...the America of Our Founding

Far be it for me to quote (*shudder*) Rush Limbaugh when he say that the only way for us to return to "The American of Our Founding" is for President Obama to fail in every part of his economic policy programs, his foreign agenda (stopping international drugs from entering the US is a good thing?  Well, if it's OxyContin, Rush would...no, that's a below-the-belt joke), and his Health and Human Services nominee's appointment and confirmation by the Senate.

Far be it for me to ever knock door-to-door-Religion-salesman (okay, there's no 'price,' but they're selling my soul for their time.  There's a few ways (such as the "Other People" trick) to drive them off), but when I, in my wheelchair, have to go answer the door (you try opening a door lock when you're stuck for the day in a chair, when the lock is at eye level, but the house alarm switch is an inch out of reach), I am reminded of what was the "America of Our Founding."

• No health care of any sane manner.  Amputation, leeches, sulpher drugs, etc.  Forget about battling an HMO over blood transfusions or surgery.  There weren't any, period, and HMO's amounted to doctors who happened to be barbers--the red and white rotating stripe?  Clean and used bandages drying.  No real health care of any kind.
• No mass production.  Almost everything we use in our daily lives, even my precious cigarettes, energy drinks, and my computer?  Either not invented or so expensive (Ethe idea of printing something for the world to read?  I.e. a blog in King George's time?) they might as well not exist.  I'd be writing drafts for my manuscripts in pidgeon feather quill using black berrys and sulpher ink on parchment, so typos and dead drafts would be prohibitively expensive.
• Our war in Afganistan wouldn't cost us trillions, it'd bankrupt us.  Then again, no 9/11, but no way of fighting the people behind its equivalent.

Oh, and,

• NO OxyContin, Rush.  You'd be on Morphine and too stoned to do anything, addicted until death or madness, as it was cut with whatever was on hand, because there was no such thing as standardize medicines.  Patents and Snake Oils all over the place.

I heard on MSNBC that he wants America to fail.  Maybe it's just he prefers dying of something penicillin and some 'tussin with codeine could cure, plus a little bedrest (some days off the radio'd actually do him *good,* but that's just me...).  Or maybe he's so hard-core about getting a 'high' better than his Hillbilly Heroin, maybe he wants us back to strick Morphine, that since he can't get a script, he'd rather we also not have any of the things that make his 'job' possible.

Let him use the Republican Time Machine that makes Reagan look like a Saint to go back to the "American of Our Founding" and overdose on Hillbilly Heroin's big brother, Morphine salts, let him go back in time, and let's just go forward like we're meant to.  Maybe that's what he wants.  F$&k him, his show, and I'll see what I can do about giving him some Oxy for a "I Love You for Being Insane" present.

Then again, if Jindal and the rest take his side?  I'd be dying of laughter at their insanity.  Is their plan to be so insane as to kill us all from how stupid they sound?  Maybe.  Sounds illogical enough for it to be something they'd dream up.

All to get us back to othe America of Our Founding.

Green is the "New Black"

Spokane County passed a law that bans the sale of laundry detergents that contain phosphate levels higher than 0.5%. Problem is, the detergents that meet that arbitrary criterion don't clean very well. Most detergents, even store brands, contain about 9% phosphates. So, is the county repealing the law? No--they're sitting on their hands as the residents drive to, yes, Idaho to buy what they can't in Spokane, namely, the same detergent they used to buy before...

Green became the "New Black."

Yes, we have ecological disasters all over the world. Tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, global warming, dying oceans, reality TV, Rush Limbaugh and Prop 8 in California.

But passing laws to "Go Green" when they inconvenience large populations? "Going Green" for the sake of it because it's a fad?

That's what eco-aware thought has become--the New Black. People are "keeping up with the Jones's" over who is 'greener,' while what we really need, a 96-square-mile solar array in Arizona or New Mexico or Nevada, something that could provide thousands of jobs and help with the current fiscal disaster while also producing enough energy so that we'd never need to use oil for anything other than plastics, pharm products, and cars; a legitimate Volcano monitoring system (Look at Alaska, Senitor Jindal); studies to tell us not what, but how we can stop the seemingly runaway global processes, rather than just informing us of the apocalyptic scenarious; and, of course, some way of teaching science to children without teaching what is nothing other than Religion, because it is only by teaching science, objective, proof-based and experiment-based science, that we can produce a generation capable of approaching the challenges our greed, such as the phosphorus in our water supply due to improper waste-water handling due to 9% phosphate detergents, we need science taught so the next generation can make a detergent with less than 0.5% phosphates so that people in Spokane won't be in Idaho every time they need more Tide.

We need science, we need teachers to teach science.

But it won't happen so long as Green is treated as a Fashion Statement.

Stop thinking Green is the new Black. Green is a necessity, Green is forward thought, a new paradigm, it's everything but that wasteful, vapid, void of all redemption realm of fashion or fad.

Green isn't the new Black. It's the new Red Cross.

Cigarette Songs

[Now, before the RIAA gets on my case for this, this is my idea, and all of this is "fair use" under the DMCA--you wrote the damned thing, so, I guess, abide by the sections you, um, don't like, too?  I guess that's only fair?  Oh, right, I'm talking about digital music and cigarettes.  And it's the digital music part that's got you ready to Cease and Decist me?  Good values.  Oh, and attempt #2 to quit starts Saturday.  Yay...]

It took me long enough to go all 2.0, what with a blog, a Twitter account, Skype for VoIP, and some other stuff.  Pandora?  Come again?  I can create endless streams of songs that have a ton musically in common with the ones I tell you I like?  Where have you been all my life?  Come and sit down, my friend, the roads are tiring and treacherous.  I'll get you a glass of ale?

Yes, Pandora.  Digital music.

Any one ever heard of "Cigarette Songs?"  Anybody who isn't a writer, that is.

In short, they're any song that, if you are working on something and you hear it, somewhere in the back of your subconscious is this voice softly screaming at you to smoke, take a break and listen to the song.  It becomes a "Cigarette Song" when the song itself is enough for you to do so, through a Pavlovian trigger.\

Until Pandora, I had 2, Loreena McKennit's "Raglan Road" and Matt Nathanson's "Sing Me Sweet."

Now?

Somewhere around 6?  All because they sound so similar to the original pair.  I've got to either quit Pandora (yeah, right, and listen to, what, C-SPAN while I work?  Been there, done that, swear to God), or create really, reaaaaaaaaaallllllllllly complicated "Stations" so "Cigarette Songs" don't derail my life.

Then again, that's what the Nicorette supposed to do, right RIAA?

Cybercrime as Journalism Toy, Business Model

itNews reports a disturbing trend in the realm of cybercrime:  Companies that offer malware software for a fee, as low as $400, and webhosting with custom configuration for a scant $50 more.

In other words, Cybercrime is being outsourced.

According to the CEO of Vasco Banking, Vlado Vajdic,

"It was inevitable that services would be sold to people who bought the malware toolkits but didn‘t know how to configure them.  Not only can you buy configuration as a service now, you can have the malware operated for you, too. We saw evidence of that this year.  Investors get malware developers to write code for them and then get the writers to host and distribute it, too."

Kits for these turneky hacking operations even come with maintenance, tech support, and a pre-written user's manual.  The software is even developed using the tried, true, and effective code-compile-build-test-repeat method.

With all of the talk of AIG and banking collapse, people have begun to forget about how entirely weak their cybersecurity really is.  In Eastern Europe, the hackers involved see themselves, most of the time, as the tried-and-true meme used by mobsters, "I'm just a respected businessman!"

According to these coder/hackers for hire, the software is for research purposes, and what the user does with it is the user's problem, not theirs.

But it doesn't stop there.  The BBC bought, for investigational purposes, a 22,000 PC 'botnet.'  The program, called 'Click,' used chat rooms to gain control of the computers and warn them of their vulnerabilities as well as provide information on how to shore up their defenses.

But if the BBC could do it, so could anyone else.

Botnets are an ad-hoc network of compromised machines waiting for a signal from their 'master,' which usually is to spam a list of targets or, more often, everyone in their address book.  This is how a person gets spam from their Grandma.  Less often, these compromised PC's are used to constantly send message after message to the same server until it crashes, an attack known as a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) Attack.

In fact, the BBC 'Click' investigation proved its concept by doing just that, against a backup site owned by the UK Security Company 'Prevx.'  60 machines, yes, 60, were enough to make it crash into a compromised state.  Compare that to the power the entire botnet could have done to all of Prevx.  Or to all of any other collection of services.

DDoS, the BBC notes, are usually the threat used to extort money.  It's an extortion/kidnapping tool.

Last but not least, Botnets are also used to steal personal information from the machines themselves.  The 'street' price for 1000 US or UK computers is around $500, due to the value of the information they contain.  $11,000 later, the BBC did all but use the computers.  There's a problem in US and UK law--'owning' a botnet isn't a crime.  Using it is.

TBL? Genius! When's 3.0 gonna be in Beta?

Thank You!

Happy Birthday, World Wide Web!

The REAL Shameless Plug of the Day

I realized I'd plugged everyone (Dani, and the others) already, and tagged the post with "Shameless Plug of the Day."

My bad.

Today's shameless plug is for an Anime blog who used something I wrote back in 2003 for a post this past February, and praised it.  Tres bon.  It's Haibane Renmei themed, in large part, but it is still cool.  Oh, if you haven't seen HR, watch it dubbed first.  This may be anathema to all of you, but trust me.  I've been asked what the perfect dub is, and this is it.

Without further ado, I bring you... Haibane.info

Fly, my pretties!  Fly!

Zero Newspapers? OMG It's the Apocalypse! -- NOT!

After the Seatte Post-Intelligencer folded, after 146 years of existence as Seattle's leading paper, after the Rocky Mountain News went kaput in Denver, and with the Tuscon Citizen about to join the choir invisibule, many are in a panic.

It's not a failure in the country.  It's not that the economy's current state is causing this (well, it doesn't deserve most of the blame)--it helped this happen, yes, but it didn't directly cause it.

You did.

Well, not you, unless you live in Seattle, Denver or Tuscon, but the growing trend in online media, such as the NY Times, and the Guardian in the UK, both of which now offer an API (Application Programming Interface), which is basically a bunch of code and documents so you can write your own code and use their content in your own nefarious ways, is for online delivery or other such means of content distribution, such as RSS Feeds (like how you're subscribing to all of your blogs and tweets and the like).

This is not surprising.  Who wants to pay US$7.50 for the nineteen metric tonnes version of the NY Times when you can get all but all of it delivered to your Inbox or your Feed Reader for free?  (Okay--little clarification.  You can get most of the Sunday Times for free, just not the...okay, okay.  You can get some of it on Sundays, just not the cool parts the Liberal Intelligencia drool over).  And other papers are learning the lesson that online is just cheaper than using (and wasting) paper.

Ever wonder what happens to unsold newspapers?  They get pulped.  Except for the front page, which is sent back to the publisher so the POS (Point of Sale--get your mind out of the gutter!) can be reimbursed for most, or all, depending, of their wholesale cost as a retailer.  The rest (i.e. everything except that front page) is recycled in a very costly process that gives back far less paper than goes in.  In addition, advertisers are refunded for underruns.  Say you advertise for a million copies, and only 900,000 are sold.  Yep, most papers refund that money, and it hurts their bottom line.

So the loss of newspapers, especially in this age of immediate-availability media, is not surprising.  Stop stocking dry goods and building bomb shelters.  It's the Internet.  I'd bet Tim Berners-Lee predicted this fifteen years ago.  No, I'm not looking that one up.

But, seriously, newspapers found that they can make more money publishing online, which saves them the cost of printing, pulping, and all that jazz, they can do all the cool Search Engine Optimization tricks (SEO stuff) to make sure they get more hits, and they save money.  The mistake made by the papers in Seattle, Denver, and Tucson is that they didn't see this coming and were way too conservative with their business model, so they, like all dinosaurs, went extinct.  It's economics 101 meets the Dodo meets Darwinism.

Should we be scared?  So long as the nineteen metric tonnes Sunday Times still comes out in print form, no.

On another note, very much related to the last paragraph, the Times needs to follow the Guardian's lead on this--publish everything electronically.  Micropayments on a per-page basis, as the Webcomics world taught us, are a hideous, glorious failure.  The NY Times needs to learn that they will make more money by putting it all out there, and that they will make far more money by giving away content.

It seems strange, yes, but giving your content away for nothing lets you focus more on quality, more on advertising and targeting and, yes, SEO, but it also saves money and generates more Net income (literally.  No pun), not Gross.  The right optimization, the right content, and the right ads means that you'll double, triple, maybe quadruple repeat visits, and you'll make more money and be happy and smile more.  It's also good for your health.  Literally.  Less stress, which...etc. etc. etc.

So, the world isn't ending just because Dinosaur Newspapers are going extinct.  It's just embracing a technological revolution that moved faster than they did.

DPI Equals We're Watching Youuuuuuuuuuu...

Let's rewind.  Phorm, the brainchild of BritishTelecom (BT), examined not the source or the destination of packets sent from a person's PC to a server or back, but the contents of those packets.  To remove the Geek-speek from that, imagine you're Googling, oh, I don't know, me.  You send information to Google telling them that you want websites with content that I've created, or content that has my name.  Now, say one of my several other Andrew's Pernick (yes, that is how it becomes a plueral...), lets say one of my other cousins, say the one who is with the Fed's as a Photographer, decides he's jealous of my popularity on t3h intertoobs and he wants a quick way to make him the more popular one.  He could, yes, this is now proven, intercept and inspect all data sent from Google to you and insert ads into the information Google sends back to you.

It's called DPI, or Deep Packet Inspection, and according to Tim Berners-Lee (bow before him you all shall -- he quite literally invented the Internet.  Look it up), DPI, or Deep Packet Inspection, is a "bad thing."

"This is very important to me, as what is at stake is the integrity of the internet as a communications medium, [as] clearly we must not interfere with the internet, and we must not snoop on the internet. If we snoop on clicks and data, we can find out a lot more information about people than if we listen to their conversations."

If you are unfortunate enough to live on the other side of the Pond, then there's a chance that this has been, not your future, but your past.  See, BT's 'Phorm' project did this for a couple of months, and that was all 2-and-a-half years, years ago.

Sayeth TBL,

"If [third parties] are using the data for political ends or commercial interest, there we have to draw the line," Berners-Lee said. "There's a gap between running a successful internet service and looking inside data packets."

He's not saying it for the sake of saying it.  In the States, a company called NeBuAd called for a Congressional investigation since NeBuAd did not explain that NeBuAd would be spying on their searches and hits.  Their privacy policy was so vague that of the 26,000 broadband customers involved, only 15 were able to decode the legalese well enough to know that they should opt-out.  Representative Gene Green (D-TX) called the practice "contemtible," to which Rep. Mike Doyle, (D-PA) added, "[it] goes against everything the country's been founded on."

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) wins the "Comment I've Hoped Be Law" award for saying, "Why do I have to opt out?  Why should the burden be on the American consumer?"  Opt-outs should be outlawed.  Opt-ins, I'm sure, would produce more, well, everything.  Choice, personal choice, opting in influences markets much more than spambombs.  Do I really, really need numbers or stats or anything to make that point more?  I can get 'em...

But DPI is scary in a much deeper, fundamental way.  Remember what our good, good friends at TBL's former home, DARPA, gave us (probably, actually definitely, to TBL's dismay)?  TIA?

The Total Information Awareness project at DARPA, now defunct (it doesn't even have its site on the DARPAnet servers.  It's dead, folks.  You can stop PGPing your jokes and gossip email...go back to breaking AES with a 386 because it's 'cool') was aimed at having a heuristic method to sieve through corporate, government, personal, you name it--every email, every everything you do online, it knows.

It's dead.  But another one is possible.  One run by an advertising agency.  How?  DPI.

Yep.  It's out of the military's hands and into those of organizations far more ruthless, Madison Avenue (i.e. the home for every worthy advertising firm worth mentioning).  The systems involved are actually available for what're called "Man-in-the-middle" attacks, which means that every Microsoft WindowsUpdate session you run?  You have no real way of knowing that the updates are genuine, WindowsGenuineAdvantage be damned.  Someone could just run some DPI between you and your ISP and come up with the fact that you're asking Microsoft for some updates, and voila, they install the update, but modified to come with mal- or adware.  Or worse.

Of course, when governments condemn things by not funding them under one administration, it doesn't mean they won't under another.

And when Congress has an investigation into a spyware advertising firm and it shuts down, we all know that ten gazillion pop up, just like their ads, in its wake.

Getting back to Berners-Lee on Deep Packet Inspection, he's got it right--corporate use of DPI for nefarious situations.

"I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that's not going to get to my insurance company and I'm going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they've figured I'm looking at those books,"

he said to the BBC.  He went on to say, of his data,

"It's mine - you can't have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I'm getting in return."

He's right.  The scary thing is, even after investigation after investigation, companies are actually debating whether or not to use opt in or opt out!  BT and Virgin are up in the air.

And of course he's right about what we put online in the first place, DPI or no...

"Imagine that everything you are typing is being read by the person you are applying to for your first job. Imagine that it's all going to be seen by your parents and your grandparents and your grandchildren as well."

Steven Lynch Is God!

I caught his special on Comedy Central.  A mix of Matt Nathanson's songstyling (singer/songwriter tenor with an accoustic guitar, curses like hell, is irreverent, tall, thin white guy...wait...are they related?) and the terrieresque comedic attitude of John Stewart, Steven Lynch is God!

Comedy Central, on the other hand...A commercial after every song?  Really?  To quote Joe, "That annoys me."

But...seriously, Steven even does a "1-2-F@$k-You" count-back for the greatest song ever, "D&D"

Go, my minions, fly!  Fly, my pretties!  Visit and Buy!

Is anyone surprised...

...that "membership communities" (aka social networking sites) are more popular now than email?

Really?

It only took, what, five years? Maaaaaaaybe seven?

And email's, what, six times that, and change?!

Why, exactly, is this news?

I really hope he sees this...

Ken Hess, You're a sexist. In your Linux Blog, specifically the article about Linux going MLM (Multi-level Marketing) a la AmWay, he makes the despicable comment "Women will trade-in their old school Tupperware parties..."

Aside from the fact that this is a 1950's throwback, and Tupperware products are now available at any WalMart, supermarket, and even some convenience stores, instead of the routes of MLM from the Eisenhower administration, aside from the fact that most women (I don't have stats but I will if it comes to it) are employed elsewhere (if they are employed--no, I won't comment on the state of the current economy), and most by far are not in the now no-longer-memetic Tupperware MLM system.

Okay, fine--stats.

Women in computers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics is around 907,000. Oh, and that's just last year. Women in ALL forms of retail sales (of which Tupperware sales, AmWay, etc. are a subset, is at 866,000, acoording to the same Bureau of Labor Statistics, again, for last year.

Know your facts and think about how you sound before you go spouting hate.

My New Hobby

Well, it's not so much of a hobby, as George Carlin would put it--it doesn't cost money--so it's an 'interest.'

Breaking Amazon by using the Wishlist and Recommendations sections.

It's pretty simple, really.

Create an Amazon account (well, if you've ever purchased anything from them, you probably have one).

Here's the steps.

1. Create an account (if you haven't already)
2. Feed it information on what you have, by telling it what you own
3. Add some stuff to your cart
4. Browse around the site for a while and save some of your searches
5. Create a wishlist
6. Add stuff it wouldn't predict to it
7. Go to the Recommendations page
8. Add more stuff to your cart and/or wishlist
9. Repeat steps 6-9 until it can't recommend anything
10. Return a few days later and repeat steps 6-10 (yes, 10) until it also can't recommend anything

And now, my wishlist and my Recommendations page are so broken it either thinks I'm a lesbian technophile or...God knows what. (See yesterday's post as for why it thinks I'm female).

It takes about 2-3 hours per day, yes, and it doesn't always work.

But, you do get the added benefits of a wishlist you can share with friends (or in my case, the world entire) and family, for those who can't think of what to do for prezzies (presents and gifts aka loot), and it also gives you info on stuff you never knew existed and now can't ever live without.

A little Postscript:

No, I have nothing against Amazon. This is my second post about the site, true, but it is actually the case that I am a big fan of the all-things-in-existence-in-one-site marketplace (they are, after a fashion, pseudo-open-source inasmuch as they have a Software Development Kit (SDK)). Well, a big fan except for the fact that their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) leaves much to be desired (yeah, that last link is a bit of a shameless plug for the expert in the field of SEO, a very nice young woman I've met, who is quite the awesome).

A Post-Postscript

I broke Amazon's recommendations system in a New way.

Twice.

In four hours.

/dev/urandom

If you're one of the increasingly-many linksurfers, jumping from page to page, seeing who is connected to whom, invariably, you'll stumble upon someone like me, someone who...

• Makes obscure references like crazy
• Makes jokes not a soul will get
• etc.

...then you'll see that in a recent comment to a comment, I made reference to W. Juliet.

Now, to correct a few misconceptions (and to get me into trouble in so doing)...

• I'm not gay.
• I'm not a fan of W. Juliet.
• I don't read Yaoi.

...so at least that is cleared up.

Now for some truth.

• I read anything (save Yaoi)
• I'll associate with anyone who isn't a NeoCon or shows hate

So, I will now explain.

I prefer Yuri to Yaoi for more realistic dialog. I prefer Shoujo to Shonen for better writing overall. Do I need to explain why I like Shoujo-Ai over...well...I've seen Boku no Sexual Harassment...once...ew. Clearer now?

Will I read W. Juliet or othersuch? Maaaaaaaybe. I've got nothing against that particular manga. Do I read Yuri for the sex? Not really. I prefer Yuri Hime S to Wildflower, and if you get that reference, then you understand my point. It's an honest admission, one that's gonna make some people pretty ticked.

Will I continue to make references no one will get? Hell Yeah.

I swear, the only time I'll ever talk 'process' here....

I work like a schizoid self-medicating with...well, it's a bizarre and idiotic method.

First, a weird first line jumps into my head. Then I write about sixty-gazillion (I wish that was a number(!)) drafts, each 'better' than the last. Then, back to the earlier draft pile to copy-pasta some of the old stuff into what works (Thank you, Alan Alda for reminding everyone, everywhere to save all of their drafts...).

Then, I print it out and use pens to write it up, inserting pages from yellow legal pads (A3, not 8.5x14) into the stack, and type it all up again, back and forth until I'm so frustrated I say to hell with it and lock it down into what programmers call a "feature freeze."

Finally, it's typed up.

That last sentence is why this is relevant. It takes weeks(!) to make a set of A3 and 8.5x11 printouts into one, cohesive draft, which I then print once and go 12 rounds in the ring against the thing with a fountain pen and a red .8mm red rollerball. That, that, *that* is what I wrote up and sent off today.

It took a &#@!-load of "It's 0kay!"-ing from my Beta-Testers to get me through that part, which usually takes about 4 hours.

Today, it took two.

Yep. Either I'm getting better at it, or I'm starting to say $*@! it too many times to too many edits.

So, score? Manuscripts needing editing? 0

Manuscripts that, after panic attacks and various methods of calming my a$$ down, are off to the weird world that is the people who read finished products? 3