Good Ol’ American Sex Scandal

The American media is very primitive, which is why it avoids complex and important issues, and instead resorts to tabloid topics like sex scandals. While their country is embroiled in an unprovoked war in Iraq, occupies Afghanistan (along with Canada), and itches to bomb Iran for oil, they’re worried more about where the wiener Petraeus has been.

It pretty much doesn’t matter, and it’s par for the course, yet it’s popular to talk about because it involves powerful people being shamed. It’s not exactly Wikileaks’ level of interesting, yet it will lead to many old stories being looked at in a slightly new, sexy light.

So far it only offers scant hope to Republicans that they can somehow embarrass Obama or impeach him over an unrelated event in Benghazi, Libya, and a shirtless FBI male agent whose photo was published today with shot-up dummies. No photo bombing, or anything remotely interesting. Expect this scandal to blow over in a month if no new tie-ins are made.
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It’s not directly related, but Greenwald had an interesting email exchange with a US Army Colonel years ago.

Intel Driver Error Causes Blue Screen of Death

If you have an Intel Centrino wireless adapter, and get a Blue Screen of Death, update the driver to version 15. 13.x and 14.x can generate BSODs especially when connecting to commercial Access Points, like Alcatel’s.

netw5ns64.sys (or related errors) come up on the BSOD screen. Windows doesn’t update to the latest Intel driver, that’s the problem. Microsoft Update tells you it’s got the latest, but that’s untrue. You have to go to www.intel.com and check there for the latest driver for your Intel WiFi card.

Geist on Copyright vs. Internet

An interesting, long lecture from Canadian copyright expert Michael Geist, given at the U of Sask. recently.

ADDED: Here’s a little on open government, as presented at the U of Regina

While You Were Sleeping

Have you committed a crime? No? You’re still in a police database somewhere. It’s not supposed to happen according to our laws, and according to American law, but it’s happening and it’s called TRAPWIRE. 9/11 is often the excuse used, but it’s actually simply the state using its latest tech toys in the most obvious way possible, which is why Orwell wrote fiction about it. It didn’t take a whole lot of imagination to dream up a world where our every move is government monitored. Yet you can expect that crime will not be eliminated in such a world.

When democracy is lost, and the power of the ballot box to bring change is gone, what’s left for oppressed people? Crime gets worse. People get desperate. It’s not an untested societal model, even if the technological pervasiveness of the state has not bee quite as acute. It’s not a country I want to see, let alone live in.

I can’t stop the slide into fascism that Canada is facing, not by myself. It took the Greatest Generation to defeat it previously, and it will take another generation to overcome again. Yet our tools of truth are under attack by governments, by our representatives. Well, they claim to represent the people, anyway.

If you care about your civil liberties: write a complaint about #TrapWire to your elected representatives!—
Asher Wolf (@Asher_Wolf) August 13, 2012

It’s 2012. We don’t have flying cars, but we do all carry tracking devices (cell phones), and the state watches where we go in multiple ways. I think I’d rather have the flying cars, even given the naive pre-9/11 view that they’d not be used as missiles.

Martian Automobile Association

Years ago I created the Martian Automobile Association (MAA), and tried selling memberships on eBay. I forget if I managed to sell any membership cards, but remember creating at least one (and have a photo of it), so I probably did. That member hasn’t stayed in touch, probably because they never managed to put one of their vehicles on the fourth planet to make use of the piece of mind my MAA provides.

Martian Automobile Association

 Don’t be caught on Mars without us!

Membership Booklet

If you are planning on traveling to the Red Planet before 2030, be sure to take your MAA card with you.

Member benefits [only available on Mars]:

• Rover towing to nearest Mars base, or Platform
• Oxygen/Nitrogen/Hydrogen/Plutonium fuel supply delivered in emergencies
• Microsoft Blue Screen Of Death insurance
• Planetary impact insurance up to $2,500,000,000US
• Access to the toll free MAA help line 1-555-GOT-MARS?
• Radiation poisoning antidote
• Babelfish and Google Translate for alien language translation
• Thermal blanket
• “Beam Me Up Scotty” transportation in emergencies
• Sand King Hotel discounts

Membership card photo courtesy of JPL Spirit, and Computer_Saskboy

Of course my renewed interest in the MAA is NASA’s recent #MSL and Curiosity rover that successfully touched down yesterday.

Eye in the Sky: MRO's @HiRISE camera caught this shot of me & my parachute during landing at Mars #MSL twitpic.com/ag8j1w—
Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) August 06, 2012

Google Street View Circa 1907

It seems Google didn’t invent Street View The idea was 100 years old when it first started to become popular on the Internet!

Behold Vancouver, street view from 1907

Barcelona, Spain 1908
Look at all the bicycles!

Vancouver in 1971, albeit a little shaky camera work.

Moose Jaw, circa 2006, with excellent John Wing humour as background music. I actually know two of the vehicles that go by.

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Hat tip Alec

Barcelona 1908 youtu.be/kJdwzY1o7k8—
Alec Couros (@courosa) July 16, 2012

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And here’s a little unrelated WikiLeaks humour. Use the Fifth.

How to take the Fifth on just about every question asked in front of a grand jury couros.ca/x/106—
Alec Couros (@courosa) July 16, 2012

Those Facebook Games

Facebook games are getting more, and more easy all of the time. Just see how long it takes you to solve one of the typical Find-A-Word game images that goes around. Here’s my contribution to the game-spam.

Share it once you find the solution! Spread my meme!

RCMP – Really Carefully Monitoring People

Originally appeared on BackoftheBook.ca

How can I write this without sounding, well, paranoid? I believe the RCMP is watching too many people, and abusing its resources. There are plenty of signs this is taking place, and it worries me. The police should not be monitoring Canadians without having a reasonable suspicion that criminal acts are imminent or are taking place. It is not a valid reason to pay police to watch all activists, especially ones who peacefully oppose prevailing political governance. Are we not a society free to disagree with our government?

Here’s an incomplete, but startling, list of reports that suggest the Mounties are getting their man by putting everyone, innocent people too, under a microscope.

• Yinka Dene Alliance is not a terrorist organization. If the report had said RCMP were monitoring “Polish Canadians” (as a random example), do you think there would be more outrage?
• RCMP interrogate former Conservative candidate for passing documents from anonymous source to Ethics Commissioner in Parliament (after Parliament mail room lost first submission).
• A BC man got a visit from the RCMP after contacting the Prime Minister.
• Until the 1980s, the RCMP kept a secret list of people they considered to be Communists, and were prepared to round these people up in the unlikely event of the Cold War heating up. PROFUNC was ended by accident.
• The G8/G20 brought Canada’s so-called “largest ever” police spy operation down on activists whose worst members did damage comparable to unruly drunk hockey fans in Vancouver. Meanwhile, the police assigned to watch the protests ended up being charged with crimes. RCMP “abandoned policy”, and kettled protesters, which resulted in the arrests of hundreds, to possibly over a thousand, innocent people.

Since there are no laws clearly governing the use of your personal information collected by the ruling political party into their CIMS database, they could be sharing this intelligence with the Mounties. Would it change your answer to any survey or political phone call if you knew your response could end up on an RCMP surveillance watchlist?

As a political blogger, I’m pretty much screwed if the government takes an active interest in me. Even though I’ve previously worked in a job for the government where people, with less oversight and more authority than the RCMP, confirmed I’m loyal to Canada (and the Queen even) and am the opposite of a threat to national security, I have little doubt that now I’m an unhappy smiley face in CIMS, and who knows what other police-state Stasi-style databases. With social networking, it’s easy to track most of my contacts. When Toews’ Bill C-30 passes, the police will be able to do legally what they’ve probably been doing since September 11th, 2001. I also carry a cell phone, so my movements could be mapped, or conversations bugged using the phone mic. Ubiquitous technology is stacked against a free, democratic Canada.

Will the RCMP maintain the peace in Canada, or bring an end to it? Will they resist the pull of pervasive electronic monitoring of every person? I know what I hope for, but the signs are pointing in the wrong direction.

Evade Censorship of Pirate Bay Block

Children learn how to use computers and work around restrictions by experimentation and reading. So too must adults when they are confronted with restrictions. It’s a good idea to learn how to evade censorship before the flow of information is shut off, otherwise working around the problem becomes much more difficult because you must work from your own ingenuity rather than from experts’ reports and examples found on the Internet.

Slashdot reports that citizens of the UK are being cut off from The Pirate Bay, an internationally famous Bit Torrent sharing website. Torrents, which point to files of all sorts, including free operating systems, leaked political documents, copyrighted TV, movies, books, programs and music are available at The Pirate Bay. UK courts have ordered Internet Service Providers in the UK to block access to the Swedish/global site. The local UK Pirate Party has provided a proxy site to work around the censorship, but this too will probably be attacked by the ruling government and courts. Sharing is a political, and even a religious act.

It’s very important that people know how to evade censorship, because the skills are as crucial to defending liberty as the Americans’ Second Amendment. The government doesn’t only want to control your guns anymore. In the Information Age, people should have a right to a free Internet without censorship firewalls like the Great Firewall of China, or the UK’s Pirate Bay Browsing Ban. Without evasion techniques and anti-censorship software like Tor, the Egyptian people may not have been able to overthrow Mubarak, or interest/involve the world in their struggle last year.

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Originally posted at BackoftheBook.ca

ConCalls: IP Match Confirmed: Poutine Used Prescott’s Computer in #RoboCon

Read lots more by Brandon Laraby who has a roundup of links, Curiosity Cat, and Sixth Estate. When the latest documents from court appear online, I’ll post them with the rest.
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RoboCon got a little more interesting and solid today after Glen McGregor made a trip to the courthouse to do a little investigating, unbeknownst to me. I was prodding CBC to ask Maher about RoboCon.

@saskboy Well, we have none today. Maybe next week!—
Stephen Maher (@stphnmaher) May 04, 2012

Then Stephen Maher appeared on CTV to explain what Glen found Elections Canada learned in MARCH of this year.

Proxy servers, burner credit cards, loose lips by campaign workers — the #robocalls hunt for Pierre Poutine narrows bit.ly/IrSYdj—
Glen McGregor (@glen_mcgregor) May 04, 2012

CBC report on Prescott’s computer.

“Elections Canada investigator Al Mathews filed the statement on March 20 to support a request for a court order compelling Rogers to turn over subscriber information about the account that used that IP address on that day. The company complied with the order the following day.”
“RackNine records provided to Elections Canada showed that Prescott’s account had been accessed from a Rogers IP address in Guelph, 99.225.228.34″

On May 2, 2011 — election day — both clients “accessed Racknine within four minutes of each other,” using the same IP address, Mathews says in the court document.

“The IP address was registered with Rogers Cable, who said the billing information for the account goes from March 26 to May 5 of last year. The election was called on March 26, with the vote on May 2.”
Sounds like an election ISP account, possibly at the Guelph campaign office of the Conservatives (opposed to a residence of Prescott), as I’ve seen others suggest (but I haven’t seen the evidence that proves that, yet). ADDED: http://bit.ly/ISd9px Star says location of computer not confirmed yet.

Matthew McBain and Christopher Crawford said Michael Sona talked about “calling electors to tell them their poll location had changed” and “making a misleading poll moving call,” according to Matthews’ court filing.

Globe and Mail’s version of events.

The latest report confirms the accusation by LaRue of Prescott, made a month ago. Prescott has not been charged by Elections Canada, and the allegations have not been proven in court. Prescott has returned to Twitter the last two weeks, but hasn’t continued blogging at his Blogging Tory affiliated site “Christian Canadian Conservative”.