Jeber’s

Local Idiot To Post Comment On Internet

In a statement made to reporters earlier this afternoon, local idiot Brandon Mylenek, 26, announced that at approximately 2:30 a.m. tonight, he plans to post an idiotic comment beneath a video on an Internet website.

Mylenek, a moron, prepares to publicly address the “dumbest shiz [he's] evr seen!!!1!”

“Later this evening, I intend to watch the video in question, click the ‘reply’ link above the box reserved for user comments, and draft a response, being careful to put as little thought into it as possible, while making sure to use all capital letters and incorrect punctuation,” Mylenek said. “Although I do not yet know exactly what my comment will entail, I can say with a great degree of certainty that it will be incredibly stupid.”

Mylenek, who rarely in his life has been capable of formulating an idea or opinion worth the amount of oxygen required to express it, went on to guarantee that the text of his comment would be misspelled to the point of incomprehension, that it would defy the laws of both logic and grammar, and that it would allege that several elements of the video are homosexual in nature.

“The result will be an astonishing combination of ignorance, offensiveness, and sheer idiocy,” Mylenek said.

Pressed for further details regarding his intended post, Mylenek, who will comment under the Internet pseudonym “xblingdaddy2005x,” revealed that there is a strong possibility he will inadvertently post the comment twice.

“After clicking the ’submit’ button, I will immediately refresh the page so that I can view my own comment. I will then notice that my comment has not appeared because the server has not yet processed my request, become angry and confused, and re-post the same comment with unintentional variations on the original wording and misspellings, creating two slightly different yet equally moronic comments,” he said. “It is my hope that this will illustrate both my childlike level of impatience and my inability to replicate a simple string of letters and symbols 30 seconds after having composed it.”

Mylenek confirmed rumors that he will be momentarily sidetracked by another inane task while drafting his comment. The distraction is scheduled to come at 2:25 a.m. in the form of a “related video” link featuring a man being sodomized by a horse, which Mylenek will re-watch seven times and laugh obnoxiously at with his friend and fellow idiot, Steve Blanchette, 28.

“Once this minor diversion is complete, I will finish posting my comment, then sit there like the worthless human being I am and wait for other commenters to respond,” he added. “Because, as I mentioned before, I have nothing better to do with my life.”

 

“We are blessed to be living in an age when we have a global communications network in which idiots, assholes, and total and complete wastes of fucking human life alike can come together to give instant feedback in an unfettered and unmonitored online environment,” Mylenek said. “What better way to take advantage of this incredible technology than to log onto the Internet and insult a complete stranger?”

Mylenek concluded his press conference with a solemn vow to uphold the awful, unintelligible, anger-inducing quality of his past Internet comments.  (Source, the Onion)

I’m still LMAO.

On the web no one knows you’re …

In the July 5, 1993 issue of The New Yorker, a Peter Steiner cartoon revealed a truism.

The cartoon was funny, but the message it conveyed turned out to be one of the most valuable features of the internet.

Suddenly no one could judge you (with the implied and find you wanting) based on your age or gender or race. You could recreate yourself as an avatar of your mind. Everyone you ever met in cyberspace would only know the you that you allowed to be known, and nothing would be more the eYou than the words you used, the thoughts you typed out for us to read.

Those of us who for years have been humanists, believers in the basic decency of humanity, saw this next medium of communication as a real chance for people around the world to share their common humanity with anyone else with whom they could connect. It would no longer matter if you were a poor child in Vietnam or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. The quality of your mind would be the leveler. Here was a means for people to get to know each other at a less superficial level than judging them by their age, gender or race. We were idealists.

“Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist” George Carlin

There’s talk around the internets about racism again. Many of us have spent years objecting to and rallying against racism. The internet gave us a reason to hope racism would quickly disappear from the mind-pool. Once race was no longer obvious or easily discerned, it would cease being of any importance. We further hoped this race-ignorant attitude would speedily spread throughout the real world. We may have been overly optimistic.

Louis Gray has written up the latest chapter in this sad saga on his blog, LouisGray.com. If you want to delve deeper into this situation, check out the conversations on Friendfeed.

It’s good that these conversations are taking place. Racism, like sexism, shouldn’t be allowed to avoid scrutiny. Those of us who find racism ignorant need to speak out against its infection of the internet. The racists should be held accountable for their attitudes.

Freedom of speech? I’m all for it. Being held responsible for the attitudes you espouse? I insist on it.

The internet still has the potential to help humanity evolve to the next level. We can leave behind our less-than-noble fears and superstitions (the breeding ground for racism) and let the internet guide our real lives. See others for who they are, not what they are.

The alternative isn’t good.

Wi-Fi Mania

My local Von’s offers free Wi-Fi.  Any business that offers its customers free connectivity ought to be applauded, but…a grocery store?  Am I supposed to wedge my laptop into the child seat and surf the web as I try to decide between tuna and ham for my sandwiches?  Will I be tempted to send out a Twitter to garner opinions on which brand of toilet paper is superior?

Where I eat, where I might sit and enjoy a cup of coffee, where I stay for the night; yes, I will be thankful for the opportunity to wirelessly access the internet.  Where I buy my toothpaste, not so much.

The web is the world, writ electronically

Humans started to form societies as soon as we learned to communicate. Small groups of hunter-gatherers formed larger groups to ensure their survival. In order to coordinate their hunting parties, they had to develop a means of communication. Communication became the means of cooperation.

Look at the terminology I just used; communicate, coordinate, cooperate. The prefix co means together; joint; jointly; mutually. Co is the prefix that defines human society. As individuals, early man was nearly helpless. He had no fur, not very good teeth, relatively poor eyesight. He was near the bottom of the food chain. Yet collectively, humans survived, even prevailed against adversity.

Communication, the ability to share ideas, is what has enabled us to reach the 21st century without becoming extinct. Our means of communication have evolved from the written word to the printed page, from smoke signals to the telephone, from street singers to MP3s. And now we have the internet.

Even though it’s only a few decades old, the internet has begun to evolve, too. At first it was a simple repository of electronic pages; you had to know where to look to find what you needed. Hyperlinking gave this electronic library continuity, a means to get from one document to another. Soon this medium earned its title as the world wide web. Anyone anywhere with internet access could communicate with others from across the globe. The internet reduced the time it took to send a message from one pole to the other to a matter of seconds.

Just as early man had the entire world to himself, early users of the web felt like citizens of the planet. Eventually, though, just as mankind settled into towns and cities and states, electronic communication is becoming more localized. Ebay is a world market, Craigslist is a local one. Local communities are finding new ways to use the internet to stay in touch, to be politically active, to recruit volunteers. Just like society, the internet is becoming more and more community oriented. Just as you can be a member of the human race while at the same time be a member of your neighborhood, the internet will always be a global means of communication, but the true value of the medium is shifting toward those around you. Social networking is starting to focus more on the small scale, the local group. It’s not unprecedented; it’s exactly the way human society itself evolved.

The Whack-A-Mole Method of Ending Hate In Our Time

Originally submitted to David Farber’s Interesting People mailing list:

Clearly whatever it is that Dutch politician Geert Wilders wants to talk
about in his film is going to be the end of the internet. The news that
Network Solutions decided to pre-empt his use of a domain name registered
through them for the purpose of promoting his film need not be re-hashed
here.

However, before bemoaning yet another registrar freely deciding, as is its
right, with whom it chooses to do business, it’s important to look at the
big picture. No, it is not “censorship” for Network Solutions to decide how
it wants its services to be used. There are a number of internet registrars
all over the world, and as recently demonstrated with Enom having been
notified by the US State Department that, yes, the OFAC SDN list means
something, one might do well to select one’s registrar based in part on an
understanding of the legal climate where that registrar is located.

But, perhaps we might understand Network Solutions policy more clearly by
looking at domain names registered through NSI which freely promote killing
Muslims rather than merely making films about them. Take for example the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam, affectionately the Tamil Tigers – a nearly
universally recognized terrorist group perhaps best known for the
assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, but which has engaged in far more numerous
outright massacres in predominately Muslim areas of Sri Lanka.

The Tamil Tigers maintain at least two, if not more, domain names through
Network Solutions – eelam.com and eelamweb.com. Here, one can learn the
answers to all of your frequently asked questions about ethnic cleansing
such as at: http://www.eelamweb.com/faq/ which states “Muslims have been
asked to leave the Tamil Eelam territory until the independence of Tamil
Eelam.” This polite request is normally made at gunpoint during operations
of the Tamil Tigers.

So, the takeaway from these two actions of Network Solutions: (1)
prohibiting an NSI domain name to be used to promote an anti-Muslim film,
and (2) permitting two NSI domain names to be used to promote the mass
eviction and murder of Muslims in Sri Lanka; indicates that one needs to
apply a balanced perspective of how NSI would like its domain name services
to be used, before making rash judgments of alleged “bias”. If the
continued operation of eelam.com and eelamweb.com is any indication, NSI’s
view would appear to be that Mr. Wilders just isn’t going far enough.

Next up, the Islamic Army of Iraq, and their Louisiana brigade, courtesy of
iaisite.info, registered through Directnic.

John Berryhill, Ph.d., Esq.

While humorous, Mr. Berryhill’s comment does raise a serious question. What is the role of a host in monitoring and controlling the content of sites that register through them? If AT&T gets its way, webhosts may soon be legally and financially liable for the content carrid on their networks. Can we trust private companies to decide what is available on the internet?

Internet company suspends politician’s website over Qur’an film

Have the terrorists won yet?

An American internet company has inactivated the website of a Dutch right-wing politician, who was planning to release a critical film about the Qur’an, the Islamic holy book, on the site.

Network Solutions announced late Saturday that it had suspended the site, www.fitnathemovie, as the company assesses whether it contravenes its “acceptable use policy.”

Politician Geert Wilders says he’s made a 15-minute film as a warning to the  West about the teachings of the Qur’an.

Wilders is a well-known anti-Islamist who has called for a stop to immigration from Muslim countries and a halt to the building of new mosques in his country.

Wilders has said he’s not against Muslims but against their faith. He has previously talked about the “tsunami of Islamization” in the Netherlands, which is home to about one million Muslims.

After being turned down by at least four broadcasters in the Netherlands, Wilders announced this week that he planned to release Fitna  —the Koranic term for “strife” — on March 31 over the internet.

“If need be, I will personally distribute DVDs,” Wilders told Dutch news agency ANP after hearing about the website’s inactivation.

On Saturday, about 2,000 protesters gathered in downtown Amsterdam to demonstrate against Wilders and his film.

Calling their protest ”Netherlands shows its colours,” demonstrators say they were upset over what they saw as a right-wing witch hunt against Muslims.

Dutch officials fear the movie could spark violent protests in Muslim countries, and have emergency evacuation plans in place for their citizens in those countries.

Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende has said he rejects Wilders’s views, but supports his freedom of speech.  (Source)

The Muslim terrorists  have done better than killing all the infidels, they’ve made us afraid.  In our fear, we will do what they couldn’t, destroy Western civilization from within.  In our fear we’ll restrict liberty, bypass Constitutional protections and permit our government to act in any way they see fit…just save us from the terrorists.  We once thought the greatest threat to our way of life were the Japanese, the Germans, the Muslims.  We were wrong.  The greatest threat we face is our own fear, our own impotence to provide security while at the same time maintaining our freedom.

A baffling proposal to filter the Internet

Tim Wu, writing for Slate, asks;

Has AT&T Lost Its Mind?

Chances are that as you read this article, it is passing over part of AT&T’s network. That matters, because last week AT&T announced that it is seriously considering plans to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of U.S. intellectual property laws. The prospect of AT&T, already accused of spying on our telephone calls, now scanning every e-mail and download for outlawed content is way too totalitarian for my tastes. But the bizarre twist is that the proposal is such a bad idea that it would be not just a disservice to the public but probably a disaster for AT&T itself. If I were a shareholder, I’d want to know one thing: Has AT&T, after 122 years in business, simply lost its mind?

No one knows exactly what AT&T is proposing to build. But if the company means what it says, we’re looking at the beginnings of a private police state. That may sound like hyperbole, but what else do you call a system designed to monitor millions of people’s Internet consumption? That’s not just Orwellian; that’s Orwell.

The puzzle is how AT&T thinks that its proposal is anything other than corporate seppuku. First, should these proposals be adopted, my heart goes out to AT&T’s customer relations staff. Exactly what counts as copyright infringement can be a tough question for a Supreme Court justice, let alone whatever program AT&T writes to detect copyright infringement. Inevitably, AT&T will block legitimate materials (say, home videos it mistakes for Hollywood) and let some piracy through. Its filters will also inescapably degrade network performance. The filter AT&T will really need will be the one that blocks the giant flood of complaints and termination-of-service notices coming its way.

But the most serious problems for AT&T may be legal. Since the beginnings of the phone system, carriers have always wanted to avoid liability for what happens on their lines, be it a bank robbery or someone’s divorce. Hence the grand bargain of common carriage: The Bell company carried all conversations equally, and in exchange bore no liability for what people used the phone for. Fair deal.

AT&T’s new strategy reverses that position and exposes it to so much potential liability that adopting it would arguably violate AT&T’s fiduciary duty to its shareholders. Today, in its daily Internet operations, AT&T is shielded by a federal law that provides a powerful immunity to copyright infringement. The Bells know the law well: They wrote and pushed it through Congress in 1998, collectively spending six years and millions of dollars in lobbying fees to make sure there would be no liability for “Transitory Digital Network Communications”—content AT&T carries over the Internet. And that’s why the recording industry sued Napster and Grokster, not AT&T or Verizon, when the great music wars began in the early 2000s.

Here’s the kicker: To maintain that immunity, AT&T must transmit data “without selection of the material by the service provider” and “without modification of its content.” Once AT&T gets in the business of picking and choosing what content travels over its network, while the law is not entirely clear, it runs a serious risk of losing its all-important immunity. An Internet provider voluntarily giving up copyright immunity is like an astronaut on the moon taking off his space suit. As the world’s largest gatekeeper, AT&T would immediately become the world’s largest target for copyright infringement lawsuits.

On the technical side, if I were an AT&T engineer asked to implement this plan, I would resign immediately and look for work at Verizon. AT&T’s engineers are already trying to manage the feat of getting trillions of packets around the world at light speed. To begin examining those packets for illegal pictures of Britney Spears would be a nuisance, at best, and a threat to the whole Internet, at worst. Imagine if FedEx were forced to examine every parcel for drug paraphernalia: Next-day delivery would soon go up in smoke. Even China’s Internet, whose performance suffers greatly from its filtering, doesn’t go as far as what AT&T is proposing.

If this idea looks amazingly bad for AT&T, does the firm have an ingenious rationale for blocking content? “It’s about,” said AT&T last week, “making more content available to more people in more ways going forward.” Huh? That’s like saying that the goal of a mousetrap is producing more mice. If the quote makes any sense it all, perhaps it means that AT&T, the phone company, has aspirations to itself provide Internet content. Could it really be that AT&T’s master strategy is to try and become more like AOL circa 1996?

A different theory is that AT&T hopes that filtering out infringing material will help free up bandwidth on its network. What is so strange about this argument is that it suggests that AT&T wants people to use its product less. That’s like Exxon-Mobil complaining that SUVs are just buying up too much gas. It suggests that perhaps AT&T should try to improve its network to handle and charge for consumer demand, rather than spending money trying to control its consumers.

I just don’t get the business aspect, so perhaps the only explanation that makes any sense is a political one. It may be that AT&T so hates being under the current network neutrality mandate that it sees fighting piracy as a way to begin treating some content differently than others—discriminating—in a politically acceptable way. Or maybe AT&T thinks its new friends in the content industry will let them into Hollywood parties if they help fight piracy. Whatever the explanation, AT&T is choosing a scary, expensive, and risky way to make a point. It is also, so far, alone on this one among Internet service providers; the cable industry is probably licking its chops in anticipation of new customers. That’s why if this plan goes any further, and I were an AT&T shareholder, I’d have just one thought: SELL.

North Dakota Judge Gets it Wrong

Posted to CircleID by Al Iverson:

…WAY wrong. This is just mind blowing.

Ever been prosecuted for tracking spam? Running a traceroute? Doing a zone transfer? Asking a public internet server for public information that it is configured to provide upon demand?

No? Well, David Ritz has. And amazingly, he lost the case.

Here are just a few of the gems that the court has the audacity to call ”conclusions of law.” Read them while you go donate to David’s legal defense fund. He got screwed here, folks, and needs your help.

“Ritz’s behavior in conducting a zone transfer was unauthorized within the meaning of the North Dakota Computer Crime Law.” You might not know what a zone transfer is, but I do. It’s asking a DNS server for all the particular public info it provides about a given domain. This is a common task performed by system administrators for many purposes. The judge is saying that DNS zone transfers are now illegal in North Dakota.

“The Court rejects the test for “authorization” articulated by defendant’s expert, Lawrence Baldwin. To find all access “authorized” which is successful would essentially turn the computer crime laws of this country upside down.” That’s untrue. The judge is trying to hang David out to dry, even when provided evidence of what actually constitutes hacking or cracking. Accessing a server on the public internet that is set up to provide that public info is not a crime, and saying that it is not a crime doesn’t suddenly damage computer crime law. The judge just amended the definition of “unauthorized” to include public internet servers that were expressly configured to provide info to anybody who asks for that info.

“Ritz has engaged in a variety of activities without authorization on the Internet. Those activities include port scanning, hijacking computers, and the compilation and publication of Whois lookups without authorization from Network Solutions.” I’m not touching the “hijacking computers” statement—who knows what the judge means, and I don’t think it’s wise to assume that the judge’s definition matches the common one. But what really jumps out here is this: Publication of WHOIS information. You know, business records. Who owns a domain. Public information. The judge has arbitrarily decided that it is illegal to take information from WHOIS data—necessary information when compiling a report on a company or activity, to make sure you’re talking about the right person—and put it in a spam report or on a website.

Mickey Chandler calls the court documents in this case “12 pages of bad law,” and I couldn’t agree more.

It appears this North Dakota judge hasn’t a clue about the internet and didn’t bother to consult anyone who does.  No court should be allowed to pass judgment on a citizen without a full understanding of the elements of a case.  In addition to contributing to the defendant’s fund, this story should be circulated widely to encourage the higher courts to overturn the sentence and reprimand the judge.

Undoing the internet’s benefits

In 1969, ARPANET went live.  A creation of ARPA, this fist computer network was meant to provide redundancy for government communications.  The Defense Department realized that existing communications methods were vulnerable to attack  These were still the days of the Cold War, and it was the intention of the DoD to counter any measure the Russians might take against us.

The internet was a brilliant idea.  It was not a point-to-point communication method, like telephones and telegraphs were.  It broke messages into packets, and those packets were routed through a variety of servers, assembled once they arrived at their destination.  If one line, or twenty lines, of the network were compromised, the message would still get through by finding intact routes to follow.  The DoD understood that redundancy was the only viable solution to the vulnerability of point-to-point communications.

Leonard Kleinrock with first IMP

These days we depend on both wired communications and wireless.  Cell phones are so ubiquitous that in the case of a national emergency, nearly every person witnessing the event in person or on TV will want to call their family and friends (or upload a picture of it to YouTube).  According to the following article from Wired News, our wireless infrastructure may not yet be up to the task, leaving us once again vulnerable to a major communications break-down.

…so many people tried to send text messages on New Year’s Eve that networks got jam-packed and many of the missives arrived hours later – or not at all.

“Think of any traffic artery during rush hour: You have a large number of people who are trying to access it at the same time,” said Joe Farren, assistant vice president of public affairs for CTIA-The Wireless Association, a wireless industry group. “It’s really no different with regard to wireless networks.”

Millions and millions of messages did get through New Year’s Eve, and a minor delay in a holiday wish is hardly the end of the world. But there have been multiple occasions in recent years when getting in touch with loved ones was more vital – the Sept. 11 attacks, the 2003 blackout, Hurricane Katrina.

“What happens where there is an emergency?” asked Scott Midkiff, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Tech. “This has been a big problem with the voice cellular system. It will probably become more of a problem with text messaging.”

The cell phone carriers say they are working to expand their systems’ capacity. Jeffrey Nelson, spokesman for Verizon Wireless, said the company invests almost $6 billion annually in the wireless network.

But the number of cell phone subscribers in the U.S. nearly doubled between the end of 2001 and the end of 2006, growing from 128 million to 233 million users, Farren said.

In an emergency, it could be a concern, Cameron said.

“I didn’t have a connection using cell phones for several days, and that was really frightening,” he said of living in New York after the Sept. 11 attacks. “I didn’t talk to my parents for a week and a half.”

“It’s definitely a really big question mark,” said Rajan Shah, who sent his New Year’s text messages before the clock struck midnight to beat the rush. “It really makes you rethink technology and whether we are able to be connected through a global catastrophe.”

Text messages already use a different transmission system from cell phone calls. There may be a way to differentiate among types of information or to create a separate system for people to use in emergencies.

Farren said emergency networks in place and now being expanded allow emergency service personnel to maintain voice cell phone service in times of need.

But that doesn’t help average Joe trying to find Mrs. Joe.

The next step may be some consumer education, Farren said.

“In an emergency situation, you really should stay off your phone” if possible, he said.

(For a good read on the history of the internet, visit The Living Internet)