This again…
Not my graphic. That’s the Cat Signal from the Internet Defense League. The beacon is lit because that pack of puffed up mediocrities on Capitol Hill are once again taking up The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a steaming pile of legislation that would essentially open up your emails and other data to anyone who could come up with a plausible reason for wanting them. It got knocked down last year, but — like so many dreadful ideas — refuses to die.
The EFF has a good explanation of what it does here. Contact information is here.
I have every faith that the pack of howler monkeys that is the internet will make this bad bill die again. But our lords and masters are so dim, they need to learn this lesson good and hard every time they try.
While we’re a-geeking, I blinked and missed what happened with this one. This morning, Drudge was all over the hacker that supposedly got his mitts on some of Sid Blumenthal’s emails to Hillary about Benghazi. Infuriatingly, the linked was totally about the hack, with nothing at all about the content of the emails.
Now those leaks are gone, and all I get is this Forbes article that says the only people publishing the content are Russian sources that (it strongly implies) aren’t to be trusted. FT said it’s trying to validate the authenticity before it publishes anything, and I haven’t heard a peep out of any other news outlets that were given the material. Hmmmm.
Oh, and if you’re into this story at all, you’ll surely know this already — but the individual who leaked the emails that came to be known as Climategate I and Climategate II has released the password for the whole 220,000 rest of the purloined emails, detonating Climategate III.
None of the new emails I’ve seen are all that interesting, but the cover letter was fascinating. The leaker is apparently an individual and an insider who did this because climate hysteria is racking up a body count. I wanted to stand up and cheer.
I know people in my little community who have gone without heat because they couldn’t afford oil. If that’s happening in my prosperous corner of the world, what is expensive energy doing to the miserable places?
March 19, 2013 — 11:55 pm
Comments: 30
Enjoy the Streisand Effect, boys!
ZOMG, have you seen The Innocence of Muslims? Oh My God, OHMIGOD, omigod! It is the dumbest thing ever.
The trailer, anyway. As far as anyone knows, that’s all that’s out there. The longest clip I could find is 13:51 and it is pure triple-A tincture of stupid. (The link is a generic YouTube search of “Innocence of Muslims” – I wouldn’t worry too much about the clip coming down. There are dozens of copies, including the one I saved locally).
It’s a dozen or so American community theater refugees hamming it up in front of a green screen, mostly against a backdrop of desert dunes. So nobody casts a shadow and the sand doesn’t move when they walk on it. Oh, it’s rich.
And, boy, were those poor bastards set up — they were acting a perfectly innocent generic sand epic. The inflammatory parts were dubbed in later, in different voices, with different mics, in a different room. The lips don’t synch at all.
“Is Mohammed gay?” “Of course!”
You can clearly see the original line was Gamera is a friend to all children.
Seriously, you’d have to be a platinum ‘tard to be the slightest provoked by this silly pile of fluff.
Which is, of course, entirely not what happened. I mean, look at those scruffy young men shouting in the streets. They obviously don’t have YouTube accounts. If they had access to funny cat videos, would they be that cross?
September 14, 2012 — 10:41 pm
Comments: 27
Most unsatisfactory
Hello. Remember this guy? This is a mug shot of Shepard Fairey, the HOPE poster dude. And the Feds want him to do time in federal pound me in the ass prison.
The Associated Press took him to court for tracing the Obama picture used in the poster, which belonged to AP. You’ll find the court docs at the link. I gather (though I am no law-talking weasel), the main points are:
- He claimed he used the photo as reference, but it’s pretty obvious it’s a straight up trace (see overlay)
- He claimed he made around $150,000 off the image, but his companies seem to have pulled off a profit of around $12 million over three years, which surely wouldn’t have happened without the iconic poster
- Based on the above, he offered AP a settlement of a weak $100K, when they probably would have gone away for a substantially bigger sum
- He already has convictions for (reading between the lines, what I assume to be) public graffiti (that was his main gig before the poster: “street artist”
But the Feds are opting to ignore all that. They want him to do time for deleting some emails and fabricating others trying to game the case.
Sure. Okay. Fair enough. Coverup worse than the crime and all that, but leaving the whole rest of it unaddressed is really unsatisfactory. Because I (and millions like me) do what he did, every day — snag news photos, P’shop all over them and post them on the web. It’s a whole cottage industry. And we would really like some guidelines here.
How strong was the AP’s claim? Would any amount of artsy transformation weaken that claim? Did the fact Fairey made a shitload of money make a legal difference? They brought all these questions up, and then left them dangling.
Years ago, when I made art for a big corporation with deep pockets, I wouldn’t go NEAR anyone else’s copyrighted content. Not even for the most ephemeral images. The very idea gave me the shivers. And for the longest time, I wouldn’t do it as a blogger, either. And then I realized everyone — EVERYONE — was having a blast P’shopping photos and nobody was going to federal pound me in the ass prison and I was totally left out of the fun. So I gave in.
But there’s still that worried corner of my mind that knows everybody else does it is a lousy legal defense.
Okay. Back here. Tomorrow. Six sharp, WBT. Round Bzillion of the Dead Pool!
September 6, 2012 — 11:05 pm
Comments: 16
Juxtaposition
So I was searching Google images for an old comic strip and I turned up the image on the left. Hilarity ensued when Google Ads decided to pair it with the broad on the right.
Well, I LOL’ed.
BTW, the thing on the left is a publicity shot for The Romance of Helen Trent, the longest-running radio soap opera evah. It ran for 7,222 episodes from 1933 to 1960, during which time widow Helen Trent never remarried nor aged a day over 35.
You can listen to many of them online.
Oh, and the aged tart on the right looks even skankier in the original color ad.
May 16, 2012 — 9:39 pm
Comments: 27
Fat lip
They’ve only released about one-thousandth of the purloined documents, so I’ll have many opportunities to eat these words, but so far, the most surprising thing about the Wikileaks cable dump is — no surprises. Nothing released so far that I haven’t heard before, at least as a rumor.
And that’s stunning. Because I’m an extreme right wing nutcase who gets all her news from my fellow wingnuts on the internet. Shouldn’t a huge dose of raw diplomatic data have dashed at least a few of my cherished assumptions by now?
The wildest revelations — things like Iran buying long-range missiles off of North Korea, Arab leaders hotter to stop Iran’s nuke program than Israel is, the Red Crescent moving weapons with ambulances — have been chatter around the dextrosphere for ages.
Would Wikileaks lead with its most boring material? Would the lefty journalists helping them sort through it cherrypick facts that support the winger worldview? I guess we’ll find out.
Anyhow, the most shocking thing — by far — that I’ve learned is that three million people had access to these diplomatic cables, including some very junior staffers. Our utter boneheaded incompetence will be the most serious revelation to the world.
p.s. Despite the picture — I’m lazy. I recycle illustrations. Sue me — I wonder how upset Obama is about this, really. None of his own words have leaked. The whole thing reflects more on Hillary. He won’t like the building loseriness of his presidency, but I don’t see him as the kind of guy who takes other people’s mistakes upon himself.
p.p.s. Do we know how far back the cables go? He could get some bonus Blame Bush out of it. He can’t get enough of that shit.
November 29, 2010 — 10:34 pm
Comments: 28
Welcome to the internet! First visit?
Someone wrote and asked me for a unicorn-shitting-skittles graphic (yeah, pretty sure opportunities like that are why my folks sent me to art school). I didn’t have time to build one from scratch but, as it happens, I have a unicorn-farting-rainbows graphic in the works for a t-shirt, so I just threw in some Skittles. (If you yearn to know how that looks in color, yearn no more).
First, though, I had to do a Google Images search for Skittles, since I wasn’t entirely sure what the hell they look like, other than real small specks of color raining down on the upturned faces of stoned children on TV (are there really no blue Skittles? What, were they afraid people would use them to mend spinal cord injuries?).
Anyhow, that image search is how I found this heartwarming story of life with the new media: about a year ago, Skittles decided it wanted itself a piece of that viral marketing, social networking thing all the cool kids were talking about. So they launched a web page that would essentially be a live Twitter feed. Every time somebody mentioned #skittles, the page updated.
Yes. They really did that.
With a straight face.
Never heard the scary there’s an escaped lunatic undead shark in the basement AND IT’S COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE music playing in the background.
Soooo…how long do you think it was before somebody tweeted “On the skittles thing? Bollocks arse fuck soapy titwank cunt wankstain piss frenulum shit twat motherfucker toss Rick Astley…”
And from the sound of that inspirational outpouring of cusswords, it was tweeted by a Brit. I’m so proud.
June 2, 2010 — 10:43 pm
Comments: 28
Let’s take a walk
Holy cow! Have you checked out Google Maps lately? They’ve got practically everywhere on street view now.
I was checking out the land around Badger House on the satellite view, accidentally hit some button or other, and — yep, there we were. Up close and street level. Way out here in East Sheeptesticle, England. (Fortunately, we’re set back from the road, so you can barely make out the house).
After that, Uncle B and I took turns showing each other all the places we’d lived and worked and hung out.
I know Google is Teh Evil and they’re doing some very dodgy data mining on these trips — but, goldurnit, street view is just so impossibly cool! It’s one thing to see a map of the first house you remember, it’s quite another to walk down the street where you lived when you were six. From the shores of the English Channel.
Our old neighborhood in Southeast London has changed hugely in the couple of years since we were there. Whereas my hometown, Alexandria, Tennessee, has changed hardly at all since 1970 — except it’s paved now. (Outside town, there’s a giant orange billboard with “home of the finest folks on earth” on it. And “Population 630”).
Check out a few of my favorite places (after you hit the link, give it a second and it’ll switch automagically from map to street view):
Have a gander at Battle Abbey. Take a stroll down Rye High Street or around lovely Winchelsea (two places very much on our short list when we were looking at houses). Scope out the Long Man of Wilmington and Stonehenge — the pictures prove just how close the henge is to the road. And Arundel Castle (I tried and failed to find the spot where we saw all the little shops in blue shadow below, with the castle looming over it, shining and golden. But have a look around the town; perhaps you’ll find it). How about Trafalgar Square? I took one of my favorite shots of Uncle B there years ago. It looks like the fountain is pouring out his left ear.
Too fun! Excuse me; I’m off to Rome. Or maybe Hollywood. Or Wasilla. Or Amsterdam.
Ah, I love the internet. It grants me all the awesome godlike powers I have always known were destined to be mine.
April 29, 2010 — 10:16 pm
Comments: 21
Hey! Hey, readers! Hey, readers! Hey!
Okay, so am I, like, the last person to discover the internet meme again? Been laughing myself silly over the Really Annoying Orange this morning.
If you’re even more behind than I am (what’re the odds?) the orange’s personal YouTube channel is here.
Or, if you’re a thoroughly lazy sack of shit (again, odds?), here are direct links to episode 1, episode 2, episode 3, episode 4, episode 5 and episode 6.
Knife!
February 4, 2010 — 11:08 am
Comments: 26
Okay, can somebody esplain Twitter to a weasel?
I signed up for Twitter ages ago — before I left the States, I think — and occasionally, I get notification that someone is following me. But beyond that, I haven’t touched it. I haven’t really got the rhythm of the thing.
I signed up for FaceBook at the same time, under my people name, and I kind of get the rhythm of that. I change my status every few days and once or twice a day, I check in to see what my buds from Rho d’Island are up to. Though, even then, way too much of the traffic is some paste-eating mouth-breather from High School telling me what’s for supper.
Oh. Yeah. I’m also a level 125 Fearless El Jefe Experto in Mafia Wars. Yes, that kindofa loser.
So, tell me how you use Twitter. Do you mostly follow people, or topics? How do you know when something interesting is going on? Do you talk back and forth? Does it become like a conversation? How much of it is paste-eating mouther-breather dinner menus? Is it just something to fill the time when Hot Air hasn’t updated for an hour, or have you found it genuinely useful?
Inquiring weasels want to know.
September 29, 2009 — 5:21 pm
Comments: 43
I has a virus :_(
No, no…not the pig flu kind. I was browsing Google Images earlier, and I apparently clicked on sumpin’ I shouldn’t’ve. Next thing I know, my screen explodes in a cascade of adorable Japanamations and ladies with ginormous breasteses.
It’s a bad mamajama, this one. It made SuperAntiSpyware run home bawling to its mama. It stole Trend Micro’s lunchmoney. Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware wouldn’t even come out of its own setup icon when I double clicked it.
Using a combination of Safe Mode and Autoruns by Sysinternals, I’ve managed to wipe two of the bastards (b.exe and msa.exe), but there’s something bad still in there. Every five minutes or so, some damn thing disables Task Manager and Regedit. Every ten, an Explorer window pops up and reaches for the internet. There’s nothing obviously virusy in the process list, so it’s something masquerading as a legit component.
Oh, well. Screw it. It’s Friday night and I have this here Linux rig. It runs hotter’n a firecracker, but it’s clean as a whistle. I have Firefox and Freecell; I am golden.
Have a better weekend than mine, everyone. Let’s hope I get it sorted by Monday…
August 7, 2009 — 7:04 pm
Comments: 37