, just being there granted me a paranoid nervousness that felt I was being tracked for whatever reason. I will say that the silk road is mostly a drug den looking site with over 10k worth of items in the drug category and 640 items under digital tools, which mostly related to TOR.

The TOR software itself is really just a firefox launcher which obtains an IP address from the TOR relay, then opens a 'private browser session' in Firefox using the TOR relay as a proxy...

Each time browse to a new site your IP address will be reported to the server you are interacting with as being different than the IP the last server you interacted with knew because your traffic is running through a relay:

That is not to say that this will hide your 'surfing while you are supposed to be working' activities because there are many underhanded ways that corporate networks can still spy on you while you are using their equipment. So this is not a license to spend 6 hours of your workday on facebook, unless you work at facebook, in which case, knock yourself out. I'm also not sure that this works if you are contained within the great firewall of China at all... Most importantly, if law enforcement suspects you are committing heinous acts from your home computer, it would not prevent them from tapping your traffic at the ISP hoping to pick up any non-encrypted traffic...

So I would not suggest that this is a 100% cure to becoming invisible online... In fact, at best it simply throws off all the data mining ad selling companies who seek to spam you out with ads 'geared towards you' while you surf, and even then, you have to remain very conscious of what you are doing in this 'anonymous /semi-stealth mode' because once you've checked your Gmail or started making online purchases all bets are off.

And forget about Torrent and illicit copywrong downloads, because first: the download speeds would be horrendously slow, and second, your torrent software rats you out by ignoring the slow tor proxy and finding a fast connection, like the direct one using your ISP assigned IP address.

So TOR, is something you might use to hide anything from dissent to human trafficking, but it isn't really user friendly. And I would not even call it 100% idiot-proof as a means of covering your tracks, and it's VERY VERY slow.

-DIrtyKID©

Crazy, Lazy, & Free, oh my!

I'd say I am amazed when the news of the day proves something I said about Montreal having become the city of protests, but I'm not really all that impressed with being right when police somehow manage to arrest 447 people at once. I did the math and the city will rake in $284739 in fines for 'unlawful assembly', which, according to a special kind of math that accounts for corruption, should fix 3 potholes with subpar asphalt. Granted that is only an estimate since there is no real math which accurately accounts for what the government actually does with money.

Censured or censored

It's been a couple of days since one of my YouTube subscriptions passed away. So I thought maybe a memorial service would be appropriate.

Status Quo's at full speed in neutral

Modern terrorism has completely transformed from the good old days. It used to be limited to theft of strategic importance, hijackings, kidnappings, assassination attempts, and bomb threats from some faction of wing-nuts claiming to want freedom for some tiny backwards nation nobody's ever heard of. Not anymore. Now that terrorism has gone mainstream and appears to be universally accepted as "God's work", it's very difficult for the old form 'Peoples Liberation Front of Easter Nauru' to get any kind of a rise out of us. I suppose it really doesn't help that so many are already hiding under their mattresses afraid of what's on the T.V. that the old school terrorists cannot find anybody in whom's hearts to strike fear. It doesn't much help that everybody's a terrorist these days, so they're having to blend in and take jobs as New York cab drivers to make ends meet.

But who are the real terrorists when some terrorists get a slap on the wrist while others are tortured until they sign a confession? Was that the point? Build the new normal until everybody thinks backwards or gives up trying to fight it?

Censor or go home.

Radio host suspended after allowing anti-Semitic rant: 

The Montreal late-night radio talk show host for 98.5 fm will be off the air for one month without pay.

I think the penalty far exceeds the crime in this instance, especially when you consider that Anglophone or Francophone bashing would have likely been considered acceptable. I mean, all this radio host did was fail to quickly hang up the phone on a caller during a 'call-in' talk show, so loose a months salary? Too harsh!

-DIrtyKID©

Atlas needs Robax Platinum®

The world has felt heavier than normal this week. It's possible that this flu has just been kicking my ass, and my sluggishness has given me the perspective of a heavier world, but that doesn't sit properly in my gut. Especially when combined with my inability to stop blogging. So, I couldn't really be all that sluggish if I'm reading the same volume of information, and writing more than normal. Could I?

But if there is more to this heaviness, what could that 'more' be? It isn't even as though it's only me, because I've been observing unusual reactions from people around me as well. People who are normally quite calm appear tense and over-stressed. I'm starting to think I need to take a closer look into all this Kali Yuga talk in Les Visible's writings. Not that Vis has given me reason to doubt his sanity, but that he sometimes speaks over my head where words sound pretty but don't resonate inside of consciousness long enough to become a cohesive thought pattern.

Study finds: what it wanted to find

Canadians a satisfied bunch, study finds:
More than 90 per cent of Canadians report they are either satisfied or very satisfied with their lives, a high enough score to enough to officially rank Canada among the happiest countries in the world.

"The StatsCan data that formed the basis of the centre's report was gathered from 65,000 people nationwide, but excluded some of the populations most likely to report dissatisfaction with their lives."... So the point of this study was to ask happy people if they are happy? I might have missed the point when I blinked...

-DIrtyKID©

Your TOS sucks

I find it interesting when a News reporting service does not even bother to re-host the videos they are reporting about:

So now, we do not get to see the video they are speaking of a meager 2 weeks later. I am not certain what Terms of Service this video violated because I did not have time to watch it while the thought police had overlooked it. However, now that it is on the public record as "NEWS" I think they might need to re-examine things just a little...

That went as expected, mostly

I was asked in the car on my way to the polling station how I thought the election would turn out. My statement was this: "A PQ Minority government, with a Liberal opposition. The popular vote will be very close to a 3-way tie with PQ, Liberal, and CAQ all right around the 30% mark, but the CAQ will not win as many seats as recent polls suggest, and The Liberals will win way more seats than even they expect." I was questioned on why I thought this, but did not really have an answer except that I had a feeling. And the results are in (stolen from CBC, because the official results page is ginormous and not as nice looking):

Quebec Election Results

Updated: Sep. 5, 2012, 1:58 AM EDT

Party	Elected	Leading	Total	Vote Share (%)
PQ	54	0	54	31.93
LIB	50	0	50	31.20
CAQ	19	0	19	27.05
QS	2	0	2	6.03
ON	0	0	0	1.90
GRN	0	0	0	1.00

All results are unofficial until final ballot counts are verified by Elections Quebec. CBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

Looks very much like what i said, though I expected the CAQ to be more like 29% on the vote share.

What I did not anticipate, was the bizarre scene that transpired afterwards. Not only am I not understanding how a man in a ski mask and a blue robe somehow managed to enter through a back door, I am not understanding how this person did not stand out as 'suspicious' at the very least. There are some other oddities here too. This story indicates that this man used a door 6 meters from the stage but fired shots at people not the stage and decried 'the English are waking up' in French but with an accent. And all of this was performed with an assault rifle, which is a rather rare specter in the streets of downtown Montreal.

Reason to quit Facebook # 1

Is not joining Facebook a sign you're a psychopath? Some employers and psychologists say staying away from social media is 'suspicious'

It's true, I have not disabled or deleted my Facebook account yet and I am a bit hypocritical for that I suppose... I also have not been feeding much into 'the system' in the past couple of years either, so maybe I am only mildly psychotic. Not that the government (or google) does not know where I am just in case the men with the straight jackets needed to subdue me... I even make sure to check in with the bank every couple of weeks so as not to appear dead.

I hear paying with cash is another antisocial and psychopathic kind of behaviour, so I might still fit the bill.

Sometimes I feel like I'm repeating myself

Did I not just write something about Acta changing it's name to Ceta?

Well, not even a whole day later I am reading that SOPA has changed it's name to IPAA.

Should I just repost what I posted this morning and add new content? No, that would be like what Hollywood's movie release schedule has looked like for the past decade with the reboot of a movie made from a tv series, based on a cartoon, that started as a comic book... Besides, I hate having to say the same shit over and over again. You can put a tuxedo on a monkey, but that doe not make it any less, a monkey

Read my first post of today, it has more meat in it and I just cannot be bothered to rephrase it all in the same day.

-DIrtyKID©