- Ten reasons to quit working so hard.
- Does the new CBO report put the final nail in the Obamacare coffin? That might be a tad optimistic. But the report just ain’t pretty, no matter how Big O’s flappers try to spin it.
- MWD, who sent this development thinks it’s a world-altering change. Welllll … In any case, it’s a hopeful sign for privacy.
- “I am sending a bag of these to every member of Congress to show my deepest gratitude.” (Hilariously scatological reviews from Amazon customers on a product that may just be slightly defective. Courtesy of MamaLiberty.)
- Also from Amazon: Just what every survival shelter and humble hermit home should have. (Tks, A.) (Yeah, and I put one of my Amazon links on it, even though you’ll buy one shortly after you open that ice cream stand in Hades. But hey, it does have free shipping!) (P.S. Don’t miss the reviews on this one, either!)
- Why do “progressives” favor gun control? (Well, because they’re control-freaking authoritarians, that’s why. Still, it’s a pretty interesting article.)
- Why does any place on earth want to host an Olympics? And if that place is Sochi, why would anyone want to go? Whoof. What photos.
- Speaking of the Olympics … Oh, so that’s where the term “white elephant” comes from!
- Priceless. Crook busts cop for going 140 mph. (Via MArooned)
If I sold everything I owned, I think I could get within $38,000 of owning one of those TVs for my very own!
Would you even have to sell Little Bear into white slavery?
I’m not sure the FreeSpeechMe/dot.bit link http://www.freespeechme.org/download-and-install/ is exactly about privacy. Maybe it is more about free speech? I think it provides a decentralized name service lookup. I have a limited understanding of it, but it seems if there was a http://backwoodshome.bit if you had this plugin, you could get this site whether DNS service was available or not. Also, I suspect that since it is using the bitcoin type of technology, that these hostname lookups would be hard to subvert- they would kind of notarized. The what-is dot-bit page suggests similar: http://www.freespeechme.org/what-is-dot-bit/. Stopping or subverting DNS are common ways to “shut down the internet”.
Well, we can dream about the death of Obamacare, but we all know that once a federal program is in place, getting rid of it is pretty much impossible. Besides which, in the Progressives’ alternate universe, the CBO is obviously full of shit, and there couldn’t possibly be any bad outcomes, and to the extent there are, it’s because we need more government!
To the extent that I ever had much interest in the Olympics, I’ve lost it. The IOC can suck on a UN committee en masse, and stick their trademark up their collective. Which is too bad, because I do admire the determination and skill of the competitors.
I’ll put that TV on my Amazon wish list, right after the 3-wolf T-shirt.
Yes, the gastric effects of maltitol are a known thing. Found item while looking up Lycasin(R) – there is a sugar alcohol called “fucitol”.
The problem with getting rid of Obamacare is that the party does not want to get rid of it. They don’t seem to interested in fixing it either.
As one who reads Amazon reviews before I even finish the product description I have to say those TV reviews are the most fun yet, LOL. Reviews like these are almost better than sun lamps in winter…..
@uownurself :
FSM and Dot-Bit (a link worth reading, if I do say so myself… and I just did) are anti-censorship tools, rather than privacy tools. What Dot-Bit does (and FSM integrates with Firefox) is create a parallel distributed DNS system that isn’t prone to manipulation by the feds, Chinese, MPAA, RIAA, whoever.
But… they are working to integrate it with privacy tools like TorBrowser eventually.
I got a notification about FSM yesterday. Did the write-up on the concept and additional applications (dark net). I’ve installed the beta to work with it a bit. Expect a review on that in a few days. Just now, all I’ll say is that it is beta, and it shows.
I had to stop reading Amazon product reviews yesterday… my sides still hurt! But it is an amazingly good deep breathing exercise. 🙂 I’ll go looking for them now when I need a boost. And I could get SOOO much more creative writing my own reviews, now that I know they won’t be dumped. I’ve been tempted so often. LOL
Olympics? Lost interest long ago, long before I got rid of the TV (I think 12 inch was the largest I ever had). I’d much rather watch the youngsters here enjoy junior rodeo and gymkana, and the county fair here is an old fashioned delight with all home grown animals and real home made crafts and things. I had never actually seen a “greased pig” race until I came to Wyoming. What incredible fun. No snooty “Olympics” with bogus “amatures” could ever even come close.
Oh, and there is no “fix” for Obummercare, of course. But fear not. It will be “repealed,” along with all the rest, just as soon as the world (including Americans) finally repudiate the US dollar. The “fed” is sucking on a black hole already, and it’s only a matter of time. Things will get tough for a while, of course… but it is inevitable. The lip lock on the black hole can only be broken with total implosion of the US government now.
And Bear… I suspect I’ll wait until you tell me the FSM thing is ready for old ladies. I read all about it, and it certainly has a lot of promise… but I don’t quite understand it yet. 🙂
Olympics… Last times I recall attempting to watch any Games were whatevertheheck year in the ’80s when I was in Germany, because German TV would cover fencing (I was in a department store at one point, and I found myself in a crowd gathered around a display set because some big match was on); and the Georgia games trying to catch some of the gymnastics. Fortunately, I escaped Salt lake before the games hit there.
MamaLiberty, right now I’d only recommend FSM for decidedly technically-inclined folks who like experimenting with things that don’t quite work. So far, my experience suggests that it should be classed as alpha rather than [optimistically] beta.And don’t even try unless you have a reasonably fast connection, because one of the first things that happens is a 1.72GB download.
Obamacare: Can’t fix what ain’t broke. And it’s doing exactly what the statist hacks want- more socialism for the Left, more surveillance tools for the police-staters, more graft for everyone. And I’m morbidly amused by the reports of malicious</i. Belarussian code embedded in healthcare.gov: How the heck could you tell the foreign malicious code from the domestic malicious code that is healthcare,gov?
Obamacare isn’t going away-they threw the big knife switch, sparks flew, and they hollered “It’s Aliiiiive!”. The real question is what will the monster become now that it’s created?
1. The Affordable Care Act was The Right Thing To Do.
2. All the buzzkill about it isn’t doing what we said it would and it is doing what we promised it wouldn’t is irrelevant because the bugs are really features and somebody else’s fault and see rule 1!
The TV also touts Free 30-Day Tech Support: This item is eligible for free tech support for 30 days from the date of delivery. Over the phone, our trained technicians can help you set up, configure, connect, and troubleshoot so you can start enjoying your new purchase.
Which tells me it’s “plug-n-pray.”
Obamacare really was the right thing to do, bringing the crash of the state that much faster, and causing that many more apostates to the Government Religion to be created. Anarchists couldn’t have done better with it if we’d tried.
Thanks for that gun control article. Just more evidence that gun control is dead. And fer sher, progressive support of gun laws makes no sense.
Susan, if you like greased pig contests, try going to a Wyoming branding party. Often there are kids in there, wrestling down baby cows, shit flying everywhere. I even gave it a try myself although it is not really for older folks!
There is something I wonder about with DNS, maybe somebody can educate me. Don’t we already have a pretty good form of distributed DNS? I thought almost every computer cached DNS requests. My pfsense router also caches them, and I think most routers can do the same. It seems to me that we’d only have trouble going to any new sites if they shut down DNS, not the old ones that we always go to. Or am I missing something?
@Paul: “I thought almost every computer cached DNS requests. My pfsense router also caches them, and I think most routers can do the same. It seems to me that we’d only have trouble going to any new sites if they shut down DNS, not the old ones that we always go to.”
The DNS system is distributed but hierarchical. If you read the TPoL article, the importance of the WorldCom DNS FU was that those machine were (at the time) at the top of the hierarchy and provided addressing data to everything else. The internet effectively died for several hours that Saturday.
Your computer does cache. But unless you override DNS updating, it will periodically update and download whatever crap redirect has been pumped into the DNS system. Or nothing, if another incompetent company killed the system again. And you’re limited to only revisiting sites you’ve seen before. Perhaps you’ve been using a proxy for privacy or to get around a “Great Wall” of censorship, but that proxy was compromised; you need a new one… uh oh.
Or, you can manually update your localhosts file for site addresses. That’s tedious, and you still have to get the IP data to enter from somewhere.
Or — see TPoL again — you want to run an independent dark net…
OK Carl, thanks for that explanation including the TPoL link.
An example: You click a link. The browser looks in your local DNS cache or hosts file and goes and gets the page. Say “404” is returned (or however the browser knows it didn’t work). The browser goes out to 8.8.8.8 (or whatever) to get the new address, and goes there instead.
Assume the DNS has been poisoned and the address you are looking at points at a phishing site or the FBI. The browser might warn you if it has access to a blacklist of phishing sites, and offer to use the old address. Again, if you get nothing at all from 8.8.8.8, you still use your old cached address. And so forth…
I obviously don’t know all the details of DNS but it appears to me that the information is floating around out there and with some intelligence the system could be made a little more distributed and bulletproof. For example the browser might never throw away an old address, but just push it down in a stack, to be re-used if the new address is bogus. Or it might only throw away if you confirm (sort of like NoScript asking you if it’s OK to run a script).
Yes, visiting sites not formerly cached is a problem. Maybe we need an application that just goes out and collects addresses from DNS servers. If you figure there are 4 billion of addresses out there and each entry takes 100 bytes, that’s only 400gig, a not particularly large disk on an ordinary PC, although it would take a long time to get the whole thing. Make it a low priority background task.
Oh, well, just wondering how a system naively designed without attacks in mind can be upgraded to be a little tougher…
Paul: “I obviously don’t know all the details of DNS but it appears to me that the information is floating around out there and with some intelligence the system could be made a little more distributed and bulletproof.”
Well, that’s what the folks at Dot-Bit (and FSM, by — pardon the pun — extension) are trying to do. Dot-Bit is a distributed DNS system. I haven’t had much time to look at the technical details (I have a few commitments ahead of that in the queue), but essentially the DNS lookup data is distributed over a P2P network. What I’m not sure of is how they avoid the registration process becoming a vulnerable choke point
“Maybe we need an application that just goes out and collects addresses from DNS servers.”
The current system does that. ISPs typically maintain their own DNS cache, periodically updated (which is why domain registry changes take time to propagate across the whole Internet). This does two things: 1) distributes the data for damage control, and 2) speeds up address resolution by not requiring every individual computer to go all the way to the big authoritative DNS servers for every browsing request. And, as mentioned, individual computers run their own cache so they don’t have to go to the ISP server every time. Aside from updates, you (or your ISP etc) don’t go the authoritative machines until you type in some new domain they’ve never seen before.
Dot-Bit apparently does the same thing P2P fashion, routing data the same way that a NameCoin/Bitcoin transaction is routed when you buy something from a vendor. There is no master authoritative machine to run the whole DNS show (except maybe that pesky registration choke point that I’m wondering about).
“Oh, well, just wondering how a system naively designed without attacks in mind can be upgraded to be a little tougher…”
Funny that, since the Internet evolved from a military system whose basic design specs were for toughness. But the military never expected its own system to need protection from its own high command.