censorship
Airport Security Experiencing Complete Turbulance!
No doubt that just about everyone in the world has heard about The Grinch who tried to blow himself up on an airplaine as it was landing in Detroit on Christmas.
Well, since then world wide airport security has taken steps…backward.
Whether it be passenger incompetence about things you can’t bring on board (NO EXCEPTIONS!), turning the plane around for one passenger whose name is similar to another person on the No-Fly List and doubling travel time and expenses, freaking out because some guy left LaGuardia Airport wasn’t on any of the aircraft but was on the No-Fly List so the airport had to be shut dhow for six hours, cancelling everyone’s flight over a jar of honey, or illegally seizing someone’s computer for being critical about current and new, rediculous security measures. If this is what you call an effective system, even if nothing is found (because it still costs way too much money to conduct any search), the system is in panic. And what happens when a person has anxiety attack, they become paranoid.
Even with terrorist threats picking up again, the TSA’s level of effectiveness is SLIPPING!
Terrorists are smart. We assume that these guys are people who live in caves and shout things in Arabic wearing scarves and toating AK-47s and C4 vests to blow themselves up. But this is wrong. To quote Keanu Reeves from the movie Speed, terrorists are “crazy, not stupid.”
The guy who stuck up the flight in Detroit this Christmas was the son of a wealthy Nigerian lawyer. Osama bin Ladin and much of his family and next of kin are wealth. Bin Ladin is the heir of a wealthy construction company. We thought that locking up his bank account would stop a guy who has enough money that he can pay for everything with cash.
Then their are all the other terrorists we have forgotten about. People who were part of the Irish Republican Army, Hezbollah, November 14th, E.T.A., Animal Liberation Front, and of course the domestic terrorists in our own country, some who may have been at the Town Hall Outbursts last year mearly to observe rather than engage in the madness.
We’ve spent the past eight years chasing ghosts, and locking up the wrong people, while suicide bombings and IEDs still go off on a daily basis, but the news media shugs it off like it is mearly a bug hitting a windshield.
Yet, you can’t enter or leave London anymore whout getting a full body high-power X-ray which is unsafe and illegal. You don’t go to the Airport anymore to travel, you go there to be herded, profiled, and treated like cattle only to have the airport shut down, flights cancelled, and planes turning around after nearly reaching their destination because of one passenger whose name matches some retired terrorists in Ireland.
People forget that terrorists are smart. They don’t need to fly commercially if they have their own private jet. They don’t even need to be at the airport to enter this country. They can hop a cargo ship, a train, or just WALK IN to the country from some port of entry no one thinks about. And what about the Domestic terrorists? Clearly, they have the ablity to drive to their destination, catch a train, or simply WALK where they want.
We are looking in the wrong direction. We have all this high technology to check someone at the airport, yet the terrorist don’t even need to use the Internet. They can be low tech and on the downlow. Look at Ted Kazenski, the Unibomber. The FBI was on a nation wide manhunt for him, yet their he was living in his little cabin in the woods, self susstaining, and off the grid.
This is why after nearly a decade, we still haven’t apprehended Osama Bin Ladin. Why shoes are taken off at the airport and strip searches are kicking in. Why an X-ray machines are being installed in airports.
Frequent exposure to X-rays in a place that really isn’t a hospital is VERY dangerous! Why in the world would when you go to the dentist, you have to wear a lead apron? So that your entire body isn’t exposed to X-Ray radiation. If you are a frequent flyer, you are about to have cancer, because the Airport is not the Hospital or the Dentist.
We worry that terrorists will set off a radiologically device, when the airport has several of them going off all the time, exposing everyone to radiation hazards daily. The guy at the TSA at the security gate is not the X-Ray Technician at the hospital.
We’ve lost at this point. The TSA is beating a dead horse hoping that it will live and still work and is lashing out at everyone who doesn’t believe that they have the ability to resurenct that horse to back to life and become Optimus Prime of the Transformers.
We need a new plan. We know what to look for. Adding security measure after security measure has been ineffective, expensive, a health hazard, and a hassle.
We assume that the enemy is stupid. So we treat everyone with indignation hoping that the terrorist will jump out and say “hey I’m over here!” We’ve been going at this all wrong!
We think that we won’t be treated terribly at the airport, but when you get there, “Surprise!”
If we want to catch people on the No-Fly List before they even enter the airport, why not put security guards at the front door of the airport rather than scattered throughout the terminals? This has been very effective at sports stadiums. They don’t inspect you when you are on the floor where your seats are at the stadium. They do it at the entrance. You can’t even get into the base ball stadium to buy anything unless you pass security. Why is this not the case at the airport?
Why are we find out about terrorists getting on plains seconds after the plane doors are closed, when people’s names are printed on the tickets? Why aren’t we identifying people who buy thier tickets when they are being printed off? We can tell somone their credit card has been declined instantly, but we can’t tell some “sorry sir, you can’t fly on the plane, you are on the No-Fly List.” To which just like the credit card declination, you can go to someone and dispute that information to possibly clear your self, especially if it involves Identity fraud.
What are the chances that a terrorist with your name, has a credit card similar to your own? We are able to identify an identity theif all the time with the credit card, but why not with airline tickets?
And what about the guys who pay with cash? I mean, you need proof of identity to buy the ticket in the first place. If you are flying internationally, you need your passport. SO WHY ISN’T THE TSA LOOKING UP THIS INFORMATION BEFORE PEOPLE GET ON THE PLANE?!
It only makes the terrorists look so much smarter, and the TSA look so much more stupid. Sure the TSA can take the credit when they find someone, but when they fail, they want to blame something else.
Don’t we have a unified system to identify international terrorists? Clearly there isn’t or else that one guy would have been stopped in Amsterdam where he was chaning his underwear to Fruit of a Booms!
No improvements have been made at the airport. If there were, people wouldn’t be critical of the TSA, London wouldn’t be turing into an Orwellian nightmare, and terrorists wouldn’t even be able to get into the airport.
Preparations is more than just guarding the airport, but making sure that terrorists can’t even buy tickets to get on the plane in the first place!
Use your heads, for crying out loud, TSA!
Climate Change is still very, very real
Despite the leaked information this week by a few scientist stiffling dissent and doctoring data, the information that is now public does NOT prove that skeptics were right.
However, when the mainstream media, with corporate sponsors and ownership by large energy conglomorates or stock in the obsolete technology that is continuing to be used and wreck havoc not just on climate but on agriculture, property, maritime safety and physical well being.
Skeptics assume that because this data is now public, they now have proof that climate change caused by humans is a myth, but they are very, very wrong!
Even though there is scandel brewing over climate change brough on by the University of East Anglia, the fact that the leading scientists tried to slience decent and exagerate the truth, there are many other institutions in the world with their own independent research and data to prove that climate change is still very real and does not only threaten the environment but economic interests.
Many climate change skeptics deny the existance of climate change not because of ignorance but because they fear that if action is taken to curb climate change it will mean that government regulation will be imposed to reduce the amount of manufacturing thus driving down profits.
The fact that economic liberalism (often supported by conservative political parties) has already allowed free trade to move manufacturing to countries with lax environmental regulation or to punch exceptions into laws than make existing pollutors to be exempt from new environmental laws has not only contributed to environmental damage but agricultural disaster, economic recession, unemployment, and poverty.
The status quo believes that it is unsulated from these problems because they have the wealth to afford to establish themselves where it will effect them the least. The problem is that despite isolating themselves from the outside world, the outside will always find a way in.
So if skeptics believe that because they have released the quibble of a few scientists trying to cover up dissent that talks in Copenhagen will fail, the skeptics are wrong!
It should be noted that eariler this year, News International was caught hiring hackers to break into private telephone and compuyter systems to dig up private conversations and personal information then used the stollen data to sensationalize it senationalize news in tabloids owned by News International.
News International is the corporation in the United Kingdom controlled by Rupert Murdoch who also owns News Corp (Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, MySpace.com) in the United states as well as News Limited in Australia.
Murdoch’s senationalism and biased news coverage has invoked all sorts of anarchy for all the wrong reasons.
In the United State, Murdoch’s “Fixxed News” has destablized the Republican Party by forcing out moderate, center-right conservative supporters in order to cater to the Republican base and far-right. Because Republicans emphazies the values of ONLY their base while abandoning and expelling everybody else, the Republican party has lost control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the 2008 Presidential Election not to metion many state and general elections through out the country.
As if that weren’t enough, the base and the far-right then developed misguided protest in the form of the what is now the T.E.A. Party Movement which has polarized American politics. One of the many things people notice about the T.E.A. Party is that it is composed mostly by white upper class individuals who for nearly the past 25 years (complements of former president Ronald Regan) have gotten away with alot of deregulation that created a barrier between the upper class and the middle class and has constantly pushed the middle class into becoming part of the working poor or into poverty.
With the rise of the Internet, a growing resistance has developed. So much so that in 2008, America elected President Obama through a grass roots campaign and community organization efford.
While the base and the far-right claims it has developed their own “grass roots efforts”, the discovery of who is really part of their grass roots campaigns denotes that they are not grass roots and only used the name “grass roots” as a buzzword which also has liberal activists on the look out for other things like greenwashing, disinformation, and of course counterhacktivism.
The counterhacktivism this week is a sign that conservative base and far-right are desperate to keep the status quo, even as going as far as to make it appear that the real hactivists are throwing their support behind skepticism. Of course, the mainstream media doesn’t know the difference between counterhacktivism and hacktivism. So who takes the credit for revealing this e-mails at East Anglia? The hacktivists.
Don’t be surprise to see more attacks by counterhactivists on issues such as the National Healthcare, Network Neutrality, Alternative Energy, Unionization, and fighting against Telecom Immunity and Factory Farming.
It is up to the hacktivist to fight back against the corporate and neo-conservative counterhacktivists.
This is our world. We have to defend it!
AT&T: When Corporate Censorship Backfires
Things seemed to be working out OK for AT&T. They had the Apple iPhone 3GS coming out. Then suddenly, when all is at its zenith, disaster strikes.
Apparently, AT&T decided now would be a good time to censor the Internet, since they did such a bang up job terminating Usenet service by creating the image that pedophiles and pornographers hang out there. Nevermind that unlike the Internet, the Usenet is composed of a fixed set of news groups, which–if done properly–Usenet providers (like AT&T) could block out and report ilicit content. GigaNews, a popular Usenet provider, made that clear last year. (It is also believed that most of the fake postings solicting such garbage throughout the Usenet is being PROPAGATED by the ISPs. Not only are we not interested in such vulgar content, but what business is that bullsh*t doing in comp.lang.tcl?)
But AT&T has some bigger plans in mind, since they can use the excuses that shut down Usenet service in the same way Senator Joseph McCarthy used Communism during the Red Scare. Mainly on content that is against AT&T.
Here, AT&T can break the rules of network neutrality by making anything they see objectionable or against AT&T into contraband.
Take ATTGreed.com, for example. This website is promoting the awareness of a contract dispute between AT&T and the Communicantions Workers of America, a telecommunications union, and the Internation Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). As far as AT&T see it, this website is objectionable.
Another opponent of AT&T has been the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Considered to be the ACLU of the Internet (only they won’t tell you to take down your Christmas lights from the town court house or don’t pray before the big football game), the EFF has been a strong supporter of network neutrality, something that AT&T believes should be reserved for those who can pay more. Since we’ve been doing quite well without AT&T meddling with Interent traffic for the last 35 years, it is only right to see things from the EFF’s Point of View. But if you see things from the EFF’s point of view, that means you side with their causes, such as free speech and fighting against warrentless wiretapping. Stuff AT&T likes the opposite.
AT&T is going to have some reallly big problems this week as they have decided to kick the beehive known throughout the internet as 4chan /b/ (NSFW). 4chan has been seen as a wrecking ball of a website, known for its various Internet pranks. Considered the home of the Internet group “Anonymous” which has caused grief against the ChuchCult of S$cientology (Co$), Anonymous has been seen as the group on the Internet nobody messes with.
But now, Anonymous finds itself in a pickle. They can’t campaign against AT&T in the same way they do with the Co$. Desipte the upper echalon of Anonymous warning their followers to stand down (NSFW), as fighting against them would justifiy AT&T’s violation of network neutrality, there will still be that one idiot who will try to be somebody…to which Anonymous will make his life a living hell for about the next six months. Anonymous is thinking about their next move.
But why stop at cutting off the uncouth nonsense of 4chan when you can block off anyone who attempts to inform the public that AT&T is censoring websites. 2600.com, home of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. Competitors like Sprint and Verzion. The Democractic Party (turns out AT&T has been bankrolling the Telecom industry’s status quo lobby which the GOP much appreciates). Given the money, and the request, you could probably put in a work order now at AT&T to block out something or to slow it down.
Unfortunately, AT&T picked on Anonymous. To which on Monday and Tuesday of this week, the hacker group has plans on causing AT&T grief but in some non conventional form. The group has already convinced AT&T users to switch to other networks. (Ironically, I had been waiting for an excuse to do it. But my reason, was Mashable heard a rumor that Android 2.0 may be coming to Sprint, which is pretty cool.)
Hopefully, Anonymous will find a way to give AT&T hell for upsetting the balance of the Interent.
Even this guy, who is a total badass, would not want to be around when Anonymous takes on AT&T!
Followup: (7/27/2009 12:00 PM CDT) Slashdot indicates that the block was pre-emptive and has ben lifted in some areas. Still a pre-emptive strike is still letting the genie out of the bottle–once it’s out, there is no way of putting it back in.
Much of the online community, and tech news sites, still see this as a brewing storm which may become “the perfect storm”. (Tech Central probably has it right: “Everybody Stand Back!”).
This could get ugly.
Followup (7/27/2009 8:00 PM CDT) shortly after that update was posted, 4chan founder Christopher “moot” Poole was able to clear the air. AT&T also posted a statement–after they saw there stock drop for most of the morning until it rebounded this afternoon. Part of it was the “vox populi”, the other part was probably the fact that Verizon’s 2Q Earning suck.
No big surprise. I recently went to a Verzion store that just moved into the neighborhood. Those guys are pushy! I just wanted to browse the phones, and they’re asking if I’ve entered my name in to a queue. What is this a restaruant or a phone store? I’m surprised this REALLY didn’t happen to me while I was there.
Anyway, back to this story.
AT&T has been know for not being surgical in their security measures. The result is the chaos that occured this weekend that in the long run will cost AT&T to see there churn rate sky rocket. (Higher the churn rate = more customers leaving. Anyone who sticks around for that will see their own rates go up so that AT&T can recoup the loss. May explain the 19 cents added to my bill since the previous month. I have got to break up with them!)
AT&T needs to be more precise with their network security. But precision cost money, like hiring American workers at their call centers cost money. (They ought to be paying people to work here. They didn’t call themselves Amercan Telephone and Telegraph just to hire people in India or the Philipines, which may explain why the CWA and IBEW aren’t happy with them.)
Outside of all that, I think that is it unless Anonymous does something.
Amazon Kindle loves to burn books. And by “burn” we mean “set them on fire”.
Congradulations on anyone who bought a $500 $299 Amazon Kindle. You now support Amazon’s efforts to preserve books in digital format virtually set them on fire.
For the second time this year, Amazon has acted aloof in their business of removing books to appease copyright owners, and people posing as copyright owners. The first time this happened, it did not involve their Kindle device. Rather all the LGBT books suddenly vanshed from Amazon.com. Last time I check, this was Amazon.com not Books-A-Million.
But this lastest incident did involve the Kindle. On July 17, 2009, George Orwell got taken to room 101 by Big Brother.
Apparently, Amazon claims that one of the copyright holders sent them a note saying that they did not authorize one of the retailers permission to sell 1984 or Animal Farm. (For some reason, All retailers are equal, except some are more equal than others.)
Reguardless of who has the rights to sell the book, anyone who bought the book in digital format and found it missing was ultimately the victim.
Amazon has said that it would reemburse readers even offer to replace the lost books with that of the book that was removed that is for sale by the publisher who submitted the claim. It’s alot loke the supermarket stealing your Pepsi because Coke filed a complaint but in an act of contrision the supermarket offers you free Coke for in exchange for the Pepsi they stoll from you.
The damage is already done. It would make much more sense for Kindle users to stop using the device, send it back for a refund and find some other place to buy books online.
The other alternative is piracy.
© Randall Munroe
But when books disappear without any reason, or for the reason that one publisher thinks it is more elite than another, the sacred trust between consumers and producers is broken. And that is when unorthodox behavior is permissable and the unethical becomes justified.
In other words, if publishers don’t want customers stealing books, publishers should not steal books from their customers. The same goes for record companies, movie studios, and software venders.
If publishers don’t want people stealing content, publishers shouldn’t steal from customers. PERIOD!
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