BoingBoing Update:
If any of you were betting on last night’s conspiracy theories regarding the unpublication of Violet Blue, you’ve just hit pay day if you bet on option number five, at least according to ValleyWag:

“Sex blogger Violet Blue may have tried to ride the Boing Boing coattail express to microfame by airing grievances publicly. But once upon a time she waged the same kind of war on Boing Boing cofounder Xeni Jardin’s side against Matthew Neal Sharp, curator of xenisucks.com, and the New York Times. Now, after the bad breakup between the two bloggers became serious business”

Moreover, a liberal reading of an interview Xeni Jardin and a few other member of BoingBoing did with the LATimes seems to hint at “affair gone sour” as the reason for Jardin’s deletion of Blue from BoingBoing existence. Jardin admits she unilaterally made the decision to exorcise BoingBoing of the specter of Ms. Blue for personal reasons.

“But at the time, I did that for personal reasons, and for a back story that will always remain private.”

“…I didn’t bring it up again in part because it involved some personal, private stuff that I don’t tend to get into. Like whether someone’s character is this or that, or whatever kind of personal dirty laundry was involved.”

So there you have it.

Interestingly, while Pescovitz (who seems genuinely upset by the whole thing) and John Battelle (BoingBoing’s business manager and CEO of site sponsor Federated Media) were interviewed for the article, Doctorow and Frauenfelder have been very quiet about the whole situation. As I mentioned last night, I can’t imagine Mark ever saying a bad word about anyone, but despite my polar opposition to most positions of Cory, I’ve got to feel bad for him right about now. If there are two things Cory loves, it’s BoingBoing and free speech/transparency in publication, and now there’s a cleft between the two because of Xeni’s actions. And then her lovely, not at all self involved quote:

“But –- it was my work. And I felt like: This is my work, this is my blog. This is not the same thing as Wikipedia or the paper of record. It’s BoingBoing. And I have the right to take these things down while I think about whether I want them out there or not.”

…and I have to feel bad for Cory. If I was in his position, I’d be ready to inflict some serious bodily harm to someone who had just made my website, which I love, look like it compromised its integrity. Because if there’s one thing that Cory doesn’t want to be seen as, it’s a hypocrite, so I imagine he’s torn between presenting unified support for a team member or the copy-left, anti-censorship rage he’s probably feeling right now.

Or he could be cool with the whole thing. Who knows.

What I do know is that, because Cory and Xeni are the two BBers who tend to post about certain subjects (if it’s copyfight or anti-government, it’s Cory; sex or space, it’s Xeni) they are most likely at odds with each other right now. Because Xeni is, essentially, the sex blogger of the site, any post that wasn’t written by Violet Blue is hers, and copyright would remain with her. But copyleft isn’t so forgiving.

The Consumerist: Think Similar!

In other Leftist blog news, to show solidarity with BoingBoing, The Consumerist has also jumped the shark. The Consumerist is a Gawker Media site dedicated to helping shoppers fight back against corporate oppression, which usually entails how to get through to humans in customer support, how to get through to executive customer service, what consumer rights are, and how to execute an Executive Email Carpet Bomb (EECB) to get results when all other avenues have failed.

Except the oppression has recently seemed more like consumer inconvenience and entitlement, and the commentors have responded with ire and disbelief at the petty shit people will use EECBs on, like managing to get themselves on the wrong plane and only being flown home for free by JetBlue, or a fast food chain that is completely incompetent and should fire all workers at one store because they forgot the pickles. And the fries were cold!

Any other website wouldn’t take the readers to task for calling out bullshit abuse of utilities that should be saved for truly horrendous customer screwing, or wouldn’t post such ridiculous complaints at all, except on a very slow news day. The Consumerist, however, Is Taking This Seriously and put forth a Ten Commandments (of sorts) regarding posts. No longer can you say that the original poster’s argument is without merit. You cannot blame the consumer. You cannot, essentially, criticize the consumer or the site moderators. Oh no. All you are allowed to do, in public on the site, is offer advice, unless the only advice warranted is “shut your fucking mouth and stop your bitching, you idiot.” Oh no! Their consumers are beautiful, precious, infallible snowflakes that cannot be criticized or called to task for acting like the humans in a certain new Pixar film.

This was back during my honeymoon period with Apple, when I implicitly trusted them and allowed them to automatically update my OS whenever they told me I should. I mean, it’s Apple. It just works, right? I’d had no problems with my MacBook in the seven or eight months since I bought it, and all other updates worked flawlessly. I couldn’t believe anything would ever go wrong with it.

Then, there was OS update 10.4.10

Afterwards, I could connect to any open network after the install (which was helpful, as the neighbors have an open, unguarded network) but not any with WPA encryption. Frustrated, but too proud to call the Apple Care support line I paid for, I reinstalled OS X version 6 and upgraded to version nine, the last update that worked.

That was in July of 2007.

Then, a few weeks ago, I bought Final Cut Express for a project I was working on, which necessitated an upgrade to 10.4.10 or later, and because of the problems I’d had previously, I installed the next update, 10.4.11. Surely Apple would have fixed the problem, right?

Nope. Final Cut worked, but once again, my uber-encrypted home network was rendered useless. The solutions seemed to be either take off encryption (and thus leave others in the household unable to do their confidential work at home — and possibly compromise my anonymity) or keep leeching off the neighbor’s network until a solution presented itself, as Apple’s website seemed to be ignoring the problem.

A quick google search revealed that more than one user had found themselves in similar situation, but the only solution seemed to be to either go backwards to 10.4.9 or go forwards to Leopard. Could it be that Apple was deliberately ignoring the problem so as to either force people to pay for the phone tech support or force them to upgrade to Leopard? One individual took his MacBook (duo core) back to the Genius Bar. A week later it was returned working, though the Geniuses could find nothing wrong with it, supposedly. Hmmm.

I was tempted, but still too proud to call or go into the freshly-opened store in my area. It’s not that I’m an elitist — only that I’m a recent convert to Mac, and I’m still operating on my experience from PC days: fix it yourself or get a hacker buddy to fix it for you (usually, you can bribe a college student with food to do this for you, by the way,) because Microsoft products are a piece of shit and tech support is laughable.

After (two) weeks of (not so) diligent searching, I finally stumbled upon a solution that worked. For the record, I did this while simultaneously installing WPA2 so either one solution works independent of the other or they work in combination. However, the solution listed below seems to be one which most will find useful.

1. Download Pacifist
2. Download Airport Extreme update 2007-002 Later updates will not work.
3. Download the 10.4.9 Combo Update
4. Go to /system/library/extensions and copy appleairport.kext and appleairport2.kext to a backup location just to be safe and then delete them from the extensions folder.I used a USB drive for the backup task.
5. Also in the extensions folder you’ll find IO80211Family.kext and copy it to backup folder and then delete it.
6. Open Pacifist
7. Open Package and choose the airport extreme update
8. In Pacifist you will now see all the files that are in the package. Find system and expand it’s tree by clicking on the triangle. then expand library and then extensions. You will now see the IO80211Family.kext file. Click once on it so it’s highlighted and then click “Install”.
9. When it’s done copying files expand coreservices and then menu extras. Highlight “Airport Menu” and click install.
10. When it’s done copying close the window in Pacifist for the airport update.
11. Open Package and choose the 10.4.9 combo
12. Again find the system folder and expand it and then expand the library and extensions folders.
13. In the extensions folder you’ll see a bunch of files. Look for appleairport.kext and highlight it. Click “Install”.
14. Repeat the previous step with appleairport2.kext
15. Reboot FTW

You should be back up and running in no time!

Edit #100,000: If this post has appeared on your RSS feed reader a million times in variations, it is because WordPress does not handle certain commands particularly well and I had to go through the directions, line by line, to find which lines WordPress found objectionable and re-write them several times to edit out the confusing phrases.

Apparently, I’m not the only one (who finds the song disturbing, played Doom as a child, or both) because the US military prisons have, apparently, been using it along with a few other songs I find annoying, including:

Bulls on Parade – Rage Against the Machine
Stayin’ Alive – The Bee Gees
Babylon – David Gray
Bodies – Drowning Pool
Kim – Eminem
Enter Sandman – Metallica.

I hope that they paid for the rights to Enter Sandman — we all know litigious Metallica can be when it comes to downloads of their music, and I’m sure playing it for untold numbers of people counts as performance.

LINK: The Torture Playlist