Moving

Hello, today I'm making the move to my new blog official. Please update all your links to my new location: http://www.neodem.com/traceblog. See you there!

Work

I'm in the process of starting a new job. I may not be posting as much.. Also I'm moving to a new blog host and I've been setting up the new home with all my free time. It's not ready yet and I'll let you know when it is.. just be prepared...

the UK Plot - total BS?

Thought I was done for the day until I read this post. Hmn.. seems to now be some substance to my claim about the BWH maniplating the UK terror plot. Even though Rubin (who writes the Bling blog) isn't convinced, I am.

You know, I can care less that I said it was bullshit or that others knew it was before me, etc. What really makes me mad is that the MSM is NOT DOING ITS JOB and they are doing our country a disservice. Dick Cranium quoted in the piece from his blog said "the media really needs to step back and take a look at how they were once again played" and he's totally right.

This country is falling all apart around us and the media is by and large simply watching it happen.

Choosing where to get our Oil

I’m always amazed with the amount of choice we have as consumers in America. There are like 50 types of toothpaste, 10 different types of milk, dozens of types of cars, stereos, etc. This is a good thing, although it’s a bit excessive. One of the least obvious benefits of choice is that we can boycott companies and products by being careful about our purchases. I have a whole list of places I won’t shop and products I won’t buy.

This is a very good thing. This is where my conservative side shows up in spades. The free market is a wonderful tool for the consumer to influence the company (and also the price of products) and the economy and in some cases politics.

So, it should come as a surprise to all of you that there is no way for us to decide as consumers where our oil comes from. If you think about it, we get our gasoline from a number of different places. It comes from the Middle East, Russia, South America, Canada, Alaska, etc. But when we pull up the pump we have no way of telling who we are supporting other than the company selling the gas (and there are a few on our household list that we won’t go to).

But imagine for a moment that you could boycott all oil from the Middle East or perhaps Alaska. Would you pay 1 or 2 cents more per gallon to get your oil from Canada or South America? I would. Why is it that we can have 50 different types of toothpaste, but we can’t choose where our oil comes from?

Sit Ins

Now.. assuming you've listened to or read the Kucinich speech, you would have heard him call for more action from us, the people of this country:

It is time for truth, a time for clarity. A time for action. A time for teach-ins, for meet-ups, for marches, for rallies about the war to begin at college campuses, at churches at labor halls, at libraries. Time to gather in civic centers, in town halls, to discuss the truth about this war, and to plan civic action to end it.

It is time for the American people to exercise their First Amendment rights to stand up, to speak out. Time to redirect the policies of this country. Time to learn and practice peaceful, non-violent conflict resolution. Time to believe in our capacity to evolve beyond war. To believe, and act upon the belief that war is not inevitable, that peace is inevitable - - if we are ready to commit to the daily work of peace building everywhere.

You know what? He's right. Instead of just blogging about how mad we are, we need to start acting on it. We need to stage some sit-ins like they did in the 60's. I'm willing to get arrested doing one just so I can get some publicity out of it and have that publicity inspire others to do the same. We can actually grow this movement from one of complaining into one of action. We can end the American occupation of Iraq.

So, I'm going to put together some friends and come up with a plan for our own old fashioned sit in. Are any of you with me?

Dennis Kucinich

On Friday, while on my way up to the suburbs for the weekend I was listening as usual to Air America (I can only get it in the car so I listen to it all the time while I drive) and to my favorite host, Randi Rhodes. She spent an hour with Dennis Kucinich who I should admit I'd only knew little about up till now. For those of you who don't know who he is, he's a congressman from Ohio and he ran for president a few years back as an independent. I'll let you guess his political slant.

Anyway, she started off the segment with a recording from one of his speeches on the hill. You can hear it here and/or read the transcript, though I really recommend you listen to the speech in his voice. Wow! We need to have more people like this guy in congress. Though he's in the minority, he is fighting the establishment every step of the way.

I urge you to donate to his campaign so he can continue to fight for the few us in America that have brains.

House Cleaning Day

I saw this sticker on a car yesterday and I've just ordered a bunch for my friends and family.

Handicapped Parking

About 8-9 years ago in South Philly, everyone (and I really mean everyone) had a handicapped license plate on their car. In addition, the city was kind enough to put up some signs in front of the peoples houses that limited parking to those residents only. It was amazing. You would look down any street and see 6-7 of these parking spots. The state eventually cracked down on the handicapped plates. From what I can remember, the only thing you needed to get a plate and the signs was a doctors note stating you could not walk more than 100 yards without needing to take a break. Honest!

Ok.. so now today there are no longer license plates but you need these little placards that hang on your rear view mirror. It was my belief that to get these placards you actually needed to be handicapped.

I'm not sure that's true. I'm out in the suburbs today and in front of every store in every strip mall out here there are at least 4 and usually 6-8 spaces right out front for handicapped only. You can tell the spaces by those little blue signs with the white stencil of the wheelchair.

First of all, I have never seen a handicapped person drive a car and I've barely seen one of them as a passenger. There may be lots of handicapped people in the area, but I don't think they get out in their cars as much as we do. I'm not sure they need all the spaces that are allotted to them.

But anyway, I'm not mad about that. What I'm angry about is the massive abuse of these spots. See, I sit in the car while my girlfriend runs into stores. I've done it most of the day today and a bunch last night. I usually park near the front of the stores so I have a perfect view of the handicapped spaces.

In the 1-2 hours that I was watching the spaces I saw (yes I counted) 5 cars pull into and out of these spots. Do you know how many of the cars were driven by or occupied handicapped or disabled people? Zero. You knew that didn't you? I was amazed. One car had these two young girls in it. They could barely drive.. I thought as they pulled up "Ok, they are just ignorant idiots and they are either making a mistake or don't care or know about the $300 fine". They pulled into the space on an angle (taking up 1.5 spots) reached down to the floor and up came a placard. They hopped out of the car and jogged into the store.

I saw this 4 more times. These people weren't even fat, or old, or anything.. Can I ask you something? What the fuck man? And more importantly, where can I get one?

BillMon at the Whiskey Bar

BillMon, the sole writer at Whiskey Bar is awesome.. anyway, here is a post he wrote about the UK deal that I found pretty perfect.

My favorite part is in the Update at the end :

The risk is that the guys in the Clash of Civilization Bureau are creating more terrorism problems than the boys and girls in the Law Enforcement Department will be able to keep an eye on.

It makes the perfect point that to stop terroism, we need to fight it as a law enforcement probelm. Bombing people does nothing, NOTHING but make the probelem worse!!!

The UK Plot - more comments

So.. now it seems that people are going to cut back on their air travel.. not becasue of fear of terror, but for avoidance of severe inconvenience. I agree. If they ban carry on bags and laptops "Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Michigan, said the situation 'eliminates the days of carry-on baggage.'" I can see that people are going to cut back on casual flying.

So, I suppose that we can now call our government terrorists. Why? Well, their regulations and enforcement are going to be the main reason that people stop flying. Sure you can say that their policies are the result of the new threat level and sure you can say the threat level has been raised due to the UK plot and sure you can blame th UK plot on the people involved and sure you can say that the people involved did what they did for some reason, and on and on.. since you can basicly go back forever, it only makes sense to me to assign blame to the people one step back from the problem and that is the TSA and our government.

But anyway, I'm just trying to make a point here.. Not unlike when I wondered what a terrorist is exactly. I mean, the blame for this should be shared by all of us. Our country is a target for these people becasue of our policies and our meddling in the Middle East. The sooner we accept this, the sooner we can head to some solution. Calling these radicals 'terrorists' and grouping them all together as this great evil enemy is no way to create a lasting peace in the world. If we could only agree that these are simply other humans who have differing opinions than ours, we could perhaps see why they have resorted to the techniques they have.

Have you ever been in an argument that escilated to the point of becomming irrational? Can you see how this can be translated to groups of people? The solution is not to come to blows, the solution is to step back, take a time out for a while and then approach each other peacefully to work out a compromise. Like a good friend of mine suggested the other day, we should seriously think about a full pullout of the Middle East. No oil, no troops, nothing.. a full disengagement from that region for 10-20 years..

But that won't happen. The 'terrorists' will 'cripple' the airlines and we will end up bailing them out again. Yup. Think $10-20 Billion to the airlines (public companies mind you) to make up for lost sales.. Yea.. that fits in perfectly with the capitalist, free market model.. yup..

Yea, I'm sure

Foam in Wissahickon not harmful, drug company says

The UK Terror Plot

In regards to the UK terrorist plot I have the following opinion.

First off, let me say that if this thing was real and happened the way it appears to have happened (i.e. there were real people, really about to hop on planes and really ready to blow them out of the sky) I have 100% thanks and approval of the British authorities.

Now. It’s pretty sad that I’ve become so skeptical of our current government. I mean I can’t believe that the first thing that came into my mind was that this was a non-event that was trumped up to a) raise our terror alert level and b) scare the American voters who in 3 months are going to vote on congress. The first thing I thought was that this was not unlike the goofballs in Florida a few months ago that we arrested.

It’s also a sad fact that we as citizens can’t be sure of the threat level of a terrorist plot until it actually happens. Because of that (and I understand why that is) we have to trust our government when they tell us we just dodged a bullet.

But I find it strange that one of the first things out of Chertoffs mouth today was al Qaeda, even though he was saying that it is too soon to tell if it was them or not. I find it odd that the plot was going to be carried out on planes again. It seems to me that the terrorists have so many easier ways to attack us and achieve the results that they would have achieved with this attack. It seems odd that this happened so close to an election. And most of all, it seemed odd to me that the story even came out at all. I mean, how does it help us as citizens to even know about this plot? Why is this such a huge story? I know it’s sensational and I know its somewhat important, but until anything is proven, isn’t this all conjecture?

I can’t really get my mind around what is bothering me about all this today. And I know if I had more time I’d be able to articulate this all better, but I wanted to post something before the day was out so there you go. We’ll see if I’m inspired to write more at a later time…

Wayne Coyne gives a Graduation Speech

You know. I don't think I can think more of Wayne Coyne. You all should know him as the lead singer and mastermind behind the Flaming Lips. He's a wacky dude, but a total genious as well. If you haven't seen the great documentary about the Lips and Wayne "The Fearless Freaks" you should rent it post haste.

Anyway, Wayne apparently had been asked this year to give the graduation speech at his former high school in Oklahoma. He couldn't make the event but did make a 12 minute video to be played in his place. If you watch the video (in 2 parts from YouTube) I think you'll get a wonderful picture of what kind of guy he is.

Fake Photos in real news organizations

Well. First we have the Reuters scandal, and now there are allegations of a staged dead guy by renowned photojournalist Tyler Hicks in the New York Times.

I'm actually pretty amazed that this is first time that doctored photos are being found in the MSM. I mean, photoshop has been around forever now and we all know that for years we've had fake celebrity photos.. why it took so long for this to get mainstream is a mystery to me..

Who can we trust anymore? Do we need to source our daily newspapers now? We need a news organization that does TV, Print and Internet as objective as possible, one that is more than trustworthy..

UPDATE : here is a great site covering all the Reuters Photo infractions.. I am having trouble loading all the images, but I think it's the crazy Comcast caching not working as planned so your results may vary...

Joe Francis and Girls Gone Wild

I first saw this article posted on Bling and thought that it was up there just to point out what a moron Joe Francis is. After reading the article I had come to the conclusion that this is one evil fucking dude! Let's not even get into how sad it is that 17 and 18 year old girls get naked and exploited by him, lets talk more about how he is a serial rapist with obvious anger issues who thinks he's above the law. Lets also talk about how even the police let him get away with shit. Ugh.. read the article and see if you agree with me.. This guy needs to be removed from society.. Why do we worry about gay marriage when people like this person exist in the world?

Greg Brady was high

That's the story about this scene as reported at Tv Squad in this post. In the post the author says that it's very subtle, but man.. it's clear as day to me. Greg is almost giggling at the beginning and totally in space near the end.. all in all I find it quite entertaining.

What a Surprise! Comcast Issues again!!!!

I don’t know what the hell Comcast is doing but they have all but lost me as a customer. Let me tell you what I’m talking about. I have Comcast Internet at home. I chose them because they are cheap and when their service works, they are pretty fast as well. I also chose them because I didn’t want to be locked into a DSL contract (the same reason I won’t switch to DirecTV).

I work at home and I work in the software business so you can imagine that during working hours I need solid internet access. When Comcast decides to not work, that doesn’t happen and often it takes a week or more to get things settled down again.

I don’t know what their problem is actually. I don’t know why their service is so bad. I have some ideas though. My best guess is all this talk of “speed boost”. They have some kind of technology that allows downloads to be super fast. I don’t know if they do it with caching or with some hardware trick or some combination of both, but the end result is that nothing works reliably anymore.

When I browse, there is a significant delay as I go to new pages and then everything spits down in a rush. For some, I can see how this would appear to be fast, but for me it’s worse than it used to be. My upload speeds have decreased as well. Things just don’t seem to flow correctly. I’m loosing random packets all over the place.

But all that would be fine if the modem would stay connected.

This is my 4th modem. I went through number 2 and 3 about a month ago when I had (literally) 10 Comcast guys here over a 10 day stretch trying to get my connection back up. It turned out (as I had told them from day 1) to be a problem at the head end (ie. Their fault) and not in my home.

Whatever, the modem is having trouble connecting today. It has been bad the past week for me here with this connection. Today it’s been the worst ever. I’ve had a 75 minute outage, a 45 minute outage and a 20 minute outage (along with a bunch of 1-2 minute deals). Clearly something is wrong.

I called Comcast customer service (again) which is based I think in Canada to complain. The person there was able to establish that not only was my modem not connected (as I had told them) but all of the others on my block were having the same issue. Hmn.. sounds like a problem in the line no? I thought so, and so did she but you know what? There was nothing she could do about it. All she could do was schedule a service call for me… on Friday!! Apparently if 4 others on my block called in and complained and also scheduled service calls a “red flag” would go up and a line tech would be called in to diagnose the problem… which is who should be here right now.

But no, Comcast is going to force 5 people to stay home from work to meet with a Comcast home rep (me on Friday and the 4 others, probably next week) who is going to look at their setup and say “looks ok from here, this needs to be checked outside on the line” before a Line Tech will be summoned to fix the problem.
And we wonder why they are so backed up with service calls? Probably because of this stupid policy. Probably because they are so into adding extra features like “speed demon” (or whatever it’s called) to their service before they even get their current system all shored up.

And they still send me flyers in the mail trying to get me to switch to their VOIP service. Ha Ha Ha.. Yea. So when my net goes down I won’t be able to call them.. good idea Comcast..

There should be a law against News agencies Lying

I mean really. Apparently FOX news (which half of my parents swear by.. along with half the nation) is still reporting that the..well, see for yourself:

This really is remarkable, even by Fox News standards. Four days after the Israeli government admitted to, and apologized for, mistakenly bombing a civilian apartment building in the Lebanese town of Qana and killing 60 innocents in the process, American right-wingers continue to scramble, trying to create a parallel universe explanation where fungible facts show it wasn't Israel's fault at all. In fact, Israel's the victim of a massive Qana hoax. Naturally, Fox News' high-profile hosts and guests are leading the delusional charge.

From "Fox News Continues to Suggest Israel Did Not Bomb Qana".

This, to me, is blatant disinformation being sold as news.. how can we expect the citizens of this nation to stay informed while the MSM allows lies to be told to them in the form of news? Shouldn't someone be doing something about this?

The 9/11 Norad Tapes

Thanks to an amazing article in Vanity Fair you can not only learn the story of 9/11 from NORADS perspective, you can actually hear the tapes (broken up into tiny relevant segments) by clicking on simple 'play' buttons next to the text. This is how an online article should be done.

I read a lot of this stuff in the 9/11 report, but being able to actually hear the tapes is even better. Also, as I told you yesterday, the 9/11 report (thanks to the DOD) didn't have the full story about these tapes so this article is a breath of fresh air.

Check it out..it's worth it!

Personal Utility Meters

I believe that people benefit when they have good information at hand. I think they make better decisions. On the other hand, if they have little information, they can't be expected to make good decisions.

With that said, I'd like to talk about something that's been bothering me for a couple of years now. There are 3 utilities that virtually all of us use in our homes: gas, electric and water. For all 3 of these resources we pay our utility company on a monthly basis for the amount we use. On our bill is the usage and that usage is measured via a meter that is usually hidden in our basement or outside of our house somewhere.

We all agree that using less of these resources is a good thing. It's good for the environment and more importantly, it's good for our wallets. I would argue that having monthly reports on past usage of these resources is an almost useless practice. For one, we have no way to be sure that these reports are correct. We simply trust that the meter is correct and to verify it matches the bill, we'd need to manually look at the meter and keep a tab. Secondly these reports reflect old data, we can't predict with much accuracy how our usage will be in the future from this data (particularly for electric and gas since they fluctuate depending on the temperature). Lastly, the reporting is in aggregate and so we have no idea how much impact certain things have on the usage.

Let me give you an example that is probably all too common right about now. Lets take a moment and look at air conditioner usage. We have central air and we've got a timer that runs the air conditioner depending on the time and interior temperature. We have no real way of computing the cost/benefit of our temperature/time decisions since we have no idea how much it costs to run. We know from our bills that it costs a lot to run the air conditioner, but we don't know how much. We also don't know how much more it costs when it's hotter outside. Same goes for any electric appliance in your home. Do you know how much it costs to run your dishwasher?

Without this knowledge, how can we be better consumers? We really have no way to measure our impact. If you knew that running your dishwasher cost you $5 would you run it without a full load every day? Or would you wait until it was full? If it cost you an extra $100 a year to run your bathroom faucet continually when you brushed your teeth would you do that? Maybe you would or maybe you wouldn’t. The point is that with god information you could make better decisions. And in today’s world, there is no excuse for us not to have this information.

So. I propose that the solution is simple. Some company creates a line of meters (for gas, electric and water) that goes between the utility meter and our homes. These meters do the same thing as the utility meters but they have the ability to report the data in a number of ways.

For instance, in my home I am pretty wired up so I would like to see these devices connect into my home network and from there I’d like to see some software that would gather this data so I can flip on my pc when I get home and see real-time usage amounts and track historical data. Maybe the software could also connect to a temperature sensor inside and outside of my house so I can see how the temperature influences usage. I can also know in advance what my bills are going to be.

These meters should be available today and should be part of every new home that gets built. I can’t see them being too expensive and all I can see is the beneficial uses over them. If we had this information, we could all do our part in curbing our usage. How bad would that be?

2pm is the magic time

Yesterday I ranted on Comcast and how bad their service was. It all started at 2pm yesterday.. sure enough, today at 1:58, boom.. first short outage.. now, 2:01 next one.. seems someone there at the home office is doing something doesn't it? I hope today isn't as bad as yesterday...

Bill Maher on Mel Gibson

I'm not usually a Bill Maher fan, but I will say that his short piece on Mel was pretty perfect..

The 9/11 Report

I've been reading the 9/11 report for about a month now.. It's been fairly interesting. They unearthed a ton of details and overall my main observation (I'm about 3/4 through it) is that no matter who is in power D or R, there still is an unimaginable amount of bureaucratic crap to wade through to get anything done at all. At every level and at every branch of govenrnment there is a mentality of "here's the best thing we can do and not really be held accountable for"... Of all that I've read so far, that's been my main observation.

So, it comes as no surprise that Will from Attytood alerted me to the following story in the Washington Post that talks about how the commissioners of the 9/11 panel were and still are skeptical of the story that NORAD, and the Pentagon gave them during their investigation...

"We to this day don't know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us," said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. "It was just so far from the truth. . . . It's one of those loose ends that never got tied."

from : 9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon

Studio 60 bootlegged

This isnt' going to last long at all. The show I most want to see in September is on You Tube.. It's the pilot and I don't know how it got there but it's there in 5 parts.. check it out if you can...

-- oh.. by the way.. I've seen the first 5 minutes.. and it's good!

-- ok.. now I've seen 10 and it's really good!!

-- 15 minutes in.. I can't stop watching..

-- there were some funny moments up to this point.. but the first Laugh Out Loud one was at about 7:45 into part 4.. This show is going to be a hit...

-- ok.. final update.. seen the whole show and there is a slight dislike for Chandler, but I think that will pass.. I love Josh/Bradley and their chemistry together is quite good.. the show is well written.. very well written and the subject is totally interseting.. I love the show and I can't wait until it airs..

by the way.. thanks NBC for leaking it!

It's even easier than we thought to hack a Diebold machine

According to a press release from the Open Voting Foundation the Diebold TS voting system is insanely easy to hack. Becasue they have the press release on their top page, I'm not sure that it will be a valid link too far into the future so I'm going to repost it here (at the bottom).

For a nice video review of this technique you can see Marty Kaplans vlog on the Huffington Post.

-----

Subject: WORST EVER SECURITY FLAW FOUND IN DIEBOLD TS VOTING MACHINE
Contact: Alan Dechert
Reference: PICTURES
(Click on thumbnail. Click again on lower half of picture for high resolution)

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA -- “This may be the worst security flaw we have seen in touch screen voting machines,” says Open Voting Foundation president, Alan Dechert. Upon examining the inner workings of one of the most popular paperless touch screen voting machines used in public elections in the United States, it has been determined that with the flip of a single switch inside, the machine can behave in a completely different manner compared to the tested and certified version.

“Diebold has made the testing and certification process practically irrelevant,” according to Dechert. “If you have access to these machines and you want to rig an election, anything is possible with the Diebold TS -- and it could be done without leaving a trace. All you need is a screwdriver.” This model does not produce a voter verified paper trail so there is no way to check if the voter’s choices are accurately reflected in the tabulation.

Open Voting Foundation is releasing 22 high-resolution close up pictures of the system. This picture, in particular, shows a “BOOT AREA CONFIGURATION” chart painted on the system board.

The most serious issue is the ability to choose between "EPROM" and "FLASH" boot configurations. Both of these memory sources are present. All of the switches in question (JP2, JP3, JP8, SW2 and SW4) are physically present on the board. It is clear that this system can ship with live boot profiles in two locations, and switching back and forth could change literally everything regarding how the machine works and counts votes. This could be done before or after the so-called "Logic And Accuracy Tests".

A third possible profile could be field-added in minutes and selected in the "external flash" memory location, the interface for which is present on the motherboard.

This is not a minor variation from the previously documented attack point on the newer Diebold TSx. To its credit, the TSx can only contain one boot profile at a time. Diebold has ensured that it is extremely difficult to confirm what code is in a TSx (or TS) at any one time but it is at least theoretically possible to do so. But in the TS, a completely legal and certified set of files can be instantly overridden and illegal uncertified code be made dominant in the system, and then this situation can be reversed leaving the legal code dominant again in a matter of minutes.

“These findings underscore the need for open testing and certification. There is no way such a security vulnerability should be allowed. These systems should be recalled”

OPEN VOTING FOUNDATION is a nonprofit non stock California corporation dedicated to demonstrating the need for and benefits of voting technology that can be publicly scrutinized.

So Police Insanity isn't just a US thing...

Apparently crazy pig police are in the UK as well..

Children arrested, DNA tested, interrogated and locked up... for playing in a tree

Those evil children! When will they learn??

The NSA Wiretapping case progresses

This case is getting really interesting now. As you know the NSA was exposed doing secret wiretapping of US citizens a while back. The federal case that it has started is starting to get mighty deep indeed with all kinds of implications. It's all outlined quite well here in an ars story. Essentially the judge in the case (good for him) has denied the DoJs invocation of state secrets and forced them to reveal their documents to a proxy (I wonder what secrets they have.. that they have been spying on non-Muslims perhaps?) They are of course appealing the judges ruling.

As Peter Pollack, the author of the ARS article says quite eloquently :

It's hard to refrain from pointing out that the precarious course the DoJ now finds itself following could probably have been avoided if the NSA had only utilized traditional court oversight in its monitoring program. While many citizens probably agree that there are times when the government needs to conduct investigations into suspicious activity, it is the blanket avoidance of such oversight which raised privacy concerns in so many quarters and prompted the AT&T suit in the first place.

The Free Speech Distributed Blog Network

It's been a while since I've posted one of my brilliant ideas. So my lucky friends, I share with you my newest one. I think that we (the concerned net geeks that we are) develop an opensource tool that will create a global decentralized blogging network. Think something like the Gnutella p2p network or Bittorrent but instead of allowing the easy trading of media, we support text. Text that is broken up into individual letters, sentences or words... broken up in a way that it wouldn't be illegal to have the content on your pc in it's broken up form.

Why would this be useful? First off, take a look on the bottom left of my blog. Under the ad for Pat Murphy you will see an ad for irrepressible.info. This organization is set up as a protest to the suppression of free speech:

Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information.

The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world are cracking down on freedom of expression.

Amnesty International, with the support of The Observer UK newspaper, is launching a campaign to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress.

And it's more than other countries. It's not inconceivable that in the future our own government will take down blogs or sites they find offensive or illegal.

I don't want my blog to ever be lost. And I don't want anyone else's. If we had a way to host the blogs via a distributed method, that would never happen. The words will always have a home. By setting up this new system, people in other nations can not only read worldwide blogs freely, but they can also write freely as well. Think about how wonderful that would be.

This idea is not only technically feasible, but it is also not very difficult. We should get to work right away!

Comcast Sucks

My internet connection (provided by Comcast) is down again. I had serious problems a month of so ago and now, starting at 2:09PM I've got intermittant connection issues with frequent 100% packet loss.

Of course I've spoken to the comcast rep and of course I've had to do the usual routine with them ("How many lights are on the modem?", "have you cleared your cookies?", etc. etc.).. No matter what amount of detail I provide to them (like the actual times for the outages, or the signal levels at the modem, etc.) they still insist that it's probably an issue at my end and they need to send a helpful fix-it guy to me ("earliest appointment is Friday at 5pm.. is that ok?")...

Fuckers.

The sad thing is that I know it's either a line issue or something at the head end and if others in my loop were using (or attempting to use) thier net connection right now and had been monitoring it like I do, they could corroborate my complaint and we can get a line tech out here pronto.. you know that to get a line tech to even become aware of an issue a house tech has to come and visit your home first..

Fuckers.

So, whatever.. I'm writing this out now so it will be on the public record. If you've got Comcast internet and live in South Philly, and you had major (there were 25 minor outages between 2 and 4pm so far) outages at 2:09PM, 2:45PM, 3:06PM, 3:39PM then you weren't alone..

--UPDATE
Since I finished writing this post I've been unable to post it because now the net is practically completely gone.. serious outages happening every few minutes..

Fuckers.

I've attached this graphic to show you what I'm talking about. I use a great tool called PingPlotter to ping a location every 10 seconds (I use google) and the tool plots the ping times. Times with full 100% packet loss are shown as red lines. (click on it to see it in full size)

Mel.. what happened to you my boy? The Cult of religion really messed you up!

Poor Mel.. He used to be such a nice guy. He has talent and he used it so well when he made Braveheart. And then he went loony.. Religion got him.. Just like all the other cults, his religion took over his brain and devoured all semblance of sanity.

So of course it was totally expected that at some point he would crack and his religiously fueled bigotry would become exposed. Thanks to Brendon I was led to this wonderful piece in the New York Daily News that outlines just how far off the deep end poor mel has gone:

"Fucking Jews. The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world," Mee's report quotes him as saying.

"Are you a Jew?" Gibson asked the deputy, according to the report.