category: internet

Kids.net.au is now my favorite childrens encylopedia. Note the opening HTML comment :-)



Here's to book-learning: Article Link

During the Silver Age of comics many Batman covers featured Robin freaking out in a bottom corner, often in the same pose, as if horrified and fascinated at the same time. The Robin Corner Shock Pose:



But there was a problem. Robin only ever did this in Batman franchise comics, he was never around to be shocked by, Archie say. Now, for the first time, and thanks to the wonders of the internet history can be rewritten and Robin can gasp, elbow-in-air, at every page of every comic ever written. I give you; Robin Corner Shock Pose Generator:



Follow the link, upload or download an image and add Boy Wonder :-)

via: BoingBoing

According to this proxy test strix.org.uk is now banned in China. Hooray! I'm a dissident!



Actually, this site is banned all over the world, from UAE to Boston. As many readers will be aware, Boston was recently a victim of a heinous plot to blow up the city, and everyone in it, using D batteries inside Mooninite Lite Brites. Police responded swiftly and decisively by blowing up a city traffic counter that treacherous actors unknown (in the transit department) had chained to a lamp post. So I understand why its necessary to take certain dangerous freedoms - such as reading this blog - away from the Boston public. I'm actually quite pleased to be Banned in Boston, even if only on municipal WiFi; it's a longstanding accolade of porn and progressive writing:

Boston was founded by Puritans in the early 17th century. Puritans held highly negative views regarding public exhibitions of sex. Boston's second major wave of immigrants, Irish Roman Catholics, also held conservative moral beliefs, particularly regarding sex.

In the late 19th century, American 'moral crusader' Anthony Comstock began a campaign to suppress "vice." He found widespread support in Boston, particularly among socially prominent and influential officials. Comstock was also known as the proponent of the Comstock Law, which prevented "obscene" materials from being delivered by the U.S. mail. Some critics have pointed out if the list of banned words were strictly enforced, then even the King James Version of the Bible would be unmailable.

Following Comstock's lead, Boston's city officials took it upon themselves to ban anything that they found to be salacious, inappropriate, or offensive. Aiding them in their efforts was a group of private citizens, the Boston Watch and Ward Society. Theatrical shows were run out of town, books were confiscated, and motion pictures were prevented from being shown; sometimes movies were stopped mid-showing, after an official had "seen enough". [Wikipedia Link]

James Ferman, newly appointed secretary of the BBFC, was very influenced by [sensationalist] advance publicity. He convinced himself that there was no way that the sustained terrorisation of a young woman could have a beneficial effect on the British public. Well, correction here. He was worried about the effect on the British working class. After the film had been shown, uncensored, to members of the British Film Institute at the London Film Festival, Ferman got up on stage and, thinking he was among friends, said,

"It's all right for you middle-class cineastes to see this film, but what would happen if a factory worker in Manchester happened to see it?"

When they heard this gaffe, the audience became hostile, and Ferman was visibly shocked. He never again referred to the true nature of his job as a censor - to stop working class people being stimulated by controversial films. [link]

One of the coolest things about making tools is getting to see what other people use them for. My Google Video search thingy is now thoroughly redundant, but it was cool when I made it (Way back before GooTube, back when Google Video didn't yet have a feature for searching for video) it's still used, mostly for finding porn. I keep a log of searches, for my own statistical fiddling, some of the queries people (you! the public) make are pure gold. Some recent nuggets:

Google AdSense has a testimonials page, these are usually very lame - often fictional quotes dreamed up by PR people, PR people posing as customers whacked on MDMA:

I'd like to thank Shady Company for a fantastic product, it's increased our revenue by 12,000% since an hour ago, and its such a pretty color. Whee! Look at the colors! The after-sales people are fantastic, I love you guys, I love you so much, I just want to touch your shirt... wow, thats so... amazing... your shirt... it feels so furry... wow.
Dr Martin Horseworthy, Nebraska

'General: You further agree not to display on any Serviced Page any non-Google content-targeted advertisement(s)'

I was thinking about newspapers today. Ordinary, pervasive, everyday things. They're almost an icon of normalcy, like cars and houses boxes of milk, things real and tangible in a world increasingly driven by unreal and intangible things. The things that actually shape our lives at this point in time are not real at all: Emails, bands, ideologies, credit card transactions, voice and text from our cell phones. There's no substance or form to these, they're only nouns by convention. What is an email? A lot of microscopic fluctuations in a magnetic field on the surface of an aluminum disc? Bursted, multiplexed dance on the surface of a carrier wave, existing only instantaneously as it flies right across the globe, into space and back again. If you give it substance by printing it on paper is it still an email, or just the text of an email, a rendering, like a photograph can be a rendering of a face, but isn't the face itself? I don't know. It's doubtful that the otherworldly magic of our technology can be readily understood in the traditional nouns and verbs of human languages that have developed over millennia to communicate the realities of the physical world.

That's why technology is still magic. The uncommon knowledge, jargon and whole technical languages used to work with computers are not very different to the forbidden knowledge of the occult and unintelligible incantation of spells that was widely believed to be the realm of magic not so very long ago. Witchcraft and black magic are still widely feared in much of the developing world by people educated and westernized enough to know better. I think for many ordinary people feeling of stigma and unknowability of the occult has been inherited by the technology.

A hacker writes a script to enter the CCTV system of a building on the other side of the world. He composes several verses in an esoteric language, written in a special, concise way, literally commanding mysterious and distant forces to summon an image of a faraway place into a piece of glass in front of him. The only difference between the hacker and a wizard chanting over a crystal ball is that the hacker actually has the power the wizard was imagined to have. The same is true of the geneticist mage creating plants and animals with supernatural properties, for the way the chemist mixes up drops and vials of things to make liquids that cure disease or make water safe to drink. It's all sorcery to most people. (continues after the jump)

What a yummy post title that is. So anyway, today I was going though my logs and I have some traffic from a site called brandimensions.com. It's one of those newfangled market intelligence companies that monitors the blogosphere to track what us consumers are saying about our corporate overlords, so their clients can tweak their ad campaigns and revv up the spin doctors when needed.

They also field an interesting service offering to 'generate buzz', where they'll find otherwise credible bloggers whose opinion can be bought with some cheap trinket or other to write nice things about Brand X so as to influence their readers and other bloggers. It's very simmilar in concept to the Judas Goat.

Abattoirs and slaughterhouses around the world keep goats, called Judas goats, which are trained to associate with cattle and sheep. The cattle can smell fear and death around the big machine with the smiley face on it so they won't go near it by themselves, but when their friend the Judas Goat walks through and comes out OK they follow, and then have a brief but fatal encounter with modern meat technology. What's important is that it only takes one Judas goat to lead a whole herd of animals, against every instinct they have, to sharp steely doom. And the goats can do this over and over, every day. Now imagine the blogosphere equivalent.

Of course, this supposes that consumers are sheeplike and will follow along with the Judas Goat of Brand X, but I'd say that's a fair assumption. People are intelligent and media savvy and all that, but we use our thinking brains on what's important to us, the big things, challenges in our lives, sudoku. We don't think long and intensely about every small choice we have to make, we need our brains working on more important stuff.

Thus if I'm in a supermarket deciding between green Winnie the Pooh socks and black Winnie the Pooh socks (yay! Tigger!) I'm not going to choose very carefully, it doesn't matter much to me which I get. But it matters to the guys who make green socks. Oh yes. Very much. So they have motivation to find a Judas Goat to give free green socks to because the very small influence this person has might well tip my purchasing decision.

I see this as yet another way big companies will try to control us unknowing masses, and must be resisted.

On the plus side, my first thought on entering the Brandimensions site wasn't fnegh at corporate manipulation. My first thought was ''What the hell were they thinking?'' Brandimensions? Brand Dimensions (two words) is a very good name for a company that sells brand metrics, but Brandimensions...

I don't know how it parses for you, but when I see that word my brain spits back Brandi-mensions. Far as I'm concerned, Brandi's a stripper name, and not one of the good stripper names like Tiffany or Jade. Brandi's the one who's 34 and the only reason she's still working the clubs - those that will have her - is because she needs money for her habit. That's the connotation their name brought up, the stretch marks, veins and nasty stray pubes of a past prime drug user on a stripper pole. And the 'mensions' bit? Seems vaguely like it might be to do with womens' periods. If it weren't for the formal white site design I might have assumed I was at a fetish page I didn't want to see.

But maybe that's just me being a perv. Maybe they were hoping the average user would see 'Brandy', the drink, and associate their business with that. So let's think about brandy for a second. It's made from uvas, the reproductive organ of a plant, that is then digested with bacteria or yeast to make cheap wine that doesn't sell and so has all the goodness boiled out of it in a still. That's where brandy comes from. It's an old people drink, very traditional. A good Republican drink. If there were a polar opposite to brown teenage girls doing vodka-jelly bodyshots in a nightclub it would be George Bush Senoir huffing brandy by the fire. (This can in fact be proved mathematically using Georges Gardet's 'Boisson Distribution and Analysis' method).

So they screwed up. Who'd pay for internet advice 'Brandy mentions'? The ruminations of old folk under the influence of brandy doesn't sound like the sort of tech knowledge that builds great dot.coms. It's too late now, they've registered the domain, incorporated a company and they're open for business. With a silly name. And they're going to know that I'm out here - trashing their brand and what they do - because it's their job to know stuff like that.

Haha! Suck it up.

Breaking news today concerning online privacy in the EU. The situation was already bleak, what with the raft of bad laws lobbied for (the cynical might say bought) by media giants and others. This is worse. German police have raided a string of servers running as TOR nodes. TOR is an anonymous internet communication system developed by the venerable Electronic Frontier Foundation to allow very secure, private communication using multiple encryped links between random points on a network of servers. This is to allow those with limited means and expertise a free, reliable, safe connection. Cyberdissidents in China, those who wish to break information to the media without the NSA knowing, people like that. By design, anyone can use it for any purpose, and all are free to contribute resources to the network. It's A Good Thing.

But it has opponents, the Chinese Government for instance is probably not keen on cyberdissidents being so well tooled. Any government, for that matter, may have issues with secure anonymous communication because it allows absolute freedom of speech. Not legally defined, can-say-things-within-certain-limits type freedom of speech, real freedom of speech, being able to say anything you want without consequence, and to watch without being observed.

There are some poor arguments against TOR. Politicians say ˝What if criminals use the net, we can't evesdrop?˝ (since 9/11 replace with 'terrorists'). People say ˝What if what is said is a lie˝, or worse ˝What if we dislike what is said, how will we stop them saying it?˝. In reality terror networks and organised crime can already communicate under the radar of law enforcement, they have sophisticated methods, TOR won't change that. TOR is for ordinary people, and that's what gives authority the willies, ordinary people not being controlled. No censorship, no imposed moderation, no way to tie an avatar to a person in the real world.

The reason given by German authorities is the absolute worst. They say TOR helps child porn distribution. Probably it does, and that's entriely beside the damn point. For one thing, TOR nodes don't keep logs, so there's no information to be siezed that could possibly help an investigation. TOR is a worldwide network, so siezing German servers won't affect the network as a whole, but will intimidate German admins trying to advance online privacy. Sure, kiddie porn may have something to do with TOR, but TOR has nothing to do with kiddie porn.

Let me explain. Suppose you make photocopiers. Someone could conceivably buy one and use it to make copies of illegal images in the process of distributing child porn. They are then resposible for a crime and it's up to the police to do something about it. You don't go having a crackdown on photocopier manufacturers and technicians. Its not their fault. The kiddie porn was reproduced with a copier, but the copier technology is neutral to it. Likewise email and fax machines are used to distribute illegal images. That doesn't mean we should ban email, or that the role of the police has changed. The role of the police is still to bring criminals to justice, doing forensics on said illegal images, detective work, sting operations, undercover agents, all that cop stuff. Once upon a time, before modems, kiddie porn was distributed by postal mail and cops would intercept it. That's not the world anymore. Not being able to waylay the postman loses the cops a trick, but that doesn't substantially alter the work of the police.

In short, there's nothing to be gained by the police in shutting down these nodes, and they know it. The phrase kiddie porn is bandied around because it's a convenient moral panic. Something the general public is so passionately upset about that it's mere mention drives all rational thoughts from their brains and they take to the streets baying and howling, pitchforks in hand. Anyone with a shred of sane reservation about all this attracts facile accusations of not caring about the children or being 'one of them'.

And that's how I think it's going to go. Supermarket newspapers will run headlines about ˝internet perverts˝ running systems ˝to spread kiddie porn˝, and rouse people up. And politicians will rouse them up further and say ˝This TOR thing is about kiddie porn and it should be illegal˝. And John Q Public won't understand, because he doesn't care for learning about things like cryptographic networks, he's just some guy in a bar watching some suit on TV talk about ˝family values˝. And there goes a shining hope for empowering citizens towards democracy, flushed down a toilet of ignorance and politics. And it pisses me off.

Dammit.

And shutting down TOR won't do a damn thing to stop kiddie porn.

Dammit.

Link to English News Article
Via BoingBoing

UPDATE: Good news, apparently the German police are not pressing charges against the TOR operators, they were following some kind of procedure to do with a larger kiddie porn sting, but not directed against privacy services directly. Detail

A panel from xkcd, one of my favorite webcomics. Click to enlarge.

The Councillor of the Exchequer has commanded a treasury-level review of the complicated mess that is the UK's intellectual property law, and you're invited to contribute. The Open Rights Group was asked to participate and have issued a call for evidence. If you have any war stories highlighting the failure of current system, please send them in.

link
my comments
Via BoingBoing

Today is Dean Gray Tuesday, a day for angst and the dowloading of free music. So for the next couple hours, I'll be getting to the spirit and sharing with you some illegal MP3s here or you can go to www.americanedit.org
to find more mirrors of this years album.

Fuck Warner! Up the Revolution!

Logogle.com is a site which allows users to customise the google logo, like so:





Its freaking genius. The ability to change the logo is so-so as far as cool things go, technically easy, not amazing. As a business idea its totally awesome, here we have a way to take advantage a neat little meme to harvest money from google, simply by putting ads in the same place google does, and charging them for their own adsense :-) or yahoo ads! And its hella good viral marketing, because it takes advantage of poeple's exhibitionism and hubris, they're going to work hard to drive people to your site to see 'their' logo. I absolutely love this site, for sheer chutzpah and business sense. Its technically boring but psychologically brilliant as a get-rich-quick scheme. I need to come up with some ideas like this.

via

NewNova.org has a huge listing of fresh documentaries. This is like finding bittorrent gold :-) Not that any of you good people would download an illegal BBC documentary of course... You'd buy a television, an then buy an ariel and a freeview box, and then pay a licence fee, which is used for god knows what. You wouldn't use the internet to get hold of something your tax money payed for...

*grin*

link

UPDATE: May 2007, newnova is no more, however there is now a huge array of downloadable BBC and Channel4 documentaries available on Google Video.



If that doesn't suit you Torrentz.com list over 600 files for the phrase 'BBC Documentary'.