Interlude: The lunatics are on the grass

When hackers take over a virtual world its just online mayhem. People are relocated to the bottom of the ocean, safe areas are turned into blood baths, and basically anarchy rules. As one virtual citizen put it "somehow an insane god had taken control of our world and was out to kill us all".

I couldn't help but draw the parallel with real life where crazy shit happening just means an insane President and his cronies have siezed control of the country by hacking into our social and political systems. Unfortunately we've yet find the reset button that will roll us back to 1999. Perhaps there was a Y2K bug after all...

And while hackers are running riot in Shadowbane, other script kiddies are doing donuts all over AOL land. AOL is going to need all the help from Microsoft it can get, lets hope they weren't relying on Microsoft giving them security advice :-)

To Boise and Back: I have a dream

I have just returned from a short business trip to Boise, Idaho. It was one of those trips where you seem to spend more time in airports and up in the sky contemplating "Chicken or beef?" than being where you are supposed to be. Consequently I had plenty of time to read and jot notes for some new blog entries. So here goes with part one of my To Boise and Back blog entries.

People who know me personally may have noticed in that last year that I've become rather interested in the topic of corporate personhood. I first heard about this issue on a Working Assets radio programme last year. As the issue and its consequences were explained it immediately made complete sense to me and resonated at a deep level. It seemed to be the root cause of so many things that are going wrong in America and consequently across the world. So it was natural that doing something about corporate personhood should be the central focus for my new found activist energy. We are still a long way from seeing an end to corporate personhood, but many people and organizations are starting to act, and act up, to ensure that it does happen, one day.

When I was younger there were three things I had listed that I wanted to see happen in my lifetime. They were:

• peace in Northern Ireland
• the end of apartheid in South Africa
• the fall of the Berlin Wall (and consequent) unification of Germany

Lofty dreams for a school boy indeed. But I've been so lucky to live to see two out of the three come true so soon in my lifetime. Arguably since the Good Friday Peace accord "the troubles" are well on the road to been a distant memory too which makes three out of three. Certainly todays unrest in Northern Ireland is a faint echo of the my childhood memories of daily bomb scares across the country, sealed toilets and no rubbish bins in public, and frequent, sometimes devastating explosions that killed thousands since the late 1960's.

So I'd like to add to my list of things to see in my life time:

• abolition of all the laws that have been passed to uphold corporate personhood, and the addition of a constitutional ammendment that sets the record straight for good: corporations are not persons protected by the fourtheenth amendment, and do not enjoy rights granted to all natural persons by it and the bill of rights.

So help me out here, follow some of the links and read about corporate personhood and help my dream come true...

The smoking gun

This weeks issue of Newsweek contains a story about how the smoking gun has been found, and classified. The problem is the smoking gun is belching its first clouds of complicity in the Whitehouse.

You see the recent 800-page bi-partisan congressional report about 9-11 turned out to be too hot to handle. It contained the black and white evidence of how Bush received a PDB (Presidential daily briefing) outlining al Qaeda threats to hijack planes just a month before 9/11. And it details the links between Saudi Arabia and the al Qaeda operatives involved in the 9/11 hijackings.

The Bush Administration is now not only saying it cannot declassify the report, it is also trying to claim classified status for information it contains that has already published on the CIA web site. For instance it claims that the very existance of PDBs is classified information and that alone prevents publishing the congressional report.

Doh!

Doesn't GWB remember that his own father was the one giving daily briefings to Jimmy Carter in the 70's? Even the most simple minded search on PDBs brings up gads of stories about PDBs, plenty of which predate 9/11. I just fail to see how any sane person could claim that classification of this information is for any purpose other than to cover someone's ass? And we all know who that someone is and just where the smoke is blowing out of...

News just in from the Ministry of Truth

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

George Orwell, "1984"

Terrorism sells. Totally.

Someone in government has decided that the best way to have Americans swallow the whopper otherwise known Total Information Awareness is to rename it Terrorism Information Awareness. Oh like that little deft marketing play will really fool everyone into believing they are not going to be using it to increase survelance of the general American populace. Does anyone else see the irony in that this is exactly the kind of tactic used by the government in Orwell's "1984"? In 1984 the "Ministry of Truth" is actually the ministry devoted to spreading government propoganda, the "Ministry of Peace" is the ministry devoted to war, and the "Ministry of Love" is the ministry devoted to law and order. So I'm really surprised that they didn't decide to rename TIA to "Truthful Love and Peace". Nah, the American public would never buy that...

The problem is they probably would because the poor dumb/paranoid/frightened (delete as appropriate) American public has a tendancy to buy anything sugar coated with the message of reducing terrorism. They bought the invasion of Afghanistan. They bought the invasion of Iraq. They bought the reduction of civil liberties. They bought the mass neglect of the economy. They bought Bush's tax cut (because cutting taxes stimulates more spending i.e. shopping and shopping is the first and most important message for us that came from the government after 9/11). Basically they bought the entire store full of "anti-terrorist" measures and will continue to do so until Bush and Co. get bored of chasing after terrorists at the end of the rainbow and the next big thing to be afraid of is identified and whatever it is, we'll buy it because buying stuff makes us feel good and feeling good is after all, the only thing that counts.

So I'm sad to report that unfortunately this little groundhog is seeing a shadow today and hence is forecasting six more years of the Bush winter of our discontent and six more years of this crazy bullshit shopping spree.

Lets hope I'm wrong.

I invented what? For who?

Today the mailman bought me a letter from the good old EU. Yes it was even address to "Etas-Unis D'Amerique". Its no wonder the USPS didn't toss it into the shredder before it reached me, but somehow it made it here. I was even more surprised to find it was from the European Patent Office. Okay so I've been listed as an inventor on patents a few times before so I figure one of them had made it to European Patent submittal. But wait, WTF is this?

Applicant/Proprietor: America Online, Inc.

It took me quite a while to figure out I had once worked on a project for a dot com customer and they ended up filing a patent on the technology I was working on listing me as one of the inventors. It turns out they ended up selling out to AOL and with them went my co-invention. So now AOL owns a patent that I invented and I'm blogging about it now just like any other asshole on-line inventor :-)

Does anyone know how to uninvent something?

And now for something completely different...

If you've done six impossible things today why not round it off with some Extreme Ironing.

A movie review unloaded: The Matrix Reloaded

Note: No spoilers ahead

I could subtitle this blog entry as "I brag therefore I am". But that would be only half the story. It should be "I brag therefore I am a very luck guy with a girlfriend who owns a small business which is soon to be advertising at the local movie theater and hence I got a very special treat tonight". Well I've said it now so I guess I wont have to say much more. Oh, the special treat? Yeah, it was tickets to a "friends and family" preview of "The Matrix Reloaded" at our local movie theater.

Now I'm not going to be so cruel as to give an spoilers about what is in the much awaited sequel, if you really wanted a spoiler or two you would probably have hunted them down by now. However I will say this, if you can get past the first 30 minutes or so which is set mostly in Zion, then those who were big fans of the first movie will not be disappointed. Those of you who haven't seen the first movie will be totally confused, but will enjoy the effects none the less but do yourself a favour, rent "The Matrix" and watch it first.

Yes you'll see the same trademark bullet-time shots a plenty, but they will go so far beyond the original usage your jaw will, or should be dropping all over again. Mine was. Just when you're thinking okay this is another Neo vs. Agent Smith(s) fight, it steps up a notch and another, and another, and another until you're wondering how it will all end. On occassion you can feel the audience getting ready to start laughing it gets so insane. And a couple of times even the movie characters give a little Spock-like grin that indeed, they had just witness something "interesting".

Yes the parts of the movie outside of the Matrix are for the most part slow, mundane or cheesy, but I'd say the same was true of the original. I'd hoped that the brothers might have been able to make the sequel and completely avoided that part of the story. Fortunately the non-matrix stuff is mostly frontloaded, mostly to explain the whole Zion sub-plot that was never really explained in the original movie. Now that the saving of Zion is the focus of the story I guess it was inevitable more time would be devoted to it in this movie.

But I would say the spectacular effects, stunning fight scenes, and yet more philosophical discussions between the ever terse "I know Kung Fu!" Neo and more garillous characters more than make up for the slow start. I really can't wait to see how they filmed some of the scenes. There's also a good deal of humour in there, but its quite natural and not at all like the movies where characters inappropriately drop out of character to make a joke with the audience. And there's some subliminal humour in there too, probably more than I caught on a first viewing. Eagle eyed Bush haters will love the brothers dig at Bush being included among the montage of mankind's evil scurges. Blink and you'll miss it!

Residents of Oakland and Alameda, California will get a kick out of seeing their home towns and streets on the big screen. Driving through the tube will never be the same, and finally I know what that big explosion I saw on the Alameda Matrix set was! Damn those guys did some amazing work on that fake freeway they built!

Oh and I should mention the surprise twist at the end (I wont say any more other than its a surprise) will leave you drop jawed and begging for the concluding sequel. Fortunately we only have to wait until November to see it which isn't too bad - unlike the several years between "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi" which was certainly the last time I was this anxious to see a sequel! So if you feel the least bit envious that I got to see the movie on 5.13 insted of 5.15 just bare in mind, its just another two days I have to spend waiting for the final episode. And I can tell you I'm a darn sight more anxious to see this final episode than Star Wars!

Get ready to "Free your mind" and enjoy the movie!

Catch the Pigeon

Bush's Orwellian quote for the day: "the United States will find the killers, and they will learn the meaning of American justice".

That would be the American justice where we toss out all International Law, send 300,000 troops with billions of dollars of smart bombs to get you. Then we flatten everything and everyone between you and us that raises so much as a pointy stick in opposition (and some that don't) and then most likely let you escape so you're free to taunt us another day.

It all sounds like some twisted highstakes international version of Catch the Pigeon to me. If you don't believe me lets check out the cast list for Catch the Pigeon:

There's Dick Dastardly, ... who apparently grew tired of losing all those Wacky Races, was now in charge of The Vulture Squadron, a band of airborne misfits whose mission was to Stop that Pigeon!. Well that would have to be George Bush Jnr.

It gets better: Dastardly received his orders from "The General" who was never seen but always heard barking orders to poor Dick over the phone.. So The General would be Corporate American, aka Big Oil & Co.

Then there's Zilly: ... whose nerves were so frazzled he could barely muster the courage to get into his plane, let alone fly it. That would have to be Chainey.

And of course Klunk: ... the squad's mechanic and inventor of gizmos so strange that they could almost put Rube Goldberg to shame. He also had some very strange vocal inflections. That would have to be Ashcroft, mastermind and evil doer behind Total Information Awareness and other dastardly deeds.

The only question is, who wins the medal as Mutley ... who always demanded a medal for following the dimwitted deeds of his master ???

Lets party like its 1984

I have to admit it made me chuckle to hear that Democracy Means You is now selling Bush-Orwell 2004 T shirts. Obviously I'm not the only one who has been making the connection between recent events and Orwell's predictions for the future.

I wouldn't even trust you to speak my weight!

The title today is a phrase from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy when Ford is expressing his contempt from a particularly irritating speaking computer. However I'm applying this comment, and the contempt with which it was expressed for Microsoft, or at least some subset of employees at that company.

Now granted that Microsoft is a company that many just love to hate and love to poke fun at at every opportunity, but really, this time they have it coming. Today I read a story about Microsoft's latest security blunder, the latest in a never ending series that I am continually reminded of like a lingering oozing sorem every time I get a prompt to download yet another Windows security patch.

The blunder this time rendered their supposedly super secure all encompasing .NET Passport service into just another wide open portal to all my personal information. Fortunately I've never registered anything other than a user name and a MSDN subscription with that service. So at least if someone had hacked my account the only thing they could have stolen was Microsoft's own software.

Now I'm ready to say that all non-proveable software probably has bugs, and quite likely a lot of them. Even the best, most mature software seems to have many lingering bugs, a few per 10K of code or, if you work for NASA maybe a little better. Worse still there's correct code which implements a bad design. Its bad design that often blows the door security systems and encryption systems and security systems are constantly showing up flaws, just think of WEP for one.

This time for Microsoft it was bad design, a bug and really gross ineptitude (you should click on that link if its the only one you click on). It turned out all you had to do to reset the password on any Passport account was to use a URL containing the phrase "emailpwdreset", presumably as a HTTP request parameter. Furthermore the guy who discovered this had sent them about 10 emails detailing the flaw before they did anything about it.

So not only did the design a really, really simple mechanism to reset passwords, and exposed it on a web page, they also made the mechanism externally accessible, failed to put an internal code checks to verify it wasn't being used from outside of Microsoft (like its not hard to hijack a domain name anyway) and finally to add injury to insult, they ignored continued warnings that they had this problem. Oh and even the FCC is pissed off about this one, because of their continued marketing spam saying how perfectly secure Passport is. They may even get fined but probably only $11,000, just what good would that do, it would cost them more than that much to make the press release about the flaw. Perhaps $1 billion might make a difference?

I do hope someone got a serious ass-whopping for designing this system and exposing to the outside world because, like the title says, now I wouldn't trust them to speak my weight, let alone guard my personal secrets. And as for the person who ignored all the warnings that there was a flaw, well Seppuku is probably the only honorable thing for them to do. And the marketing people who continue to endorse their BS security campaigns? Well maybe rip out their tounges and poke them with a pointy stick.

Okay, I forgot, we live in a civilised society so we can't do that kind of thing. Well maybe since they are endangering our national security (I take a guess that a good number of our government workers have Passport accounts that could have been compromised) we could use the infamous Patriot I act to "detain" them indefinitely down in Guantanamo Bay as enemy combatants. That'll teach 'em!

Fighting terrorism funds drug dealers? WTF!

The irony it contains is thick, layers deep in fact, and multi-faceted too. But the news just in is that after the Taliban virtually eliminated growth of opium poppies in Afghanistan (they thought drugs were bad mmmkay), Afghanistan is set this year to be the Number 1 opium grower in the world.

So having run those interminable ads about how buying drugs funds terrorists, now Uncle Sam has to realize that the converse is true: fighting terrorism in Afghanistan has funded drug dealers. This years bumper crop will no doubt result in a bumper crop of opium and opiates on the drug market which will suck more and more people into the world of smack. Then Uncle Sam will have to go and wage its Jihad against drugs in Afghanistan too and use it as an excuse for a continued and massive military prescence there.

If only the US would give a fraction of what it spends on waging war, on economic and developmental aid to these countries it might just be able to convince their starving rural farmers its not worth growing opium poppies instead of wheat for purely economic reasons. After all how much does it cost to pay a few hundred thousand farmers more than the $1.5 a day they make from processing opium seed pods? A hell of a lot less than the tens of billions we spend on fighting wars against nations and against against drugs and the intangible Axis of Evil. After all the tangible harm the Axis of Evil has yet to inflict on our country has been the economic damage of tens of billions spent on a war against Iraq and the continued distraction from what a totally crap job our unelected President is doing at running the country while he's busy running rough shod over the UN , International Law and any hope for a future other than that with USA Inc. winning Most Hated Nation Status.

The cynic in me really wants to point out that the government wants to see drugs back as the #1 evil that poor frightened Americans have to worry about. I guess they didn't bother GWB, or Clinton too much when they were consuming them, but then they were the lucky ones with the socio-economic status to kick the habit and the highly paid spin-doctors to gloss over the tarnish on their records. The rest of us, we will have to go to war against drugs to save our soles.

Come to think of it why aren't they just targeting Hollywood and music business, some of the biggest and must visible consumers of drugs? Oh I forgot, because it would be hypocritical not too go after your own before trying to right the rest of the world and since we now live in a hypocracy, not a democracy, its A-OK with GWB & Co. for business to continue as usual. Right after they are done catching all the evil terrorists that got away and so far that's just about all of them.