One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

So there’s this thread going around these days called “crazy shit that you find hilarious” or some crap like that. I was sorting through my images-from-the-forum directory and happened on these two gif files, which I either mist the first time or completely forgot.

Either way, they’re REALLY funny.

Shift-refresh if you need them to start over.
first: (first line: “what about a catapult?”)

second: (first line: “I can’t believe we’re doing this”)

I was going to bitch about how goddamned irritating it is to find out that everybody and their dog seems to be taking anything new and interesting and unique to a podcast, thus making it impossible for those of us who can browse (but not listen) at work to ever see it. Turns out that I’m not alone.

Listen to this. It’s really awesome.

We’re a month and a handful of days away from the day that a middle-aged black woman refused to give up her seat to a white guy who demanded it. This happened in a society that was so unbelievably oppressive that she risked physical harm by doing this. Over the years, many people had a chance to ask her why she did that and, basically, the answer was that she did it because she was so unbelievably tired of being under someone else’s boot that her need for that shit to stop overrode everything else. She wasn’t trying to be a hero, she was just totally fucking fed up.

She died yesterday. link one link two wikipedia She lived an understated life, largely outside of public view, but her name will forever be synonymous with the drive for equal rights (and to a lesser extent, rebellion in general.)

I’m still not sure what to think of this. I probably can’t understand the real magnitude of it, since I am neither black nor from 1950’s Alabama. But it seems to me that as a society as a whole we’re no smarter than we were then. Earlier tonight I found myself browsing (what amounted to) a white supremacy message board (that’s SA for ya, don’t ask too many questions) and the whole experience was entirely too surreal - like walking through a parody, except that none of it was written for comedic or ironic purposes. It was all real people saying real things.

Some days I wonder if all the hate and stupidity just gets shuffled around - none of it actually goes away, and as we get collectively dumber it gets harder to keep in check. Our cup runneth over with hatemongers like Fred Phelps and people who believe that if you change the name of creationism it becomes science.

And we’re running out of brave, intelligent people like Rosa Parks.

Seriously. Fuck it in its worthless ass. I had a huge, huge post here with a lot of neat short sci-fi for everyone to read, I opened a PDF in another tab and when I closed it all my goddamn tabs freaked the fuck out and I ended up losing the contents of my post. Firefox never acts fucking flaky except when the Acrobat plugin is displaying something. At least it’s not as bad as IE, which crashes constantly whenever I accidentally click on a PDF at work.

So that’s it. I’m deleting my Acrobat browser plugins both at home and at work. I’ll open the fuckers in the actual reader program from here on out. I’d love to replace the cocksucker in general - Anybody got any good suggestions for an Acrobat Reader replacement? On my Mac I use Preview or xpdf; on Linux there are a zillion options but I don’t know of any others on Windows.

Maybe I’ll post about sci-fi short stories tomorrow. Seriously, I had a kickass post written up. Fuck you Adobe, fuck you in your worthless asshole.

(With apologies to The Who. At this point it should be no secret whatsoever that I love that line, and everything Who in general.)

I don’t know why I didn’t post this here earlier, but here it is: For those of you who read my blog, many of you also posted over at the sipclan.net forum. Well, the domain expired & hosting is set to expire soon as well so since I have a godawful amount of transfer I’m just hosting the fucker now. It’s running new software (<3 phpbb) but all the old posts and accounts were imported so if you had an account your password should be the same. If it’s not contact me and we’ll fix it.

New forum link: http://badstuff.net/forum

So today the WoW “spyware” story really hit the goddamn bigtime. Everybody knows I’m not a big fan of the cocksuckers at Blizzard; after all, they’re not big on interoperability or innovation or even answering a few honest questions from their customers and fans but seriously, this whole “OH HOLY FUCK WOW PUTS SPYWARE ON MY COMPUTER” shit is so fucking fucked.

God dammit, if nobody else is gonna put a frame around this thing, I’m gonna.

Warden is not spyware. One of the things that spyware generally implies is that the program was either installed without the user’s permission or using some sleight-of-hand. No matter whether you like or hate Blizzard you have to admit that their users allow this to happen. They’re clearly informed of what the terms of use are and choose to allow this spying to occur.

Many other games use this kind of technology. Punkbuster is definitely the name everybody’s been throwing around, and it’s a good point.

That said, there are a few points that are being made by sensible people (Bruce Schnier, for one, said that while Warden isn’t by and of itself dangerous, this is definitely a slippery slope) and a few arguments nobody is voicing, such as:

Why in the fuck do companies like Blizzard or Even Balance think it’s smart to keep all their detection methods and procedures under wraps? Why isn’t it smarter to let everybody know what you’re doing and be open about it? If you prowl around the WoW forums, you’ll find that the general consensus is that discussing Warden at all is grounds for getting banned. Not sure why, but that sort of oppressive bullshit is not good for anybody.

Blizzard has a habit of pissing on a lot of people, so it’s no big surprise that Hoglund’s post has sparked a huge nerd backlash. Hey, spend ten years pissing on anybody that tried to do anything even remotely interesting with your product, and people will (gasp!) be rather bitter about it.

So there’s this story going around about this guy who ‘hacked’ myspace - which amounts to writing an interesting little javascript that caused anybody who viewed his profile to add him to their heros list… and then anybody who viewed their profile to be added to his heros list… and on, and on, and on. (For those people who haven’t been in a classroom for a while, this is what we call an exponential function.)

Now this in and of itself is kinda interesting in that “WoW Flu is kinda cool” way, but the technical details prove far more interesting for us nerdy types. I couldn’t help but think of Def Con and sitting on the john reading 2600 while reading this. This guy’s pretty clever.

Hey, World of Warcraft users: Read this. I’ll wait.

Now that I’ve gotten your attention, let’s think about this. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a technical article addressing the details of what an anti–cheating program does. I tried, but was unable to find any down-and-dirty details about what Punkbuster does, although I found a couple of security advisories and a fair number of criticisms.

The top of the list has to be that any security tools that are invented by hardware & software authors (i.e. DEP) make tools like this useless, and in the case of Punkbuster at least fucking require you to run with administrative privileges. (Ref: here, ctrl-F for ‘privileges’.)

Still, it’s nowhere near as disturbing as knowing that not only are people letting these programs crawl all over their shit without even thinking twice about what information is being lifted from their systems, or far more important, what potential security holes are being induced by this software.

This is a presentation from Tim O’Reilly’s OSCON 2002 given by Lawrence Lessig. This is almost three years ago. It’s old enough that I thought everybody had seen it, but I forget that not everybody follows the copyright wars. It’s about 35-40 minutes and it’s definitely not a waste of that time. Go listen. I’ll wait.

http://legacy.randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free.html

Continue reading “Everyone On Earth Should See This (again)”

Hey cocksuckers, remember back in 2004 when we were all still basking in the glow of the fucking fantastic Return of the King and eating Chee-Tos and drinking Mountain Dew: Pitch
Black (Before The Sucking) and posting on the Sipclan forum? Well, if you’ve tried to go there recently you know the domain has lapsed. But fret not, little minions; like the phoenix, the forums shall blah blah, blah blahbedy blah blah blah.

Jesus, just fucking go here already. Fuck.