I need to get out of this rut.

Due to another project I had a bunch of scans of cutout letters lying around, thought I'd throw them together in a script to make those cliche ransom notes that appear in old episodes of McGuyver and Magnum PI. And, here it is, enjoy :-)

Sand dunes in the Negev. Click to view the full sized image, the colors are amazing. Searing heat sounds pretty good to me right now. [Google Maps Link]



Mount of Olives, with the Dome of the Rock visible on the left. Much of the New Testament is set on the Mount of Olives, some Christians believe this is where Jesus ascended to heaven. Incidentally, the Dome of the Rock is supposed to mark the spot where Muhammed (PBH) ascended to heaven, though he had a cool flying horse while Jesus presumably had to walk.

The west face of the mount is white because it is covered in tombstones, approximately 150,000 of them. According to the Book of Zecharia [Verse 14], the Mount of Olives is where God will start reclaiming the dead at the end of the world, so folks like to be buried there, so that they can be the first zombies to claw their way back to the light on Judgement Day. A good place to be dead, at least when Jordanian soldiers aren't defacing the graves. [Google Maps Link]



Floating fish farms in the sea off Eilat, just because. I have a soft spot for fish farms. [Google Maps Link]

The other Planeteers were devastated when Wilmot, with the Power of Chocolate, returned to Belgium to attend fat camp, though Gaia had come to regret giving him his ring. He would sit for hours with his fist in his mouth mumbling 'chocolate' around sticky fingers. His place would eventually be taken by Ma Ti, a whiny savage from South America, and without Wilmot's power Captain Planet lost his distinctive chocolatey smell and turned an unhealthy shade of blue. This worked out well for the show overall, as TBS would have been unlikely to broadcast it with a brown superhero in the early nineties.

Learn more about Captain Planet
Hooray! Captain Planet Coloring Book!
Ted Turner's Captain Planet Site (I think he made it himself)
Durham University Conservation Society

I'm studying Mind Performance Hacks by Ron Hale-Evans. Unlike more traditional brain hacking books (Brain hacking for Axe Murderers, The Zombie's Guide to Hacking Brains, Brain Hacking for Dummies) this one focuses on the needs of Mad Scientists, assuming an intelligent reader with limitless megalomania. It provides memory techniques for tasks such as quickly memorizing long strings of binary code - so you're never without your doomsday computer virus, even if the Justice League destroy your secret headquarters and all your storage media.

It provides many brilliant techniques for streamlining work processes, record keeping, brainstorming, note taking and keeping vast quantities of information in your head without forgetting any. The most interesting chapter so far covers Speedwords (Rapmotz), an auxiliary langue - similar purpose to Esperanto - that's very easy to learn and designed around simple, clear expression of ideas.

It's a lot like Newspeak in syntax and implementation, but where Newspeak was supposed to limit speakers ability to think or articulate unorthodox thoughts Speedwords focuses on the efficient processing and communication of ideas. I intend to be fluent in it in a week.

I may even make it the official language of the New Humanist World Order when I get around to taking over the world. In a similar vein, Unitarianism will be the official religion of the world government. By way of a want ad, I have already chosen my cabinet but there are many important positions to be filled. We will need, for instance, a Prelaetor of Microbiology and a Secretary for the Peoples Republic of Sark.

People sometimes ask me why I wish to take over the world, after all; dictatorships have a habit of sticky endings, often involving a lot of unpleasant shooting. Don't worry, I have most of the details worked out.

Saw today's Marmaduke comic and couldn't help but think of the Ceiling Cat, I've modded it to reflect what I saw. Original at Joe Mathlete Explains Marmaduke. All characters and artwork property of their creators, blah, blah, blah.

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.

An approach to giving yourself unfair advantages.

Hello! You know Swami Vivekananda said that learning and wisdom are superfluities, the surface glitter merely, but it is the heart that is the seat of all power. I think that's bull because octopuses have like 16 hearts and no power at all. So who are you anyway? your profile says you're into [synchronized weasel dunking]. Does that mean you're one of those annoying chicks who talks on a cell phone the whole time?

Anyway, I always say that [life is too short to spend it thinking] and [we should experience as much as makes us grow].

So if you want to go on an adventure to feed donuts to the zoo cops sometime email me back. But only if you can think of a better adventure or are willing to dress up nice.

Dave

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

TurbidBlue writes:

Happy Friday Everyone. Apparently we have only four more days to live before the nucular war [sic].

In actual news: the rise of the machines. Regular visitors may have noticed a few changes hereabouts. For one, the captchas are gone, enticing spambots to leave their little electronic bowel movements on the blog.

There is a *very* passive-agressive bot trap lurking behind the form. Ordinary comments pass as usual, any that fail a battery of tests get rerouted to a script that tries a number of methods to catch or kill the bot.

So... if you have a comment to make about, say, viagara and mortgages email it to me rather than using the form. The script is intended to total web browsers (legally, no funny business with viruses), please accept genuine apologies if affects anyone commenting in good faith.

Enough disclaimer, let's look at the log :-)

And then, one afternoon I found myself face to face with the Cupcake Statue of Liberty.



How beautiful she is. All that is American virtue shines serenely from her regal countenance. Welcome, sanctuary and freedom from opression. The downtrodden and persecuted, blessed by her runny sugar eyes as they start new lives in the land of the free. Her mad, foamy mouth whispering promises of opportunity and shigella.

Sing with me. Everyone.

O say, can you seeeeeeeee, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro'the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watch'd, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro' the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of brave.
On the shore dimly seen thro' the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes, (tenor: CUPCAKES!)
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? (tenor: CUPCAKES!)
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream: (tenor: YUMMY SNACKS!)
'Tis the star-spangled banner: O, long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Link: Sugar Dude Liberation Front
Ruby Mae kicks teh bottom.

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

One can imagine the internet as a great muddy sea that we surf with our keyboards, skimming it in erratic arcs and bursts, leaving yellow foamy wakes that spread out in a big V behind us, disturbing the lumps and bits. Floating rubbish and plastic bottecaps bob over the wake and it tips up an ancient condom wrapper suspended just below the surface, bouyed by tiny bubbles on it's foil underside, the logo still barely visible.

As I was surfing today a small white object caught my eye. I cut the power and slid the keyboard to a halt, the wake taking me over as I did and pushing the board the last meter to the white square. It was a page of scripture, sodden and stained, but holding together. It's from the Book of Joe, and made me smile:

With every circuit in its battered robot sphincter screaming in complaint, Spambot No. 1723 squeezes another impossibly sized load into the blogosphere.

Ah, comment spam, how do I love thee. Let me count the ways... I actually haven't had too much comment spam of late, the captchas and blocklist seem to have kept it out, but maybe I should. This blog should have more comment spam. Why? Because I want to mess with the spambots. I've been reading about the state of the spambot arms race and there's a fair bit of inventiveness on both sides. For one thing, they're getting smarter. Well equipped comment-spambots can now read captchas, operate off botnets parse javascript, convincingly emulate humans and sidestep a whole raft of systems designed to stop them. They're no longer simple little script-kiddie things that make HTTP posts to predictable pages.

If I were to set about making a spambot today, I would not be looking at a script (like most comment-spambots of the last several years), it would be a browser add-on. To convincingly emulate a human the bot should use the same tools and surf similarly to a human. It must produce unique, relevant text in its comments and field a set of working email addresses to reply to verification forms. It should use bugmenot or similar to bypass registration where required. It should use a large number of proxy servers or zombie machines and never the home IP, working gradually and returning often, keeping track of it's progress and regularly checking up on comments posted. It should post *one* comment per site, not thousands, and do so very discreetly. Where possible it should analyse comment and posting trends on a site (time of day, comment length, grammar, etc) to blend in. It would be formidable, and fortunately I have no interest in making it.

Mark my words, bots as I have described already exist and will become common, perhaps in the next two years. And they'll just keep getting smarter. AI will eventually be employed to this end. There's a lot of money in spam and with the blogosphere continuing to double every six months the potential markets become enormous. So long as dumb people continue to buy dumb stuff off the internet (honestly, who are these retards buying all those penis pills, I dont know *anyone* that stupid), this form of spam will increase.

So, as a webmaster, what do you do about bots like that? The thing that struck me most when reading about the development of systems like SpamKarma is their focus on blocking either the bots or the comments, using Baysian filters, P2P systems, etc. The focus is very much a 'close the door on them' approach. It won't work. They'll come through the windows, or dress up as your creepy Aunt Gladys. Baysian filters can be poisoned, and P2P systems can be joined and co-opted (like Kazaa - served!).

My approach is different. Next time a telemarketer calls dont just hang up the phone, try this:

• talk at length about your problems, and how depressing the world is


• say 'No honey, get away from there.. sorry, my 3 year old is playing by the pool/at the top of the stairs/with my gun, be right back...' and see how long they'll hold.


• try to gently initiate phone sex (bonus: with a member of the same sex)


• ask questions. What does this person think about Sex and the City? Low rise jeans? It's really easy to do. They'll start asking questions about you, just respond with something like 'Yes, I could use some home insurance. Seems like a sensible, almost cosmopolitan thing to do. I bet Carrie has home insurance, do you think Sex and The City promotes things like that? What do you think about Carrie? Really, I've always liked Miranda better...'

• Redirect the bot to a blog you don't like with a HTTP 302 response, let some wingnut/racist/evangelical deal with it. Use the bot as a tool to some other end. The site you redirect to should run on the same blogging software as yours for best results.


• send a normal, correct HTTP header, XML document descriptor, and then an endless stream of invalid characters. If implemented as a shell script this will make the terminal it's running on beep endlessly at the user, as well as holding up the bot. It may continue to download indefinitely, halting it's run and if we're lucky crashing the program when it runs out of memory.
?

• three words: buffer overflow exploit :-) a computer virus, padded a certain way, can sometimes be run by overflowing the memory assigned to some data with JUMP instructions to the beginning of the virus code. As these instructions flow into code memory a process may hit one and launch the virus, possibly giving you control over the spammer's computer. Then the fun begins in earnest. Well written programs are usually immune to this, but I'll bet my hat that most spambots are not very well written.


• 302 (temporary redirect) to another port on the next page viewed by the bot, see if it follows. This is to mess with bots using unsecured HTTP proxies, many of which won't go to some random, high number port. If badly coded the bot may interpret this as non-functioning-proxy, causing it to remove that proxy from its list, making it think it has less resources than it does. Overall, a hindrance and also useful information on how a particular bot works.

What follows is the most lamentable comedie of Carlos (pictured in the poster below, top right) and his magic frog juice. From an early age Carlos was widely renowned in Barcelona as big dumb galoot. Truly, the boy was dumber than buttered toast, but possessed great physical strength of which he was very proud. By age ten his favorite game was to run up behind small, elderly people and scoop them into the air, shaking them around with joyful cries of ’’Look Mama! Look at Carlos!’’

This priceless photo is from the Idiotarod 2006, New York's annual running of the idiots which I hope to take part in someday. It's like the Iditarod raced with shopping carts instead of dog sleds and teams of homeless people volunteers for huskies. More details from precisionaccidents.com:

This is a Northern Gannet, Morus bassanus. Gannets are a species of boobie. Yay! Boobies!

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