Maybe I Understand What is Going on With Boingo and their "hate site" Designation

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In the process of sending my little letter to Boingo to try and unblock this blog, I may have (almost accidentally) come across what they are thinking here.  In the process of contacting customer service, the phone system asked if I was calling about service at a government facility.  Perhaps it is their policy not to provide access to websites that discuss politics, particularly websites that are very negative about the political situation, which I certainly am.  I would not say that is a hate site, however.  So we will see.  Maybe they can just call me a "political site" and perhaps convince me that they do this to everyone who is political, and then it might be understandable and maybe even reasonable.  However, if they do this to me and not to, for example, the Wall Street Journal, that would not be reasonable.

Or maybe what is going on is that they can't handle the truth and dont want to be accused of allowing free speech to happen if it does not reinforce the illusion that we live in a functional democracy with a justice system and equal opportunity for everyone.  Maybe their clients require them to censor reality.  Its perfectly possible and completely understandable.  Maybe the "hate" is all on their side, they hate certain blogs because they say things that they dont want to hear.

Guess Which Picture Violates Facebook Community Standards

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Guess which of the pictures below violates Facebook Community Values and will get you blocked.

Have you guessed yet?  Examine each one carefully!  Which one is the most salacious, which one is the least?   Your average 12 year old boy would have no trouble answering this question.

The answer is image number 2 from Lifeforce (1985).   This is the image that got me blocked from Facebook for 24 hours.  The other two caused no problems with their totally automated, perfectly insane, AI guardian of public morality.

Pretty wacky, huh?

When you consider that Facebook also owns Tumblr, the very home of twisted pornography on the Internet, the mind achieves a unique state of Zen like incomprehension.

[My friend Jerry Weil informs me that there was a huge brouhaha about "nipples" on Facebook and so he knew immediately which picture was the offending one.  Well, me bad, I had missed this important social dialectic entirely but it reinforces my opinion: Facebook is not very sophisticated here, they are in fact, holding back my real feelings, near moron-like stupid.]


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Notes:

1. For those of you who are coming into this late, my objection is not to Facebook's removing images, my objection is to how they handle it, the lack of human communication, and the extreme punishment system which is probably malfunctioning.  You are welcome to read the forums if you want to see what other people think of this Facebook system.  Be prepared to read many swear words.

2. The other two pictures are (1) the famous Vampirella of comic book fame and (3) a still from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2.

The Need for Reciprocity When Insulting Someone With Social Media

One of the great aspects of Social Media is the ability to offend people at a deeper level and with more oomph than mere email or online forums. In the past, using receding media technology, such as writing on paper or the printed word, one needed a little time for the insult to become clear. But now with the bold new technology of Social Media and the power of the Internet we can mortally offend someone with the click of a mouse.

And we do, we do insult people, we insult people all the time with Facebook.

But since this is a totally new approach, some mechanisms may need refinement until it settles down into a truly democratic method of punching someone in the ego.

Such refinement is probably necessary in the case of the Facebook method of blocking and unblocking. As it stands now, one can block someone without their knowledge, but also unblock them without their knowledge as well. Blocking keeps either party from seeing anything about each other, even to know that the other person exists on Facebook. So far so good.

But there are issues.  The first problem is that the blocked individual has to find out on their own nickle that they have been blocked, which is always a demeaning thing to have to do. One wonders what happened to the other person, one searches, one does not find, then one discovers that one has been blocked. I have noticed that by the time this happens that the feeling is usually, but not always, mutual. In my case, the two times I have been blocked it is because I tried to build bridges to someone who I have damaged relationships with. In both cases their blocking me is a rebuff.

But you see, having been rebuffed in my effort to open communications, that is pretty much the end of the matter from my point of view. But Facebook does not give me the ability to implement that. The other party can unblock me and see what I am doing whenever they want, and I don't want that. I want any unblocking to be mutual, they have to ask, and I have to agree.

Because, frankly, I really don't want to see or hear from them again.

Google Mail Uses Esoteric Knowledge to Create Your Avatar

Things move ever swiftly on the Internet, that bold new paradigm, in order to maintain valuation and return maximum value to the shareholders. In the never ending efforts to achieve these worthwhile goals and with all the advanced and esoteric technology being used, it is reasonable to expect that mere users may be confused by what they see and foolishly and incorrectly believe that they are witnessing bugs and mistakes. It is incumbent on all of us to keep up and be aware of these misperceptions and help the future-challenged user to understand that the system is without flaw. 

For example, in the process of receiving and processing email with Google Mail, I was unaware that it helpfully creates a visual avatar of all the people who send me mail and does so flawlessly and automatically without needing to review its results with the mere sender of the email. It is not permitted for the user to be aware of the clever, neural network based, deeper learning informed, higher-level consciousness algorithms that Gmail uses to implement this miraculous new feature because we are uninitiated in the Mysteries.  Still some of us have speculated that Gmail might look out on social media, or perhaps remember attachments that the sender has used in the past.

I suspect it does nothing so simple. I think it is probable that Google is using the esoteric knowledge associated with the ancient Hermetian Mysteries themselves. Many have tried to use these Mysteries for practical purposes in the modern world, but I believe that only Google has had the resources and intellect to actually accomplish this difficult task.

Are Consecrated Masters using Esoteric Knowledge to create your Gmail avatar?

Alas, my sister in law did not realize the perfection of these esoteric algorithms and so when I made a comment about the nice picture of the dog that Google had used for her avatar, she tried to rip my head off.

I think it is important to remind the users that they are indeed "mere users" and that they should not attempt to understand the ways of the Illuminated Masters.  They should accept that their life is an open book, not just to the FBI but to the world at large and anything they use or say on the Internet may be repurposed for their own good.  Google Mail may choose all or none of these ephemera to represent you to your friends, to your family, to your clients, in fact, to anyone. You have no control over it, nor should you.

You should have faith that the Illuminated Masters working in secret shrines will use these Mysteries to create your new image and that the result will be as perfect as the spheres with which the celestial bodies orbit our planet.

Where did this come from?  No one knows but my sister-in-law was not amused.

Foolish mortal! Give up that illusion of control, abandon yourself to your fate and accept that the Adepts of the Mysteries have your best interests at heart.  

The Journalism of Runaway Blimps

Is it too much to ask journalists to spend five minutes trying to understand what they are writing about, or is it just hopeless.  In particular I am tired of journalists fucking up when it comes to writing about defense or intelligence matters as these areas are so expensive and important that we should stop being ignorant about them.

Misinformation is a problem.

For example, lets review the case of the runaway blimp in Pennsylvania. Its a medium sized blimp, that is or was normally tethered to the ground.  It apparently broke away from its mooring because of the weather although that is not entirely clear.   Like all modern lighter-than-air craft, it is filled with helium.

See, for example, the Guardian's discussion of the rogue blimp.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/28/us-army-blimp-breaks-free

Its a big helium balloon.  It is not clear whether it caused the power failures in PA.   Maybe it did, and maybe it didnt.  But the balloon did not cost 2.8 billion.  The moron journalist could read about the JLENS project here had he wanted to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JLENS

Its not a space shuttle. It is part of a program that over the last 10 years or so probably did cost that much money because it is part of an effort to create an over-the-horizon radar for air defense, and radar, which is usually very exotic, weird electronics, can be very expensive.

But the blimp, oh I dont know, maybe a million or two.

Get a grip guys. Make a phone call. Use the internet and read up on the program. Yes, even you, the jounalist, should be able to figure it out with a minute or two of thought.

I know you can do it.

Yet Again, the Problem is the Documentation

There are several unwritten rules about the Internet and we might as well make them clear up front. The first is that everything is great, and if you dont say and acknowledge that its great then you are an asshole and must be ignored and written off as someone who complains.  And I do complain so they are correct.  The second rule is that the documentation sortof sucks, and it does.  It is not intentional on anyone's part that the documentation sucks, or rather is uneven.  It is just the way things turned out.

Now for some details and a specific example and one more time it is not the technology per se that is bad, although of course there are always things one might like to change.  The problem, as always it seems, is that the documentation is either wrong, inadequate or overwhelmed by noise that masquerades as signal.  And that noise manifests itself as "helpful" documentation available on the Internet and authored  by the "group mind" that is, unfortunately, wrong or out of date or replicates what is already there or all of the above and there is no easy way to tell the difference.  As a result, the anarchic state of the documentation makes learning new and possibly better approaches on the Internet annoying and much more time consuming than it needs to be.

Websockets is the “new” approach to client server communication for browser applications. It does not look like much, but it is apparently almost as good as what we had with the Arpanet on day one in 1972.   As I read more about Websockets, I realize that there is a lot of thought that has gone into it in fact just because the Internet is not the ARPAnet and there are a variety of considerations that this forces on the design of technology like Websockets.  

Now Websockets is marked as experimental and is also considered to be incompatible between various implementations/browsers. However, it seems that is old news and that there are good implementations in most browsers and a variety of frameworks to hide differences between browsers.   For my application, I am not too concerned about this as my specific application is more of a proof of concept and we can finesse such things as working transparently on all browsers, for example.

But as always, the documentation is ad hoc.  There are many different frameworks one might use for your server side implementation.  Each of them has a different approach to documentation. Just choosing between the different frameworks (in this case that works with node.js) is itself a chore and a half.

For example, the websockets.org site has the source to an echo client that runs in a browser and is written in Javascript, and they also run a live echo server on their site.   But the source for their echo server is not available.  Why not?  And there is no contact information on their website such that you could ask them that question or any questions at all.

I presume that the people involved in all these technologies and frameworks are not lazy nor stupid.  I suspect that there is a combination of things going on here.  They include such things as (a) being not particularly talented at writing documentation nor enjoying the process, (b) not realizing that such documentation is necessary, (c) balancing the needs of this project with other responsibilities, (d) relying on someone else to do it, and (e) actually believing the groupsource myth that says that other people will write it for you.

My guess, my personal guess, without enough information, is that Websockets is an effort by an elite who simply do not understand or care that people learning their protocol who have not lived with it as they have on their committees will need more documentation and usable examples to make good use of their time.  It works for them.

If you dont like it, well its the Internet, and you dont have a choice.

[Addendum.  As time goes by, I penetrate more of the mysteries and it is not too bad. In fact, it may even be reasonable.  But Jesus, they really don't try to make it easy for you.]

Internet Advertisement Shocks Viewers and Advertisers Worldwide

In a shocking advertisement placed before a trivial news story for the British Daily Mirror viewers were subjected to an unexpected video.  Although claiming to be an ad, the short film presented in a calm voice without any hype information about how to use a popular spreadsheet program in a new and useful way. There were no flashy graphics and no helpful links trying to entice the viewer to go to another web site. It was simply a short informative film with a helpful technique.

Advertisers throughout the world were outraged by this violation of all standards of public decency. “They may have well as slapped every advertiser in the face with a dead fish”, said Bill Plotnick of the International Brotherhood of Advertising and Commerce, “Advertisers everywhere were stunned by this gross violation of protocol”. “Advertisements are meant to be intrusive and obnoxious”, he went on to explain, “that is how they attain their value. If we don't have potential customers cursing us with foul language we know that we have not done our job”.

Testing has revealed that viewers actually watched the controversial video all the way through instead of clicking on the “Skip Ad” button further raising hackles on Madison Avenue.

“This sort of thing has to be stopped at the source, “ said a spokesman for Turid, Turid, Turid and Snap, an Internet advertising agency located in Zurich and New York. “Governments must enact legislation to prevent this from happening again and the perpetrators of this stunt fined or arrested.”

When asked if the Department of Justice would file a complaint in British courts to stop the rogue advertisement, officials there declined to say more than they were investigating the situation.

Daily Mirror Homepage

http://www.mirror.co.uk/

Secret Parameters in Firefox

Please be sure not to tell anyone that the secret parameters in Mozilla Firefox are listed under "about:config".

Do Not Leave Those Naked Pictures of Yourself on Github

One of the not-so-entertaining results of our civilization's obsession with computing and cash is the "fuck our customers we don't care" approach taken by the consumer electronics and computing industry towards such things as systems administration, backup administration and security administration and its impact on our lives.  Now we are all forced to take on these dreary sub-specialties or face one of many horrible fates that this technology mania has brought down upon us: the wiped disk, the non-working backup, the zombie computer used by Chinese or Russian spies, or worse, the "hactivist" holier-than-thou swine ready to exploit your assets to mine Bitcoin or some other juvenile and anti-social goal for their self-appointed crusade.   We are all now responsible for these and many other tasks and woe unto those of you who think you are above such things for then your sins as documented by your iPhone will appear on social media and there you will be, in full color, engaging in some drunken bisexual orgy as an undergraduate for everyone to see just as you are running for your first political office or other responsible position.

Be warned, if you wish to avoid this or some other horrible fate, there are a few hundred things you need to pay attention to at any one time, although that list is a moving target. You have to know enough to keep yourself out of trouble.  No one else will do this for you. 

Many of us use Github as a repository for source code for our projects and collaborations. In the past I have used it off and on, but these days I use it more or less 7/24. As part of your repository, one could keep security strings that give access to various other resources that exist out there, such as the Amazon cloud. A friend did just that and forgot about it. Although he certainly knew better a few years later he made that repository public (it was either that or delete it, he wasn't working on that particular idea anymore).

Well his repository contained security information for his cloud account on Amazon which he also wasn't actively using and some hackers grabbed it and ran up a bill in the many 10s of thousands of dollars per day. Amazon.com caught it nearly immediately and my friend will not be liable for most of this bill, hopefully not any of it.

My friend is beating himself up because of course he knew better. He does know better, by the way. Don't let this happen to you. He suggests reading the following discussion on these issues to learn how to keep passwords out of your Git repository.

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/163506/how-does-one-handle-sensitive-data-when-using-github-and-heroku

Never forget it's a jungle out there and that, generally speaking, people are scum.

Nuclear Disaster and the Small Time Criminal

As many of you know, TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, has been receiving a very hard time because of events at Fukushima.   Ok, so they made a few mistakes.  But how were they to know a tsunami would happen in Japan?  Its not as if tsunamis have ever happened there, well, at least, not that often.  Ok, so they do happen on a regular basis, but it would be expensive to protect against them, you know what I mean?

And what bad timing!  Just as the world was about to embark on another round of building nuclear power plants, they convince the world that private enterprise could never be competent to run nuclear power. Sure, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima did not work out, but is that enough to turn away from such a great way to extract profits?

And people are so critical about the plans for nuclear waste, or rather the lack of plans.   People are so fickle sometimes.  They do not mind when we dump toxic waste in Africa or plastic in the ocean.  Why should they all of a sudden get so picky about nuclear waste?  It just isnt fair.

But that is not what this post is about.

Its easy to point the finger at large corrupt companies and governments.  After all, they have a lot of money and power which they can use to betray trust and steal things.   But what about the little people?  The individual entrepreneur?  What can they do to exploit the sick or the poor or the frightened and steal money?  Do they also have a role to play in our modern globalized economy?

I believe that they do and this post celebrates the contributions of the little guy and his/her work to make our world even more screwed up than it is.   Our heroes or heroines did not attend the elite schools that prepared them for corruption on the big stage.  No, these are the small-time grifters, the petty thieves, the kind of people who would steal money from the poor or the sick on an individual basis.  The kind of corruption we discuss today is much more personal and demonstrates the lofty spirit of the individual criminal in society.

I have extracted from a Reuters article about the latest TEPCO scandal two comments that are part of a beautiful scam to exploit the unfortunate circumstances of Fukushima.  These comments attempt to exploit the fear of radioactivity to sell the reader some worthless snake oil to protect him or her from its dangers.  What spirit this shows!  What indomitable will!  Our enterprising criminal can not provide a direct link to his product because many comment systems forbid this in order to prevent exactly this kind of abuse.  So our spammer creates a brand/product name and asks you to search for it, so that he may attempt to exploit your ignorance and fear and steal your money.

Here are his/her advertisements masquerading as comments to an article about TEPCO.

We must thank the Internet for providing a medium for bold entrepreneurs like this.  Where would we be without the Internet and its anonymity, so useful and necessary to protect criminals of all types?

What a beautiful example of the beliefs and values of our fellow bipeds!   How clearly it shows us the very best that our society aspires to!  Not in some vast epic of stupidity and corruption like TEPCO but in the actions of the little people we find the true spirit of our civilization and our hope for the future.

The article from Reuters about TEPCO is here.

When Uverse Goes Down I Shall Not Frown

A first draft of a poem I have written about my Internet Service Provider.  I am sorry the rhythm is off so for now lets just pretend this is blank verse.

      When Uverse Goes Down I Shall Not Frown 

      For to do so would be immature

      But I would be lying if I was denying

      That Uverse is a puddle of manure

An Experiment in Intellectual Property Theft

Warning: the following contains spoilers for Edge of Tomorrow (2014) although they are not terribly revealing ones and nothing that you could not guess from watching any trailer for the film.

The bold, new Internet paradigm has done an amazing thing. It has lifted millions and millions of people above the squalor and poverty of their lives and enabled them to achieve their hearts's desire. To achieve something they always wanted to do, but circumstances held them back. Now, with the power of the Internet they can achieve these lofty goals and become a petty thief, or a scam artist, or a subcontractor to organized crime, or a sexual exploiter of children or a pornographer.

I have often heard it said by leading figures of the glamourous motion picture industry that the Internet is the very center of the crime of intellectual property theft. It is said that no sooner than they release a film but it shows up on the Internet for downloading from Pirate Bay or similar organizations.

So I decided to run a test and see for myself.

The test was as follows. I would pick a specific film in recent release. It had to have been in the theatres for only a few weeks and not in Academy Award season so that there would be no screener DVDs around to make digital copying easier. The film had to be big enough to have normal precautions taken against theft, but would not be so large a hit as to be an incentive for thieves. Finally, it had to be a film I was willing to go see in the theatre so that I could in good conscience see a bootlegged version, comfortable in the knowledge that I would also go to the theatre and give the studios some money.

Although watchable, the bootlegged copy was obviously not as good as a 720P from DVD for example

The film I chose was Edge of Tomorrow (2014), starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt and directed by Doug Liman. This film was released just a few weeks ago and was not doing well by the standard of expectations that this would be the summer blockbuster movie. On the other hand, it sounded unexpectedly entertaining to me, and I loved the trailer.

NB: In the following narrative, I mention some technical details, but I hope I am not encouraging anyone to violate the law and I do not approve in general of violating copyright.

Because you see, to my surprise, it was trivial to get this film. The copy I got was not too great, but it was watchable, and it was easy.

1. I installed a torrent program on my designated victim Windows 7 machine. I expected this machine to possibly be the victim of malware, so if you are following along with me, be sure to make backups and possibly get anything of value off your computer.  The torrent client I chose was “uTorrent” as least likely to have malware installed.

2. I did a Google search for “Edge of Tomorrow Download” and it did not surprise me that I immediately got lots of possible hits.   This did not surprise me because I knew from experience that there is a lot of "cant cheat an honest man" malware sites ready to advantage of the wouldbe thief.  However, one of them seemed plausible to me.   About the fourth or fifth result was one from thepiratebay.se. It had a 1 GB 720p version and it even listed the source (from an Italian version) and the technical characteristics, e.g. CODEC, format profile, color space, stream size, color primaries and so forth.

3. I pointed uTorrent at the “magnet” link on Pirate Bay, and permitted the browser to invoke uTorrent.

4. The transfer began and said it would take about 2.5 hours.

5. I went and did something else and came back in two hours and it was done.

6. I copied the 1 GB file to a Linux computer so that any malware lurking in the mpg would not do much damage.

7. I watched the movie

Although this was very easy and rather convenient to do, to my amazement, there was one downside that was obvious and ultimately bodes well for the studio. The quality was not very good. It reminded me of an Avid workprint. Although the nominal resolution was 720P, in fact the actual information that was presented was far less. And the color had been quantized. I have included some screengrabs courtesy of VLC and you can see for yourself.

Ironically, the deficiencies of the copy were most prevalent in scenes with lots of fast motion and which were dark.  Now it turns out that in this movie, some of the most interesting scenes, or at least climactic scenes, have fast action and a dark palette.   So the result was that this copy acted like a very long trailer for me.  On the one hand, I now know what will happen, but on the other hand I am genuinely motivated to go see a good version of the film in the theatre.  So the studios should not completely despair: there may be some sort of silver lining to this cloud.

One thing became very clear to me.   Emily Blunt doing pushups is the new sex icon as far as I am concerned.   With a great ethnic name for her character, Rita Vrataski, which is some sort of faux-Polish made up word, and a sexist nom-de-guerre of "Full Metal Bitch", there was genuine character development as the Cruise character fell in love with her after fighting the aliens with her and dying hundreds if not thousands of times.  Watching her die, bravely and heroically, each time.  Always to wake up in the morning and have to introduce himself to her while she is training for the next-day airborne assault.  Her first words are not very friendly because of course due to the time loop she does not know who he is. By the end of the film we realize that the Cruise character, a nebbish advertising guy in uniform, is relieved to be assaulted by her in the morning because it means she is still alive, in a time-loop sort of way.

So now I am a little perplexed.  How can the Pirate Bay site continue to exist?   How can these web sites just publicly say that they have this film and actually do?  I would be less surprised if they hid their activities a little better, e.g. maybe you had to know that Edge of Tomorrow had to be spelled EgDe fo TmOrOrw or something, but no.  Its just right there hanging and waiting to be harvested.

Emily doing her pushup / yoga mashup and displaying (a bird watching term)

I have become very fond of Emily Blunt because of this movie.

So in conclusion, however it is that people are able to make bad copies so early in release (I can guess but it is sheer speculation on my part), it is true at least in this case that a copy was available for download within a few weeks of release.   So the studios are not wrong in saying that there is an issue here.

Edge of Tomorrow on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1631867/

Stupidity on the Internet: Is Quora the New Stupid?

This post is part of a series on the topic of Stupidity on the Internet.   There is so much material there to discuss!

One of the great things about the maturing of the Internet and the creation of vast wealth for a small number of criminals like the guy who runs Facebook, is that we no longer have to worry about any bullshit from right wingers about how "capitalism rewards merit".   Theft of ideas, sure, always rewarded.  Bad user interface design, absolutely.  Rewarded a billion times over.   Criminally stupid and obnoxious?  You bet!

But how stupid are people who are financed with hundreds of millions of dollars to steal money on the Internet?  Very stupid indeed.

Take for example, Quora.  No link provided, you want to talk to these morons, type in the link yourself.

I am surprised that Quora has not gone public and made 100 billion dollars like Facebook. They are eminently qualified.

Quora spammed me to tell me that a friend had provided an answer to a question about the future of Bitcoin. Ok, I said, I'll bite. Lets go see what my friend has to say. So I click on the link and ... Quora starts demanding answers to questions. Here are fifty topics we think you are interested in: Dick size in pygmies, dress lengths in Zimbabwe, How to Roast Pig, How to Castrate Pigs, How to Spam Your Friends and Make Money. All topics that have nothing to do with the link. And this goes on and on, without an option to "skip".

But best of all. Best, best, best of all:

It refuses, absolutely refuses, to let me see my friend's response.

So Quora, lets be clear: Fuck you. Never talk to me again.

This leads me to a practical suggestion for web browsers.   I need an easier way to block sites, and an easier way to suggest to friends that they also block web sites.   I understand that stupid companies are what the Internet is all about.  I understand that stupid companies is what Wall Street throws money at.  No problem there.  I just want to make it easier to make it clear I want them to go away and never, ever give a web hit to support their stupidity.