A name for namesake only

So the big brother watch has turned up in France now, as well. So let's see, there's now: U.S.A., Canada, U.K. Australia, and France who are about as bad as China in how they abuse the internet... Sure China actively 'censors' what's available, but do you not think that all this surveillance and logging of everything that is coming out of these other places has a similar effect? If people become paranoid enough over being monitored, that tends to lead to passive censorship which is actually worse in my opinion, because the first means nobody can read it, the second means nobody is saying it (really, no 'dislike' buttons because nobody wants to feel the sting of criticism? What are we, kindergarten children?) to begin with. France, of course, chose to put their own ironic flair on things by griping about the U.S. before any of their own problems became known.

run-on sentences and other poorly labeled thoughts

I have a backlog of things, yet again. It seems that Alex Jones may have been loosing ratings. I'd toast the occasion with a scotch, but I'm flat broke, so this will have to do.

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©

The goose that laid the rotten egg

There appears to be an acceleration in the rate at which scandals tarnishing the ruling class are being discovered and reported on. From my perspective, this acceleration has very little to do with the number of scandals in existence, nor the number of back-room, underhanded, 'you scratch my balls, I'll scratch yours' deals that these narcissistic control-freaks get involved in. No. The way I see it, the only acceleration is in how many of these come to light, and how quickly they are discovered as compared with the good ole days (if there ever was such a time or place).

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.

To all the NEWS I've unread before.

Let's do a little house-cleaning... I have a number of NEWS articles that don't really fit together, nor have they found their way into other posts, but I'd really like them to stop cluttering up my news reader...

Juggling road apples

It appears that playing politics must be really difficult. On the one hand you promise cheaper or even free education, then on the other you think the schools are over-funded. Obviously, not having the students pay for school would mean that the money has to come from somewhere, this is not rocket science. It's a well known fact that you can't please all the people all the time, and the more you try, the more people you piss off with the juggling act. Especially when you promise two exact opposites in the same week.

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.

deliberated asyncronism in backwards land

These are backwards times we live in. I know we're meant to be knocked off balance and pushed out of sync with the world, and this doesn't really bother me all that much. I can't say as I've ever really been in sync with the world anyway, however, I don't appear to be off balance in the least. If anything, the more that's thrown at me, the more balanced I feel, and the clearer my vision becomes.

I've been dreaming again lately. Not just any dreams either, but the dreams I used to have which caused a near constant state of deja-vu. A few of weeks ago I was having dreams of my cat becoming ill, he is now ill. Last week I had a dream which presented me with a solution to a problem at work, which had not yet happened, but when it did I already knew what to do and fixed it before anybody was even aware that the problem had occurred... I was watching the right server at exactly the moment the problem occurred.

The tie for worst place and the toll-bridge trolls run amok

Fuck Walmart. I return a gift I received in duplicate and all I get is a lousy 'Walmart Gift Card'. I am not sure what that is going to be good for when you consider that I make a very conscious effort not to shop there at all... It isn't even like Walmart Canada offers stupendous savings unless you buy only their off-brand garbage... $15 dollar (crotchless in a week) pants that didn't fit right after the 1st wash (which means the first time you wear them after the fitting room). I am debating standing at the check-out lines asking if anybody is paying cash... They claim if I brought the gift giver and original receipt that they would credit the debit or credit card the gift was purchased with, or return cash if it was payed cash which leaves a 1 in 3 chance that I'd not be getting anything at all, some "gift". Thanks.

Apart from that, my holidays were good.

Now, on to business.

consuming the consumed consumer (re-regurgitated)

Grayson: Walmart is ‘the largest recipient of public aid in the country’

It's interesting to think that everybody pays for Walmart's roll-back whether they shop there or not. Before I I read this I looked at the system as being more of a self feeding system: employees can only afford to shop at Walmart, and the former Mom & Pop shop owner that could not compete with Walmart can't find a job anywhere else. This puts a new perspective on it, if Walmart employees cannot afford to shop at Walmart without government assistance... Which the owners of Walmart probably do not finance either due to tax loopholes or off-shore banking, or even both.

Of course, I can't very well boycott them MORE, given that I have never been a fan and have seen the evils of that machine since long before it invaded my country. It wasn't entirely about economics back then but also about censorship which was why I laughed so hard at the demise of Blockbuster (and oh did I laugh). Zellers has already fallen off the grid, and it's possible that Sears is next on the chopping block, unless it's Best Buy. I'd help them out if I could afford to buy anything, but I am not indoctrinated enough to desire 'things' enough to turn 'want' into 'need', and I am making less than the salary my father did when he was my age and 'things' did not cost as much then as they now do.

01110011 01101111 01110011 (S.O.S.)

Watch "Hacking Democracy - Full Length" on YouTube

I must say, first of all, I am extremely surprised by the fact that the security of elections in the U.S. relies on the security of Microsoft Access (MDB files), which, even when password protected, are easily cracked. sure Access great for many things, I even use it myself, but I would never propose to count votes of hundreds of millions of voters using it. That was the absolute first thing that struck me while watching this video. Of course they found ways past every other check and balance by directly manipulating the memory cards prior to actually voting using a simple +5 -5, which means adding zeros could easily negate an entire election.

Obviously this was done carelessly otherwise no voting machine would ever have reported negative votes. Meaning whomever had manipulated those cards overestimated, either voter turnout or the number of people voting for a specific candidate.

It's hilarious that Diebold would leave all it's source code on an open FTP server, because it indicates just how security conscious this company really is.

I heard Canada is thinking of using machines or e-voting soon too. I think that is the perfect time to not show up, if they actually do this.

-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...

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©

CETA: because ACTA's often change names to be public friendly

CETA (The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement): is a proposed free trade and copyright agreement between Canada and the European Union.

It just goes to show us that the proverb 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again' is alive and well in the world of legislature and politics. I am not going to repost the similarities between ACTA and CETA since Michael Geist already has  perfectly good side by side example here. Add to that that we only know anything about this thanks to a leaked document dated February 2012... If it's supposed to be 'good' for us, they'd be trying to sell us on it, when they hide it from us it's because we'd all object, protest, rebel, and cause a general ruckus.

Yar Canada! Our home and pirate land

I am not certain if I should be proud or insulted to be on the "priority watch list" of The Office of the United States Trade Representative's 2012 Special 301 Report [PDF alert]. Canada has made the highest rank on the list in a dead heat with: Algeria, Argentina, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine, & Venezuela... Columbia & Mexico are only on the "watch list", they are not a priority

Going Postal™

Despite that Canada Post® has been complaining of loosing money and loosing ground to e-communications for years now, they have decided to launch a lawsuit that I see no way they could possibly win. They allege that they are the copyright owner of postal codes...

???

Become the media

Is the plan becoming unglued? Are the money masters becoming nervous, or has their greed finally gotten the better of them? I was always certain that things would trend in the direction of infighting, impatience, and bold-faced publicly visible idiocy. I just thought they would be able to hold out until much more of the plan would have been played out. But, I suppose greed has a way about it which is transformation into a gluttonous lust for power culminated into envy among the 'haves' over what the 'have mores' have gained at their expense. Maybe this is also written into the plan even if it does not appear to be so.

MSM lies are becoming more and more transparent as time passes. Kony is a good example of failure to grab public support and sympathy. I had not personally watched the video before a co-worker had told me of evil people in Africa recruiting child soldiers... My only response was "That sounds like really old news... Like 20 years old..." This not statement only dis-armed my co-workers emotions, but prompted them to further research the issue and realize that somebody might be trying to manipulate their emotions. I was rather surprised about how easily I was able to defuse a situation that had presumably been carefully calculated to overwhelm logic with an outpouring of emotions designed to lead to only a single conclusion 'Invade Africa and get this monster no matter the cost'.

All your .COMs are belong to U.S.

Just to prove the point that ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, and any other of these nefarious laws are not actually required, a Canadian registered .com based gambling site no longer exists because it is in breach of Maryland state laws. I am starting to wonder if I need to rethink my stance on the U.N. having some level of internet governance.... No, that still doesn't sound like a good idea, but this is possibly one of the future references that will be used to support that case. It certainly does help to make Russia's and China's case that the U.S. has too much control over the internet.

Why do I care about a gambling site anyway? I actually don't care about the gambling aspect of it, I think gambling is largely evil and is just as addictive to some as crack cocaine, such that, left unchecked, an addicted gambler ends up in the same predicaments as the chronic cocaine user minus the heart problems... Further proof of this can be seen everywhere as too-big-to-fail banks gambled (and still do) our present and future into oblivion, but the content of the site is neither here nor there in my perception of true the issue at hand: the internet as an American police state.

One small step...

Well, at least it's something... I have received a response for my petitioning of Bill C-30 and Bill C-11. even if it is just a standardized reply, it was not instantaneous, and therefore not automated...