Congress to vote on fascist “Protect IP Act” 11/16

Facebook saves everything forever, has ‘shadow profiles’ for non-users

From http://www.identityblog.com/?p=1201

Message from Anonymous: Operation Facebook, Nov 5 2011

This ought to be interesting. I’ll get the marshmallows.

Study: Internet Explorer Users Less Intelligent*

* By “study” I mean publicity stunt.

AptiQuant Psychometric conducted an online study (IQ-Browser-AptiQuant-2011.pdf)  to determine the intelligence of users of various web browsers.  When I saw this article at first on Consumer Affairs about it, I was all, like, duh!

Being a programmer, I know IE is a big piece of garbage, and personally I use Firefox, but after taking a step back from the ego-stroking I was forced to admit there is major bias in this study, the most obvious being the comparison of IE versions 6-9 with newer add-on browsers.  IE6 is 3 years older than version 1 of Firefox and Opera.  IE 6 was released in 2001 and Firefox 1 was released in 2004, as was Opera. Google released Chrome in 2008.

Their conclusion is invalid because they’re over-selecting users for the IE group who don’t/can’t update software (less intelligent people are less capable of updating software).  This doesn’t speak to the choice of browser, it speaks to inability to install and update software.

IE is installed by default with Windows, and other browsers actually require you to do something to install them.  Less intelligent people are less capable of downloading and installing software. A lot of people don’t even know what a browser is so they would have no idea how to install something additional. They will just use the default browser, whatever it is.  How about people using Safari, the default browser on Macs. Are they stupid too?  Perhaps.

I think it goes without saying that surfing the web with IE6 is dangerous and not a very bright idea, due to the amount of malware out there on web servers, but this is not obvious to all people.  No offense if you don’t update your IE.   There’s no need for anyone to call you stupid, because you’ll find out the hard way on your own when your computer stops working.  If you like re-installing Windows over and over, who am I to judge?

To summarize, this is bologna.  If you read the conclusions  it sounds like they are angry at M$ for integrating IE into the Windows Explorer like a brain slug that can’t be removed.  Aptiquant developers seem to have a bone to pick with IE (who doesn’t) but they should re-examine the data and attempt to control for some of these confounders or they’re going to insult a lot of users and not learn anything useful.  Then again, no publicity is bad publicity, right?

Tweeting again

I was using a service to tweet my posts to twitter but that stopped working so I installed a plugin for the blog which will auto-tweet posts.   Additionally I’m running a local url shortner, so there won’t be any 3rd party tracking of your clicks (excluding the NSA vacuuming up most if not all internet traffic).

But anyhow, this blog doesn’t use Google Ananlytics or URL forwarding services like bit.ly (sorry, working on that), facebook iframes with “Like Buttons” (and javascripts), or other shady code, so just be aware I’m trying to prevent any 3rd party tracking and protecting your privacy as much as possible.  If you browse this site thru a proxy, you can rest assured I’m not going to have your browser pinging the mothership and wasting your efforts, but hopefully you’re blocking cross site JS anyway.  It’s not just the government that wants to sniff our data, it’s private corporations like credit reporting agencies, and marketers who want to buy and sell your infos and annoy the living crap out of you.

I don’t have a privacy policy posted, but I do log IP addresses for my own protection in case someone hacks the blog.

Thanks for reading and here’s the Twitter feed

By the way, I can send tweets from my phone in case TSHTF and I can’t post directly to the blog.

Google censoring “BitTorrent,” other search terms from instant results

To Google and shadow government homeland security types who are probably doing a lot of arm-twisting in the form threats and payoffs, I have a message for you…

There are a lot of legitimate uses for BitTorrent other than piracy. It can be used to share ANY data.  You are attempting to restrict access to a powerful technology that enables many distributed applications.    You should take a lesson from history and realize that censoring words is a losing battle.

Go to Google.com, turn on ‘instant’ and type in bittorrent to see for yourself…

Ah but since you already know how to spell the word, they’ll show some suggestions in the “instant” box now.  Who made this arbitrary decision?  Do we now have the governemnt in there micro-managing Google’s search queries and algos?  This is getting ridiculous.

They say “jump,” you say “which window.”

Lots of open source software uses BitTorrent to distribute files, so this is essentially an attack on open source software.

We need to move away from google as much as possible.  I am going to intensify my research into alternative search providers and hopefully post some links for you soon.

Ariana Huffington and AOL CEO discuss huffpo sellout

No need to watch this, unless you want to see AOL CEO Tim Armstrong doing a kind of corporate internet jargon-show.

The only reason AOL could possibly want HuffPo is to suppress alternative views that may have slipped thru in a multi-user blog environment like hers.   It’s doubtful that anything very earth-shattering would have slipped thru in the first place though.   HuffPo does nothing but parrot establishment leftist dogma.

Now AOL can neutralize all remants of political thought on the site and turn it into a big pile of ads, sports, and celebrity gossip.

Well anyway, sorry your HuffPo sold out to AOL.

It always cracks me up when “anonymous” does a press release

ANONYMOUS PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Distribution
February 7th, 2011

Recently, the head of internet security firm HBGary Federal, Aaron Barr, sought to elevate his investigation of the Anonymous movement by providing the Financial Times with what he claimed to be accurate and useful information about those who allegedly drive our activities.

In yesterday’s release we inferred that the information presented was easy to undermine by any of the millions of people around the world with a cursory understanding of internet culture. Not only was the information provided by HBGary Federal woefully inaccurate, it provided no incriminating evidence against any of the persons named.

Today, Anonymous learned that HBGary Federal intended to sell to the FBI a large document (it can be found at http://hizost.com/… ) that allegedly detailed the identities of dozens of our participants.

Within hours of learning this, Anonymous infiltrated HBGary Federal’s network and websites. Anonymous acquired the document with supposed personal details of anons, along with more than 50,000 company e-mails (~4.71GB) – all of which have now been distributed on the internet. Additionally, his associated websites and social media accounts were hijacked and manipulated to stress how poorly this ‘security expert’ handles matters of his own security ( http://imagebin.org/… ). Woe to his clients and others who invested in his confidence.

The lack of quality in Aaron Barr’s undertaken research is worth noting. Aaron Barr missed a great deal of information that has been available online, and in fact failed to identify some of those whose identities were never intended to be hidden. People such as DailyKos’ diarist blogger Barrett Brown, and the administrator for anonnews.org joepie91, whose identities could have been found with a simple Google search.

It is also worth noting that Aaron Barr was also providing this documentation as an example of investigation protocol. This would introduce a systemic flaw  to the FBI’s investigative woodwork. The risk of institutionalising a flawed procedure exponentiates a problem, and it does so at the taxpayers expense in every sense. Had  the FBI indeed bought this information from HBGary Federal, it would  have been paid for by taxpayers money. Many innocent people would have  been marked as leaders in actions they may not even have been associated  with.

Unlike you, Aaron, we did our research, we know who you are, and now, so will everyone else. Although you have managed to ruin your credibility in an attempt to further it, you did provide us with entertainment, albeit very briefly.

Anonymous does not have leaders. We are not a group, we are not an organization. We are just an idea. What we have done today will appear harsh. It is harsh. We will respond to those who see threats to Anonymous. We understand that our participants have been concerned about recent FBI raids and companies such as HBGary lurking in our chats, so we’ve given all of Anonymous a message: we will fight back.

We are Anonymous.
We are legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Expect us – always.

Yours faithfully,

Anonymous.