cobolhacker.com

Ever wondered about the structure of the intellectual property lobbying system?

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4079/125/

It’s like a whole ecosystem designed to influence our government.  Genius, really.  Groups like the CRIA realized that a single lobbyist is mostly ignored by the Hill.  But what if you have multiple groups all saying the same things to the government over and over?  Sort of like teaching a child.  You tell him over and over and over and eventually he learns whatever it is you are trying to teach him.

The sad part is that the general public are mostly powerless to stop this.  Why?  A lot of people don’t care, for starters.  Only about half of the Canadian electorate bothered to vote last election.  That should tell you something about the weakness of character of a lot of people around you, but we aren’t going to go there.

Let’s say you do care.  What are you going to do about it?  Quit your job and go to work as a lobbyist on the Hill for no money?  I’m real sure they’re going to listen to your arguments against oppressive intellectual property laws after you’ve been living in your car for four weeks.  Even the very act of trying to keep up with all the machinations of these lobbies is a part time job, one without pay.

I’ve been trying to write a solid, eloquent letter for two weeks now to oppose the new privacy destroying Internet bills, but I am disheartened –  it’s never going to get read.  The last ones didn’t, or even if they did, it wasn’t an opinion that was desirable or considered credible.  Ontario Chamber of Commerce?  How the hell am I supposed to compete with that?  They have the money to hire writers a hell of a lot better than me to say anything they want.

Now I’m starting to see what is wrong with the system.  It’s not that the government doesn’t want to listen, or that Stephen Harper is some kind of evil mastermind bent on subjugating Canadians.  It’s just the government has become so big that it doesn’t have the time to listen to regular people unless they are full-time political players.  For most of us, with families to raise and bills to pay with no money to back us, it is impossible to be a player, and therefore, impossible for us to cause change.

Is this what becoming a libertarian feels like…?

The road to aquiring mad skillz begins at an early age, even if it is only to make video games play better.

Stop 0×0000007B.

Oh dear, Windows Setup needs a third party RAID driver.  I guess poor old setup doesn’t know what to do with the little RAID controller in a modern Intel ICH10R I/O controller.  The solution is easy:  begin the install again but this time, right at the beginning when it says right at the bottom to “Press F6 to install a third-party SCSI or RAID driver” press F6.  It will eventually ask for a floppy disc with a third party driver on it.  Copy the OEM driver to the disc, stick in disc, it loads the driver, it’s all good.

Yeah, well, no floppy drive on this system.  To be fair, when Windows XP was created, computers commonly came with floppy drives so I can’t really blame them for this inconvenience.  I suppose I could do a custom rollup of XP, burn it to a CD and go from there.  But this seems like a bit of a waste for an install I’m going to do maybe once in the next 6 months.  So instead I go back to my old skool ‘F6′ rig: a Maxell 3.5 floppy disc, a trusty Panasonic 3.5 inch floppy drive, a long 34 wire floppy cable and a very long Molex to Berg power adapter cable I harvested from a 386.  Attach the rig, pull out the floppy, format it, copy over the driver files and I’m in business.

Bah!  The Maxell doesn’t work anymore.  Format can’t be completed.  Oh well, it’s not like I don’t have a zillion replacements lying around.  Next disc!

Bah!  This one doesn’t work either.  Next!

The third disc says “Windows 3.1 disc 5″ on it and… doesn’t work.  Floppies never used to be this shitty, something’s up.

After the third attempt to make the OEM disc I decide to try another computer just in case the floppy drive on top my workstation was mad at me (”he’s sticking these filthy little bastards in me!  screw him!”)  A sweet young disc is produced from a shelf and gently inserted into the recently replaced floppy drive in the bench computer.  Brandless, purple, with a sexy black dust cover.  It has “Resume” carefully printed on its label with green pen with a doodle of a flower beside it.  I’m guessing it must not have come from around here.

Dammit!  Do none of these little buggers work anymore?

Time to pull out all the stops.  An old disc is dug up from deep inside my laptop bag.  AMIDIAG is scrawled on it with Sharpie.  This disc has been used a thousand times in a thousand drives and dates back from the DOS era.  It has gone through 10 X-ray machines.  It was dropped in the snow once.  Chewed on by a dog.  Thrown down a flight of stairs by a toddler.  It was stepped on twice, once by me.  It is the floppy that will not die.  The write tab is toggled.  A format is started….

After the driver is successfully loaded and the install underway, the kit is put back into its box with the AMIDIAG disc in its rightful place on top of the Panasonic.

Rabbit show jumping!  And here I thought people only did that with horses and dogs.

Check out the action packed videos.  Bet your bunny can’t do that!

Downloaders were never mentioned by the minister regarding the privacy destroying bills C-46 and C-47 but here’s my reasoning why they are the real targets or will become the real targets.

At first, what I thought the police were after was the ability to immediately get an IP address linked to a name linked to a time. They can get that information already now, but they have to get a warrant.  But since the law doesn’t require ISPs to log people’s stuff, they don’t bother to.  I figured the cops were just pissed because by the time they get the warrant the information is usually gone.  So you make the ISPs log everything and not require a warrant to get names and IP numbers, which is what this bill does.

But I don’t think that’s the main reason.  If the cops knew the name of a suspected terrorist or child molester, don’t you think they would get a warrant to search his house?  No, the reason they want this law is because they don’t have names.  This law would allow them to crawl through an ISP’s records looking for every IP that connected to a website they didn’t like.  From there they would use the records to link the IPs to the names.  Like a big dragnet.

But even that’s isn’t what this law is going to wind up getting used for.  Bear with me.  Kiddie porn sickos, terrorists, crime lords, etc… they aren’t stupid.  They all know about Tor.  They all know about PGP, which is how they encrypt their emails and USENET posts.  Like banks, they use TLS to secure their websites.  They use overseas hosting and darknets to store data.  They use open and cracked wi-fi networks for untraceable Internet access.  And even if you do catch them, they use full drive encryption to protect the evil contents from prying eyes.  These are some of the reasons why these people are so hard to catch.  In fact, catching these people over the Internet is basically impossible and I can’t believe the government and law enforcement wouldn’t know this.  Even the stupidest pedophile knows to download all his shit at the Starbucks.

But a group of people who are easy pickings when you’re logging Internet traffic are file sharers and downloaders.  Most P2P systems don’t (in fact, can’t) do anything to obscure IPs.  And most people downloading the latest teeny bopper album aren’t computer savvy enough to protect themselves even if they could.

Let’s assume the cops don’t care about you downloading (I’m still not entirely convinced of this, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt).  They aren’t the ones you need to worry about.  Right now, there are a group of people who know what is being downloaded and to what IP.  Investigators for the Canadian Recording Industry Association constantly crawl around the P2P networks, looking at what IP is connected to what.  P2P client software has to be able to know this.  But all they have are IPs, no names, and no real way to get names.  Until this new bill passes.  I can’t believe that with all the big media lobbyists running around Parliament Hill these days that someone from outside government didn’t suggest such a bill because it makes a lot of lawyer’s lives easier.

I guarantee that if this law happens, the CRIA, RIAA, MPAA and all the rest of these assholes will begin their court challenges to be allowed use this information too (assuming the bill doesn’t allow this already, I haven’t finished reading it).  Then the factory lawsuits will start.  Remember, downloading is not illegal in Canada, but you can sue anyone for anything.  Even worse, it would only take one more law to criminalize copyright in Canada and you can bet your bippy they are lobbying hard for that too.  Then they can even have the police arrest you!

Why do I care so much about this?  For starters, bored cops looking for pedophiles with too much information on their hands sometimes see crime where there isn’t any.  It’s a problem in this country because child pornography law in Canada is overly broad and it makes no differentiation between real children and ‘fake’ children* (say, a 21 year old dressed as a schoolgirl).  To say nothing of the fact that half the legitimate porno out there has the word ‘teen’ in the title, anyway.  And the girls you get are like eighteen and nineteen, and more often than not, somewhere-in-my-twentiesteen.  Bored cops looking at every file you download, scanning every site you visit, or inadvertently visit, has the potential to land a lot of people in jail who are not a threat to real children at all.  If anything, it’s going to divert resources from finding real pedophiles.

Fortunately, judges are going to throw most of that out.  Hopefully not too many people will have their reputations destroyed in the process.  No, the real threat is that the cops, in their quest to catch Internet ‘bad guys’, have got themselves a bill that which has the potential to be greatly abused by other interests to make the lives of millions of Canadians miserable.  Because millions of Canadians like to download stuff.  The law does little to address the problem of child pornography but has the potential to put a staggering amount of information in the hands of people who are who have an interest in using it against you.  Does that sound like law which is in the public interest?

…

* The distinction between real and fake children is important.  One would think the purpose of child pornography laws would be to protect real children from harm.  But what about porno where no children were harmed, such as an animated work?  Perverted to most, but last time I checked, you are free to be a sicko in Canada as long as you don’t bother anyone.  Canada’s child pornography laws reject that idea.  It is they only law I can think of in Canada that punishes thought-crime.

ISPs must help police snoop on Internet under new bill.  Headline says it all.  I really need to get better spies in government because they sneak this stuff up without telling anyone.

Basically, Internet Service Providers will be required by law to watch what you are doing on the Internet and give that information to police if they want it.  Michael Geist has a more detailed discussion of the implications of this on his blog.  Most troubling is that in some scenarios, they won’t even need a warrant to do the spying.  One of the reasons we have things like court oversight and privacy laws is so the government doesn’t spy on you for capricious reasons.  Capricious governments have tendency of developing much more sinister habits.

This bill shows a serious lack of understanding on the part of law enforcement.  Either that, or they are on the take.

Does the government really think that “criminals, child pornographers, organized crime members and terrorists” haven’t figured out things like encryption, proxy servers or open wi-fi networks?  Did no one tell them that Skype was encrypted?  That their evil little websites sites are protected with SSL?  They aren’t going to catch any of the bad guys they mentioned with this law.

But they are going to catch lots of people downloading stuff from the Internet.  Gosh, who might benefit from that, I wonder?

This government is either full-on frakking stupid or in someone’s pocket and right now I’m leaning toward the pocket.  I think it is letter writing time.

I found this while randomly bouncing around in Wikipedia.

Diego Garcia is this picturesque island in the India Ocean, a relic of the Cold War and one of the control stations of the Global Positioning System.  The USAF and Royal Navy run the sucker.  It’s also not open to the public.  You don’t get to go there for a vacation.  You don’t get to go there for a honeymoon. You don’t get to go there for anything.

But damn does it look pretty.

“Yeah, I’ll put in the drivers for your old laptop.  Only $30.”  That seems like a fair price for maybe 15 minutes of work.  I’ll download and install the drivers the customer can’t figure out how to put in, he throws a bunch of money at me, it’s all good.

This is a Dell Latitude C800, a Windows 2000 machine, obtaining drivers is easy.  Even though Dell has the bad habit of using many different devices in the same model of laptop, I’ve got a copy of Unknown Devices, and I can always identify the right one.  The network card, modem and soundcard go down easy.  But for some reason, the video does not.  The display driver Dell supplies does not work.  It bails on install telling me, “INF Error.  Video driver not found.”  You stupid, stupid software.  You are the driver.  That’s why you’re getting installed you hunk of shit!

It’s going to be one of those installs.  Every computer technician knows the type.  Everything goes fine but then you have to spend hours hunting down this one last driver.  This shouldn’t be hard because the graphics controller in this computer is an old school ATI Rage Mobility 128 AGP 4x. But, you see, ATI doesn’t distribute Mobility drivers for 2K on their website anymore.  I don’t think there is a technical or legal reason, I think it is because they are pricks.

I hunker down and begin to work the problem, thank you Google.  Many people have encountered this sort of thing with ATI drivers.  There are a hundred solutions on a hundred messageboards and none of them seem to work for me.  A hundred different driver packages from a hundred different dodgy driver finding websites.  Some make you watch ads.  Some make you register.  Some of them even want you to pay for the privilege of downloading from them.  Assholes.

After some four hours of searching, trial and error and fist shaking, an obscure driver is downloaded from the bowels of the Internet.  When the system reboots, the screen pops up at the proper colour depth and resolution.

AHA!  I win, you little bastard!  I WIN!!!

Yeah, ‘you win’ Bob.  You just wasted four hours of your life for a measly 30 bucks.  Why do you do this job, again?

For what it’s worth, this is the install package that did the trick.  Here’s the irony: it’s a Dell install package, just a different one than was offered to me.

Ah… Bork. An amazing meat: 50/50 ground beef and pork.  It makes for the finest homemade hamburgers.

Bob’s Savoury Borkburgers

Version 3.  Makes 8 burgers.

• 600mg lean ground beef
• 600mg of lean ground pork
• 6 tbsp bread crumbs
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp pepper
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 2 tsp onion powder
• 2 tsp paprika
• 2 dried cayenne peppers (about 2 tsp)

This recipe halves and doubles nicely too.  It also isn’t bad as just a straight beef recipe, but I find that Bork just has this certain flavour.

It’s best to start with meat which has never been frozen.  Because this meat is taking in air for the second time it’s best to cook or freeze the raw patties immediately.  Sticking the patties in a freezer right away also has advantages, even if you intend to use them in an hour or two.  It cools them back down quickly and stiffens them, making them easier to handle.

A lot of supermarkets in my area of the world tend to package ground meat in chunks of around 1 1/4 pounds, which works out to be around 600mg of meat.  To make up the meat part of the recipe, simply take one package of pork and one package of beef.  If it is close to that 600mg mark, it’s all good.  You can use medium cuts, but since we intend to barbecue these, it’s mostly a waste.  Lean seems to work well without being too greasy, though I find extra lean isn’t greasy enough and sometimes behaves oddly on the grill.

I grow a variety of peppers in my garden so I tend to build recipes around whole ones.  Unless you are using store-bought powder, grind the cayenne peppers, seeds and all, into a coarse powder; this will yield about maybe two teaspoons worth of it.  It generates a bit of heat but it’s not stupid hot by any means.  Mix that, and all of the dried stuff together in a steel bowl then add the meat.  Bread crumbs are not strictly necessary in any burger recipe, but I find they make the meat mix lighter and easier to mold.

Flake the meats apart with a spoon and mash it together with the other ingredients.  Really go to work on it and ensure that the spices and the two meats are thoroughly mixed together.  Pork is a lighter shade of red than beef and you’ll see this as you start to mix them.  If you have trouble telling them apart then the mixing is complete.

Prepare 8 sheets of wax paper, each around 15cm square.

Turn the meat lump out on to a clean counter top and roll it into an evenly shaped log.  Divide it in half, then divide the halves again.  Divide each of these resulting halves once more into the eight portions we are seeking to make and roll each one into a tight ball.  Smash the balls flat with your hands on the counter a few times, constantly packing them in at the sides to ensure an even, unbroken, circular patty of meat.  I tend to flatten them out to around 10cm in diameter and about 1cm thick, but you can go wider, keeping in mind that it has to be thick enough to survive being pulled off the counter.  Place the patties on a plate with the wax paper separating them.

Barbecue is the only way to cook a burger IMHO.  Clean it and heat it up to around 200C then slide each burger on to the grill.  This is fresh meat so it will stick unless you slide it along the grill a little first (alternatively, you could grease up your grill).  Usual hamburger rules apply: cook it until it is around 75C (165F), flipping the patty once halfway to cook the other side.  Though not necessary, you can flip them twice more and press on them a bit to get the excess fat out.  You’ll know it is good when the juices coming out of the meat are nice and clear.  The actual cooking process takes maybe ten minutes.

What to have with a Borkburger

Some people swear by fresh buns, but I prefer to toast mine slightly until they are ever so slightly golden.  At the same time I melt some real Canadian cheddar on top of the meat — not a slice of processed cheese — slices of real, aged cheese cut from a block.  You do this in the final few minutes of cooking.  If you are really clever, you can also do bacon in a at the same time as you do these burgers.  The time to preheat the barbecue and cook the burgers is also around the same amount of time required to cook the bacon.  I don’t have a side burner on my rig, so cook the bacon in a small cake ban at the back of the grill.

French fries are a classic side, though there is no easy way that I know to deep fry them on a barbecue.  Oven baked ones are good in a pinch, but never seem quite as fresh.  Potato chips (crisps) are also pretty good and require no preparation or heating.

Hamburgers go with just about any beverage.  Lager beer seems like a natural for this recipe, but equally good is a large Coke poured over ice.

Everyone’s is different, but my perfect cheeseburger, from the bottom bun up is:

• the Borkburger patty with cheddar cheese melted on top
• a slice of bacon
• a thin slice of fresh, sweet onion
• a slice or two of a kosher dill pickle cut down its length
• ketchup
• two slices of tomato
• a big leaf of iceberg lettuce
• a generous spread of mayo on the top bun

Brilliant.

Just keep telling yourself that so you can get over to the couch.  The weakness and I are going to sit over here and have a cold drink, thank you.