- The warm, fuzzy (literally!) face of the police state. (H/T Jim Bovard)
- China finally going to stop stockpiling US dollars?
- You already know this, don’t you? Nevertheless, it never hurts to be reminded of the four magic statements to make to the police when you’re stopped and they want to poke around and see what they might be able to pin on you.
- Mostly for the nerds hereabouts: Rethinking cloud storage (and in particular, rethinking SpiderOak).
- “Security and privacy: Experts connect the dots as debate rages.” (Tip o’ hat to MJR)
- Via the Infamous Oregon Law Hobbit: The Skunk Party Manifesto.
- Solid scientific evidence for intelligent design! Erm, that is design by fish.
- Finally, Chaser — the famous border collie who can identify more than 1,000 objects by name and understands simple sentences is now the subject of her very own book. (Link is to an interview with Chaser’s owner/trainer, who’s pretty exceptional himself. Windsurfing and biking at 85!) You can of course get the book here. Video below and at the interview link.
Thanks for that link about Chinese giving up on the dollar. I’ve passed it on…
As to magic incantations in cop encounters, somehow they do not appeal to me. “Am I free to go”, do people normally talk like that? How about “Are we done here?” And saying you wish to remain silent, then saying it again, because the Supreme Court says so, seems kinda silly to me. How about just keeping your trap shut? Anyway none of these incantations will work if you get snagged under NDAA…
But hey, go ahead with them. Who knows, they might help. Certainly better than spilling your guts, anyway. Isn’t it interesting that in all the cop shows on TV, the only suspects who do the smart thing and keep quiet are the Mafia thugs? I guess the ruling class are “animal training”, trying to tell us only bad people do these things.
Someone [Edison ?] once said, “Work is what you do when you don’t like your job.” Obviously Chaser hasn’t WORKED a day in his life.
~~~
I do like the *CONCEPT* of the “skunk party” — but am also fearful it would turn into another Tea Party — people wanting to make a political division and trying to “lead” it. The nature of people being what they are… (This in spite of the author explicitly saying that it would NOT be a Party.)
My major objection, though, is: how do the Policy Ideas play out while getting them accomplished? It sounds like government interference (laws, influence, and control of the results) is the method of choice. Who among anarchists would trust this? Only limited government advocates need apply.
I keep getting advertisements from a company that wants me to put my business data in the cloud. Their selling point is that during a disaster the information would still be available, and my business could keep running.
I think their definition of “disaster” is not my definition of “disaster.”
I beleive there is a good chance that the servers that make up the “cloud” are already owned or coopted by the NSA. If you want secure back up for your data, I recommend a thumb drive stored in a safe.
Police state trading cards? Get yours today! Coming soon, the “orifice probulation” series, starting with a pair from New Mexico!
In contrast, here are some dogs doing something useful.
The NSA is definitely out there. And not fully understanding various sorts of encryption and network protocols definitely puts data at risk.
I may be deluded, but I think I can store data in the cloud and derive some benefits from doing so. OTOH I don’t know many other people whom I’d trust to do it for me if I had anything actually important to store…not implying superiority here; I’m just saying it’s a complicated subject and it’s very easy to go astray.
Still. I hesitate to say “never use the cloud.” It’s sort of like saying “don’t bother to use any sort of encryption or security, because all systems are imperfect.”
It’s not exactly the same argument. But it’s close enough to bug me.
And thanks for the link, Claire! {8′>
This is getting creepy:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2513592/Is-TV-spying-YOU.html
Note that if you have installed a pfsense router, and maybe with ordinary routers too, you can block any internet traffic from your TV going the “wrong” way (back out on the internet). It may require setting your devices up for static addressing however. It’s not a big deal though.
I don’t yet have an HDTV. Might be looking at that next year. Mostly, I’ll try to find one without all the bells and whistles, though being able to stream video to it from my computer is an attractive proposition. Since I have DD-WRT running on my router, I can do a MAC address DHCP reservation for it, and no need for static addressing. Then I can block any outbound IP requests coming from it.
This is just one advantage of running your DSL/Cable “modem” in bridged mode, and using a 3rd-party router, such as a Linksys (Cisco) or Netgear.
Yes, there are probably several ways of doing it.
I like static addressing because I can look in the logs of my pfsense router and know where the traffic was coming from. When you allocate addresses dynamically, the logs are much harder to interpret. Dynamic addresses make sense when you have 30 devices on your network, and administration is a full-time job; not so much when you have only three.
We are still running ancient tube-type TVs. For some reason the damn things will never die. 🙂 Anyway I can’t imagine spending more, giving the dreck that usually comes from them. Who needs high definition dreck anyway?
With a DHCP reservation for the MAC address of the TV (or other device), it gets the same IP address every time. This simplifies lots of things, including, as you say, finding stuff in your logs.
My old Toshiba CRT television continues to soldier on. However, picture clarity and quality is much better on the HD sets. And some things definitely benefit from this. Firefly on BluRay, for example. Which might not be of interest to everyone.
A lot of the stuff in the Skunk Party manifesto is just tarted-up big-government progressivism — “net neutrality” and speech restrictions on corporations, for example. It’s things that don’t fix the problem, only add another layer of regulation (and regulators to be suborned).
I agree, Roberta X. I just enjoy the no-BS attitude of their name. And enjoy that fact that US politics are continuing to fragment as the allegedly mainstream parties loose their support and credibility.