Entries Tagged 'Techie' ↓

So, if you’re a fan of Teh Intertubes, you know all about the non-smackdown that happened between Violet Blue and BoingBoing and just how boring and frustrating it’s been the past few days. When will someone at BoingBoing say something that doesn’t sound like Scott McClellan wrote it? When will the BB fan boys stop acting like Violet Blue is the devil? When will readers notice that BoingBoing and Big Brother share initials and memory hole policies?

For those of you who aren’t Intertubes fans or have been in a cave recently, the non-story of the year goes like this:

Violet Blue is a sex blogger and sometimes writer/radio show host who probably has more money than God that comes from simply talking about sex. Boing Boing is an anti-censorship, liberal vehicle for Cory Doctorow’s latest work copyleft/copyfight blog that pretty much makes money from talking about how much copyright, big government, and invasion of privacy suck. Sometimes, the libertarians on this blog are all over BoingBoing; sometimes, we’re just over it.

The connection between the two comes from the fact that Blue once wrote a few posts for BoingBoing, and used to be a favorite on BoingBoing insomuch as she was linked to with frequency. Over the course of a few years, Blue wrote for or was mentioned in BoingBoing somewhere on the order of 70 times, give or take a few, according to an LA Times blogger who bothered to go to the WayBack Machine and count.

Why the Wayback Machine? Well, that’s the rub. You see, according to BoingBoing, they “unpublished”, which is a NewSpeak way of saying “deleted”, not just articles by Ms. Blue, but every mention of her in existence on their site, effectively scrubbing her from their archives and sending her down the memory hole.

Trust us, Winston Smith was doubleplusbusy that day.

Naturally, for such an anti-censorship site as BoingBoing, this seems rather odd, especially since there was no transparency in the action to unpublish Ms. Blue: one day she existed in the BB universe, the next she did not. Even Ms. Blue was unaware of her deletion until this past week, when the news slowly began to trickle out that she was gone from BB. People began to ask questions, and alternatively flame the hell out of BoingBoing, and BB began a hard and fast policy of denial: any comment that mentioned Violet Blue was systematically deleted from their site. The InterTubes grew restless. Metafilter got involved, then ValleyWag picked up the story, which then hit its sibling site Gawker, and all hell broke loose.

Sometime yesterday, BoingBoing responded to the controversy with a non-post about the issue by Moderator-cum-Douchebag Teresa Nielson-Hayden, who did her best White House Press Secretary working interview and forced out the editors’ response to the controversy, which was pretty much “This is a personal blog, we’ll damn well do what we feel like and have no responsibility to tell the readers what happened or why. More over, this is personal, so leave us alone.”

Also, she cannot comment on an ongoing investigation.

Now, that by itself wouldn’t be so bad, if the comments that followed weren’t routinely attacked for asking questions that seemed pretty self-evident after reading the post, such as how can a blog about transparency and accountability be neither transparent nor account for its actions? How can they continue to post about Mr. Doctorow’s novel fighting Big Brother (entitled “Little Brother”) when they had gone totally BB themselves and unpublished a writer? Between Nielson-Hayden and the readers, things in the comments quickly spiraled out of hand and two camps formed: fan boys who believe BB can do nothing wrong, reading for two minutes of hate with Violet Blue as a symbol of all that’s wrong with the InterTubes, and conspiracy theorists and general uber-left communists who now want BB staff to post home addresses, SSNs, and all other personal data to be the most transparent InterTubes blog of all times or else fail miserably under the weight of evil corporate oppression.

After that there were only three or four new posts to BoingBoing’s site, ending around 3PM. Then, for six hours, BoingBoing was dark, save for the glowing light of the comments thread growing exponentially. Meanwhile, ever the willing victim in all of this, Ms. Blue was giving interviews to any blogger who would listen. She even created a spreadsheet detailing every post involving her that was deleted from BB. When it comes to being sympathetic, Ms. Blue seemed to be aiming for a new residency over at Fail Blog.

Lost somewhere in the maelstrom was the question that the first few hundred posts reasonably asked: what transgression did Violet Blue commit that was so horrible and unspeakable, she had to be erased from the annals of BoingBoing, at the expense of BoingBoing’s own integrity?

For anything even close to an answer, only the LA Times and SF Gate came close to getting answers, and theirs had the ring of X-Files paranoia to them.

1: Cory Doctorow is a big copyleft protector, fighter of the “evil” of copyright. Violet Blue legally changed her name two years ago to Violet Blue and soon after sued a porn star for using Violet Blue as a name. Said porn star is a single mom (Oh noes! Leftists always bleed extra hard for the single mommies!) quit the business to sell her own work herself (Leftists also get massive hard-ons for independent production and small business) and (here’s the actually important part) had been using the name since 1999, long before Ms. Blue was a sex blogger. Moreover, it is believed that Violet Blue knew of the porn star’s existence before legally changing her name, and allegedly, before even using the moniker at all. Blue (the sex blogger) even had Blue (the porn star mommy) on her radio show once. The fact that Blue (PSM) couldn’t afford a decent attorney and was trounced in court by Blue (SB) would have really pressed Doctorow’s buttons wrong and ended with Blue being throughly denounced on BoingBoing. However, Blue being a former contributor, it might have looked bad to other editors or the almighty sponsors if Blue was still on the site as a contributor and yet trashed later on, so it was best to delete her and go on their separate ways.

2. Federated Media supports BoingBoing through ad revenue almost exclusively. Like many other publications, BoingBoing could, theoretically, be held hostage to the demands of Federated Media, and if they decided association with Ms. Blue was becoming a liability, they could demand she be wiped from the site.

3. Blue was “riding the coattails” of her BoingBoing posts, according to some readers and bloggers familiar with the two. She allegedly referred to herself as the fifth BoingBoing editor, which may have bruised an ego or two, and eventually might have had a falling out over taking more credit than her due and trying to raise her importance level to back her new projects.

4. Editor Xeni Jardin and Ms. Blue were allegedly involved at some point, and the affair turned sour. A hurt Jardin may have then convinced the other three editors that deletion of Ms. Blue was the best way to go. This rumor is fueled by a LA Times blog post which suggests that after a conversation with both Jardin and Blue, the blogger was satisfied that it truly was a personal matter handled poorly and not worth the bru-ha-ha it generated. Of course, that blogger’s lips are sealed.

5. Combine theories three and four. Or, as ValleyWag puts it:

For Blue, we’ve come to believe, the friendship always had a mercenary angle — Jardin could get her linked as well as laid. The association with Boing Boing boosted Blue’s career. How painful it must have been for Jardin to realize she was being used by a groupie who wanted to join her band. And people in pain exercise supremely bad judgment, which is what Jardin did when she “unpublished” posts about Blue from Boing Boing.

None of the rumors implicate either Mark or David as the root of the problem, which makes sense, as Mark just seems like such a nice guy, you can’t imagine him getting into a fight with anyone (did you see him on the Colbert Report?) and David isn’t nearly as active as the other three. Mark and David are like the Ringo and George to Doctorow and Jardin’s Lennon and McCartney, respectively. While you can see the latter getting into public feuds with people, the former just are so freakin’ nice and quiet, you’d have to murder their ickle robot puppies for them to get upset with you, and even then you could probably settle the matter over a cup of tea or something.

So, no matter what theory you subscribe to, the one thing all the theories have in common is that BoingBoing has compromised their principles for some unnameable reason, which makes the compromising of said principles all the more suspect. For a group of editors who decry the Bush Administration (and who doesn’t anymore, really?) they sure have learned a few lessons from the last 8 years under Bush Jr’s reign, such as how to talk without actually saying anything.

War is Peace.
Secrecy is Transparency.
Long live BoingBoing.

From BBC News:

Apparently, a creative-minded car salesman in Missouri had an idea on how to stop flagging car sales due to increased gas prices: buy a car, get a gun for free!

Continue reading →

If you didn’t watch the news at all in the last year, and if The Smoking Gun isn’t bookmarked, you’re probably not aware of the bizarre story of Lori Drew, a suburban mother who posed as a teenage boy in order to taunt a neighborhood girl, Megan Meier. Posing as “Josh”, Drew and accomplices flirted with Meier and initiated an online relationship. Then in October of 2006, “Josh” turned on Meier, tore her apart, and Meier committed suicide.

One could imagine it was just a cruel joke gone wrong, that is until it came out that Drew knew about Meier’s history of depression! And the fact it was caused by a falling out between Meier and Drew’s daughter. And the fact that Drew has seemingly no remorse.

Drew stated she knew “arguments” had broken out between Megan and others on “my space”. Drew felt this incident contributed to Megan’s suicide, but she did not feel “as guilty” because at the funeral because she found out “Megan had tried to commit suicide before.”

Drew explained the neighborhood had recently found out her involvement in Megan’s suicide and her neighborhood has become hostile toward her and her family. Despite the recency of the suicide and several neighbors recommending she not confront the Meier family (especially on Thanksgiving), Meier stated she and her husband attempted to contact the Meier family three times, “banging on the door” although Mr Meier had already told them to leave.

She attempted to contact them on Thanksgiving, six weeks after she indirectly caused their daughter’s death. And that statement is from the police report Drew filed against Mr. Meier when he bused up a foosball table the Drews had asked the Meiers to store for them. Hell truly is other people, especially suburban helicopter mothers without a soul.

Today, however, the Federal courts have indicted Drew on conspiracy and fraud charges. Whether this will stick, of course, remains to be seen.

Salvador Hernandez, assistant agent in charge of the Los Angeles FBI office, called the case heart-rending.

“The Internet is a world unto itself. People must know how far they can go before they must stop. They exploited a young girl’s weaknesses,” Hernandez said. “Whether the defendant could have foreseen the results, she’s responsible for her actions.”

Drew was charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on the girl.

_{Source: AP]}

According to the co-conspirity, Ashley Grills (who, if I may say so, has no right to make fun of someone what so ever) Lori Drew wasn’t going to just stop the torment. Oh no, she had better plans:

Salvador Hernandez, assistant agent in charge of the Los Angeles FBI office, called the case heart-rending.

“The Internet is a world unto itself. People must know how far they can go before they must stop. They exploited a young girl’s weaknesses,” Hernandez said. “Whether the defendant could have foreseen the results, she’s responsible for her actions.”

Drew was charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on the girl.

_{Source:ABC News}

I’m going to admit something here, right now, just so it’s off my chest: I am a libertarian. I’m registered as one in my state, I’m a card-carrying party member, and before my most recent job forbade me for engaging in such practices, I vigorously campaigned for the party. I support Mike Gravel and Ron Paul and would die to vote for a Gravel/Paul ticket in this upcoming election cycle.

Having said that, I’m sure you can imagine how happy I am that the US 9th District Court of Appeals has decided that the information on laptops are able to be searched, seized, and confiscated indefinitely by border control.

It all stems from a case, apparently, where an individual traveling from the Philippians to the United States was stopped by DHS / US ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and his laptop searched. It was there that they discovered child pornography and the man was promptly arrested and charged as appropriate. His attorney argued that the man’s 4th Amendment rights were violated, but the 9th District jurists decided differently. When you go through customs, you should have no expected right to privacy or expectation of 4th amendment protection, essentially.

The usual arguments about “you shouldn’t worry about it unless you have something to hide” are easily put down like a second place Kentucky Derby horse (Is it too soon? It is, isn’t it?) There are many reasons an individual may want to keep the contents of their laptops hidden from prying eyes. First of all, there are private photos that may end up in the wrong hands, like the young woman who became an unwitting porn star at her local Best Buy. Or there are the numerous businessmen and attorneys who travel internationally for business with private, sensitive information. CNet points out that journalists too are effected as their anonymous sources’ identities could be compromised. Will there be a separate line for CIA agents working under cover or will we have many more Valerie Plames in the near future? And then there are the artists and writers and photographers whose work may be deemed as illegal and offensive by one agent and artistic and acceptable by another.

Remember the trouble Nabakov had with Lolita, kids? Now imagine just trying to be the publisher bringing that over on a laptop and it getting into the hands of a John Wayne customs officer going to save the kidlets from the terrorists and pedophiles like he’s the next Chris Hansen.

Was it always this way, or is this yet another sweeping power of the executive branch granted to us from on high by the great and powerful George W. Bush? Only time may tell. Over at the Consumerist, several readers had rather inventive suggestions for combating ICE, or at least messing with them, including renaming all of your files “kiddie p0rn” and changing every icon on your desktop to a link to your own downloaded copy of 2girls1cup. Some others suggested traveling with a completely empty laptop and doing all work from a remote server inside the country or keeping all of your information on the SD card tucked neatly away inside your camera with your vacation photos or using your iPod’s disk usage feature.

CNet, however, has a different approach: encrypt first, ask questions later. Additionally, they recommend:

1. Shut your computer down for at least five minutes before entering customs, as this will erase passwords stored in RAM
2. Erase your cookies, cache, browser history, and saved passwords
3. The Feds may install spyware on your hard drive — keep your spyware detection software as up to date as possible and, if your computer gets confiscated, boot from a DVD or other OS to see if anything on your hard drive has been tampered with.
4. The Feds may also try to get to your memory through FireWire ports — guard against it by “setting an Open Firmware password disables physical memory access for FireWire devices”
5. Finally, conceal your data so that know one even knows it’s there. Remember kids, encrypted data is suspicious, but you can’t be suspicious of something you can’t see.

Here’s a problem from 2007 that’s making a comeback: a lack of connectivity when you update 10.4.10 or later updates for MacBook.

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.

Kids, set your faces to stunned.

The New York Times tech blog “Bits” is reporting that Apple have decided to “back down” on premium pricing for DRM free music and sell all music — crippled or not — for the same price: 99 cents.

For the record, there is no official announcement on the Apple “Hot News” page, but they’re too busy bursting at the seams over the release date for OS X Leopard (10/26 if you care) to post it, perhaps? Or perhaps it’s just a rumor that the NYT decided to run with. I’m assuming it is, for now, the latter (unless the NYT have an insider at Apple), as Coldplay (an EMI band and therefore part of the DRM free catalogue) “enhanced” (read: DRM free) tracks are still $1.29 on iTunes as of this moment.

My only question to Apple is: what are you going to do for all the people who paid an extra thirty cents per song up through today? Don’t think that you can ignore them, Steve. Remember the iPhone price-cut fiasco problem?

According to the BBC, Sony have confirmed there is a rootkit on their Micro Vault fingerprint-locked USB flash drives and that they are absolutely concerned about this. They’re looking into the problem, ladies and gentlemen. Surprisingly, it only took them five days this time to acknowledge the problem instead of the weeks they went ignoring the problem with the CDs.

However, their definition of concerned and mine seem a bit different, as they’ve promised a fix for those effected by mid-September, and reiterated that people shouldn’t be overly concerned as they no longer make this Micro Vault anyway, even though they are still for sale on various internet websites — or they were until Wednesday, when the story broke.

Sony said it was conducting an internal investigation into the problem and would offer a fix “by mid-September”.

Moreover, Sony points out, no customers have complained about the problem yet. Well, that could be because it’s a, oh I don’t know, rootkit and the scary thing about said rootkits is that you do not know that they are there until a friendly little hacker knocks on your computer’s virtual unlocked door and says, “Pardon me, but you appear to have left your computer unlocked. You may want to have this checked.” Or, they send in a trojan or worm or virus (or virii if they’re feeling particularly nasty) and start logging your keystrokes, infecting your computer, and turning your computer into a little zombie PC. And as much as I like zombie films, I’d rather not have one in my home — human or machine.

Researchers at F-secure said that a hacker could then infect a computer as any files stored on the hidden directory would be invisible to the user and also from some virus scanners and security software.

As usual, Sony do not take the blame for this, and insist the problem was an outside firm they contracted to do the security work. This time, they say, the rootkit problem is “not as serious” because they were doing it for your protection, not theirs. I’m sure anyone who loses their identity due to some malevolent hacker feels much better already.

Sony also stated that, in conjunction with the outside vendor’s full cooperation, they’re launching an internal investigation. Don’t you feel better? I sure do! It’s the equivalent of wealthy and/or politically important parties finding out their son or daughter (or both) have been arrested on charges of a DUI, possession, and assaulting an officer and insist that the child should be released to their care and they will quietly handle things themselves. Then, they disappear from the media, not to be heard from again until the little bastards do something else. So we let Sony off the hook for this one, they fuck off and work on making a bigger, better PlayStation or plasma TV so people will go “rootkit what?” and meanwhile pull a repeat of the CD problem, releasing a patch that only makes things worse.

To which Sony (in Invader Zim-style) would reply, “Worse? Or better?”

Sadly, only the BBC seem to be covering this right now, which means thousands of people could have left the door wide open to their computers and be none-the-wiser! Oh, you tech-savvy, anti-corporation bastards, where are you now?!

As of “press time” (ie: when I uploaded) Sony’s website for the Micro Vaults does not acknowledge this security flaw! Also of note: neither the Press Release nor the articles available online denote which of the three “discontinued” models of Micro Vault have been effected. I tried looking for any kind of press release from Sony regarding which models are effected, so that I could do a search of online and local retailers to see who’s still selling the effected models and how many are out there to be purchased, as Sony can’t be arsed doing a recall, but guess what I found when I searched the term “rootkit” at Sony’s website?

A search for “Micro Vault” led to press releases announcing the newest Micro Vaults to be released and those about to go on clearance sale, but nothing noticing its customers to the huge security hole gaping in their systems. Nice.

Additionally, now McAfee’s dev blog is giving Sony a verbal bashing that’s somewhat fierce. Go McAfee!

Edited 9/2/07 @ 10:44 EST to Add: According to CNet’s news blog, the effected Micro Vaults are the USM-F models, which are listed on the Sony site still without warning.

A search of MSN’s shopping site revealed eight smaller online retailers still carrying the effected flash drives, and a quick google search of the model numbers reveal that they are still for sale at the websites for major retailersCircuit City and Amazon.com.
I intend to check out the Circuit City, Best Buy, Radio Shack, and CompUSA in my area to see if they are still for sale in stores, just to get a feel for how widespread this problem could potentially be.

If you’re like me (a dedicated Windows/PC user until Vista left you crapping your pants in fear of the horrors to be unleashed upon your precious machine) and just pluncked down a rather large chunk of change to jump head-first into the world of Mac, you know how annoying it is to have to redownload or re-purchase a lot of software that, contrary to the Mac ads, doesn’t “just work” at all, because you’re running a new OS it doesn’t want to play nicely with. And, just to be extra annoying, some programs haven’t been programmed for those of us who’ve moved away from Microshit. (Hello, I’m talking to you, makers of Trillian!!!!!)

To the rescue is Open Source Mac, a directory of some of the most useful freeware Mac programs out there, including Mac versions of some old favorites like Firefox and Thunderbird, and some new favorites I downloaded recently like Fugu, which is an excellent FTP client for Mac, and VLC media player. I’m totally not a software-minded geek of any form, but this site is definitely one you should bookmark.

Remember that lovely rootkit Sony put on their CDs last year in a *huge* media fiasco that had them sued, sent their stock prices tumbling, and briefly obliterated customer loyalty? Well, like an annoying pop tartlet who doesn’t know when she’s no longer young, cute, and hot, Sony’s pulling out the tricks *again*.

Electronics giant Sony has again been accused of selling products that leave PCs vulnerable to attack by hackers.

The vulnerability is similar to one found on CDs sold by Sony BMG in 2005 that led to the discs being recalled and lawsuits against the company.

I can’t help but not feel a bit of blame should be placed on the users here. I mean, as the Chinese say, fuck me over once, shame on you. Fuck me over twice, shame on me. Why would you trust a company that potentially ruined millions of people’s computers — customers who *legally* bought the music — in the name of stopping the people who weren’t going to buy the damned CDs anyway?