High School Isn’t What It Used To Be

Imagine the embarrassment of being a teenager again, except now your source of torment is not limited to forced school interaction with ruthless bullies, but now occurs at home and around the WWW too.

Sexual attitudes need to quickly change, and treatment of bullies needs to radically evolve if we’re to save kids like Amanda Todd from social torture and early deaths.

ADDED:

Two years ago a child at King George School committed suicide due to #bullying, from what I hear the kids are at it again #PrairieSouth—
Robert Thomas (@Rhino_Bob) January 09, 2013

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.

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

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

Bit Torrent Links

I’m downloading the latest Ubuntu Linux OS to try it out. It’s a free alternative to Windows, and comes in very handy if Windows ever quits working (for one of its various usual reasons).

To download quickly, safely, and without errors, even if there’s an interruption, Bit Torrent provides those features. Here’s a review of the most popular and effective clients. I’d not heard of qBitTorrent until today, I’ve more typically used uTorrent or BitComet years ago.

This way I also found Jamendo, which has free albums for download and sharing. It’s like the old software known as “shareware” where you could try the full product before you bought it.

Technologies like Bit Torrent help the Internet remain a place where anyone (in places without SOPA style laws) has equitable access to distribute their work for others to share it. That’s why the Pirate Party of Canada promotes the use of Bit Torrent.

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Also free, and very useful, is LibreOffice. It’s a replacement to Microsoft Office. Most people will not need to buy Word, Excel, or Powerpoint if they use LibreOffice. Install Java as well. If Java asks you to install a toolbar, just say no.

Cats

It would appear from this graph that as the cat threat makes it into the news more, there are fewer people[?] searching the word “cat” on the Internet. Curious.

I’m questioning my theory that the Internet runs on cat power. Perhaps the AI autocorrection robots will overtake their cuteness and hilarity?

Robots vs. Cats: The epic Internet battle for teh tubez.

RoboCon and VikiLeaks

Surprisingly, the Canadian government is dealing with other scandals it’s instigated. Vikileaks was the subject again today, where the Speaker ruled that Anonymous (an unrepresented collective of hackers and political activists) was found to have breached the privledge of Minister Toews who’s created the monster of a bill, C-30 (to spy on Canadians using the Internet).

You can’t arrest an idea, but you can call it before a committee even though there are no people there to represent it.

Anonymous gets to #Toewstify

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ShitHarperDid.com cocreator points out, the IOC didn’t bicker about how much muscle Ben Johnson grew from cheating, and if his original muscle would still have been enough for first place in 1988. Why give the Conservatives more slack for something more serious?

“Canada’s Math Problems”:

I’d like to speak to you about Canada’s serious math problems.

First of all, the Harper Conservatives were elected to a majority government with less than 40 per cent of the votes. That’s four in 10. Mathematically speaking, four in 10 is not the majority of numbers between one and 10. In fact, four out of 10 happens to be a failing grade on a math test. It’s also a losing — and I repeat losing — road trip for a hockey team. But perhaps most importantly, four in 10 isn’t even enough dentists to credibly recommend you a tube of toothpaste.

If four in 10 isn’t good enough for toothpaste, should it be good enough to run our country?

(Crowd yells, “No”).

Digital Star Credit Card Scam – GLOBAL PAYMENTS – UPDATED

I’m a recent victim of Credit Card Crime. I’m actually kind of amused/intrigued by it.
My Visa was used by criminals to send ~$75 to “Digital Star” in the UK. Fraudulent charges appeared first after Feb. 3. Check your Visa, doesn’t matter which bank.

The charges were made by phone or Internet, Visa rep couldn’t distinguish! He suggested I phone Digital Star in the UK to first confirm I hadn’t dealt with them, although I was pretty sure I hadn’t made any ticket purchases in the UK, since I didn’t plan on going there anytime soon.

I’m not overly worried that my computer is compromised (cross my legs, hope to fly), and figure a business got hacked. Now I need to figure out everywhere online I have recurring payments set up, and add the new number. That’s a 10 day wait, and that’s the only downside to this, since I won’t have to pay the $150 missing from my credit.

UPDATE March 31, 2012
Ok, tonight CTV News reported Global Payments was breached, and up to 10 million cards could be compromised. The charges would have been in Jan. And Feb. I think we just learned what did this to us.

Child Predator Tax

Look for the latest charge to appear soon on your Bell, Rogers, Telus, (or MTS, or SaskTel) bill by next year when Vic Toews Bill C-30 comes into effect. It may not be labeled as such, but you can think of the price increase as the “Child Predator Tax”. The misnamed “Lawful Access” cum “Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act” Bill C-30 is going to require new hardware to be installed at all Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and you’re paying twice for its (inevitable) implementation.

For those too young, or naive, to remember the grossly inaccurate government estimate for the implementation of another electronic tracking system (No, not GIGAText), the Long Gun Registry (LGR), here’s some quick history to catch you up (with added highlighting):

Taxpayers were originally expected to pay only $2 million of the budget while registration fees would cover the rest. In 1995, the Department of Justice reported to Parliament that the system would cost $119 million to implement, and that the income generated from licensing fees would be $117 million. This gives a net cost of $2 million. At the time of the 2002 audit, the revised estimates from the Department of Justice were that the cost of the program would be more than $1 billion by 2004/05 and that the income from licence fees in the same period would be $140 million.

The Harper government meekly estimates the net cost to Internet consumers (you) to be $80,000,000 over the first four years (plus extra millions into the future). This is only 40 times more than the initial LGR estimated cost. Using the multiplier of $1B/$2M (500 times off) for the LGR to get to an expected (by me) final cost, puts the price tag closer to $80,000,000 * 500
= $40,000,000,000? Could this worst case be right?

Naw!

Skynet can’t be that expensive to implement? Who wants this crap anyway? Oh, looks like everyone from English speaking colony countries do. Simultaneously. That’s sort of freaky. No?

In opposing the US pornography bill, Rep. John Conyers said :

“This is not protecting children from internet pornography. It’s creating a database for everybody in this country with a lot of other purposes.”

Don’t Toews Me Bro! – Harper’s NCC Letter

Read the First Part, if you want.

This following letter may be the most hilarious thing the Vic Toews Internet Spying Bill scandal has produced. Stephen Harper, the 2001 President of the NCC, wrote supporters the following:

“The jackasses at Elections Canada are out of control.”
Please excuse my language,but when I learned Elections Canada’s bureaucrats have pressed charges against a Canadian citizen, I just blew my cool.That is the exact language I used.

Was he mad at Election’s Canada for charging Conservatives (who later pleaded guilty for a reduced penalty) with the In-Out scandal? Nope, the Conservative Party and their electoral fraud scheme hadn’t been invented yet. He was mad for a legitimate reason: Early publication of election results to elsewhere in Canada – a practice common thanks to social media.

What’s strikingly funny (also), is this:

What was Paul’s crime?
He simply posted news on his personal website. And no, it wasn’t part of a criminal conspiracy, or luring children toward violent pornography. It was actually something government officials seem to believe is a lot more dangerous – information.

In fact, this is the first attempt by our government to control the Internet and press charges – just for the sake of controlling information. The implications are very ominous, very scary.

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Hat Tip to Susan D.

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More gold is contained in the NCC Harper letter. He basically makes the case for WikiLeaks, years before that website was founded (and its primary creator’s {Assange} life threatened by Harper’s former primary adviser {Flanagan}).

Paul saw Section 329 as nothing more than a gag law and an archaic gag law at that. As he put it,“People can beam around information worldwide in micro-seconds, and government wants to ban our use of it when it becomes inconvenient. It’s time for the Canadian government to join the rest of us in the 21st century.” So he purposely defied the law on the principle that the government has no business controlling the free flow of public information on the Internet. He believes, as do I, that all Canadians should have the right to disseminate public information. It’s called free speech.

I believe the Jean-Pierre Kingsleys of the world fear Paul Bryan. Or more to the point, they fear what Paul represents – a free, independent-minded citizen using technology to give power back to individuals. After all, information is power. The less control the government has over the flow of information, the less control it can exert over its citizens.

So Elections Canada has charged him with breaking a law that’s as dangerous as it is ludicrous.