• Radley Balko, who posts a lot of photos on his blog, has just posted the best two ever, bar none, no possible comparison: Cory Maye as a free man.
• How come Al Quaeda is always responsible, even when Al Quaeda isn’t responsible?
• “Playing to Your Strengths.” For some, this might be a no-brainer. But for others (e.g. who were forced or simply fell into their career paths), not so.
• Charles Hugh Smith is a wonderful thinker. He’s just come up with the best analysis of what the Euro really is and what the current goings on in European finances really are.
• “The U.S. Government and Activist Technology.” (Tip o’ hat to C^2; I think he’s also the author of the piece, but there’s no byline.)
• And similarly … “Subtext, and Saving the World.” Brilliant!

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To those of a certain age, “Telex” may evoke memories of large, unwieldy, chattering ancestors of the fax machine.

Today Telex is something else: a potentially revolutionary way to route around Internet censorship.

S., who found the information, comments (this will make more sense if you’ve read a bit on the above links):

I suspect there will be a number of interesting variations on this technology. For example, the The Mental Militia forum is almost certainly monitored by one or more Three-Letter Aacronyms. The Telex approach requires many different machines in the network to run a Telex server, and is therefore somewhat difficult and slow to deploy.

Imagine that the TMM server ran a modified server, let’s call it Telex-2 server. People could log into TMM (or another, single website) and would appear to read innocuous stuff. The small group who were trusted and/or in the know enough to have installed a Telex-2 client would be accessing a secure forum, which might contain censored literature, discussion of verboten topics, notice of meetings, a marketplace, etc.

The beauty is that instead of a network of servers running Tor or Telex, a single server could provide secure, well-obscured access to a group of like-minded people. The TLAs might wonder at the level of interest in a site hosting pictures and discussions of well-formed goat udders (I actually saw that following Mutti’s links on TMM) but would have no clue what information was actually being shared, or that any info was being covertly shared.

No smoke, no key words, no interest. They can vacuum it all up and learn nothing, in fact they get more noise in their databases. I think picture and video sharing websites would make good screens, as they use a lot of bandwidth. That makes it that much easier to mask the traffic signature from the secret site.

Another example: When people communicate with PGP, it sends up red flags. They can’t know what we are saying, but they know we are talking, and that we use PGP.

If there were a picture-hosting site with Telex-3, we could use it to store and forward PGP-encrypted messages. I post a picture of an especially nice goat udder, but as the picture is uploading my Telex-3 client sends the PGP message. When you log into the site, the message is sent to you along with a suitable image for cover. No one sees that an encrypted message was sent.

This is the kind of technology that will enable phyles. I’m not a software guru but there are plenty of smart people who will take this and run with it. It’s good news for the good guys.

Hm. It’ll be very interesting to see which governments will scream in alarm about this and try to forbid its adoption. How many alleged “lands of the free” will suspect their own citizens of using telex privacy to perform Evil Plots against them?

Not our “land of the free,” of course. Never that. Our government serves and respects its citizens, always …

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I installed Linux Mint 11 last night. And this morning. And again this morning. I think I’m done now.

I’ve been using Linux Mint for several years and just loving it. It’s the most stable, most newbie-friendly, most media friendly Linux I know. Release 7 was terrific, 8 even better — and there I happily stayed until I began having browser woes. I knew there could be hassles jumping three versions forward, but Mint is so friendly I wasn’t worried.

Ha!

First time I tried to install, it insisted on a username and password long before any had been set. It hinted that the username it wanted was “mint,” but no password in the ‘verse would appease it.

After researching and finding others having the same problem — but no one having a solution — I restarted and tried again. This time it didn’t ask for any impossible information. Guess it decided I was okay.

However this time, though a combo of my own brain fart and one of Mint’s new features (really, if you’re going to have slider bars that hide until somebody mouses over them, you really ought to tell the n00bs that’s what they have to do to access additional configuration options), I screwed up the install by not mounting all my quirky little partitions.

Third time, I got the partitions right, and thought everything was just hunky-dory and nifty-zorch — until I was configuring email and noticed that the @ key was typing ” . And yes, the ” key was typing @. And the pound (#) key was typing pound as in British money, despite my having definitely chosen the standard U.S. keyboard.

Fourth time I finally got good old Mint — complete with all (or nearly all) of my saved configurations. Yay!

The only thing that gave me real trouble is the Thunderbird mail reader. Mint 11 comes with T’bird 3.1.9 (which is far from being the latest release, but seems to be the latest stable Debian package). And T’bird 3.1.9 sucks is a seriously mixed bag. It’s not only filled with crazy quirks (like insisting that some, but not all, “sent” folders be subfolders of the inbox), but in the name of Windows-type automation, it makes it darned near impossible to custom-configure server settings.

Its autoconfigure feature is theoretically cool; but once it decides it wants you to use IMAP servers, not POP3s servers (which it always does, even when IMAP servers might not be available), then you’re going to use IMAP servers (and therefore you’re going to have separate inboxes for each and every one of your dozens of email addresses) even if you opt to configure manually. The only way to avoid it, apparently, is to erase any mail account you just created, click to create a new account, then hit STOP! as quick as you can before the autoconfigure process starts.

Please tell me they got rid of that in later versions of the app. I’ll be watching for new .deb packages.

Anyhow, the short version of the story is that I’m back in business, with only a few deadly email glitches still to work out.

—–

Oh yeah. And Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II was really good. Not great (I don’t think any of the Potter films qualify as great), but one of the best and definitely a fitting, whiz-bang, beautiful, touching conclusion to a remarkable series. Voldemort … positively Shakespearian. Nigel … comes valiantly into his own. Minerva McGonagall … steals the show with her couple of tiny scenes. Snape … no wonder viewers made him the winner of the Harry Potter World Cup. And Ron, Hermoine, and Harry … what can you say? Even if not one of the movies rose to Lord of the Rings level, it’s a pretty amazing thing to have made eight so good, with the final being among the best.

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… to help people in other countries route around gov censorship.

Once you get past the irony, do you get the sense that the fedgov will rue the day that it created these? (NY Times link. Tip o’ hat to PT.)

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• I said I was going to de-focus on bad news and its attendant blogistic knee-jerking. But once in a while the reality checks are too stunning to ignore. Here’s how bad it’s getting: The U.S. Department of Education sends a S.W.A.T team to kick down a door and terrorize a family — for defaulted student loans. (NOTE: Original link is now 404. Thanks to dsd in the comments, here’s another link, with photos. Check his other links, too.)
• Facebook is at it again. Keep your photos OUT of Facebook, guys. How you’re going to prevent Granny or your best buddy from posting photos of you is another thing. But this is creepy and the opt-out instructions don’t address the basic facial-recognition problem.
• “The Internet Wakes Up” (short-short fiction). You go, Kent. Good one.
• How ’bout a personal Evil Plan, rather than a political one?
• :-) Waving at the bus. (And the Wave at the Bus blog.) Gotta love this family.
• Turning the tables on an abusive bank. Second time at least that this has happened.
• After getting burned by e-gold, I’m not trusting any online currency until it’s well proven. And I’m uber-suspicious of any money generated out of thin air. Or so complicated that only geeks can grok it. OTOH, if Bitcoin has enemies like Schumer (more), it’s worth taking another look …

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We all know John Gilmore’s famous dictum: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

True, but with governments doing what they do (and with more bandwidth being centralized in the hands of fewer, larger ISPs), routing around damage isn’t necessarily an automatic thing.

From C^2 comes word of a new book (available free in HTML, pdf, and epub, available for purchase in dead tree format): How to Bypass Internet Censorship. Forgive it for opening with the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights; to some people in the world, that’s an improvement over what they’ve got locally. I haven’t read the whole thing, but it looks like a pretty good guide, C^2 says it’s backed and partly funded by the good people of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and it’s free.

Tell your friends in less free places. Snag a copy for your own reference, come the day. (Even short of that day, it appears to contain a good explanation of how censorship works, how to circumvent it, and what risks are involved.)

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O. sent this to me with the comment, “If this is true, it does not portend good things for freedom, in general, or firearms, given Facebook’s reach on the net.”

Facebook’s managers are deploying a new software upgrade that will dismantle myriad groups of like-minded political activists unless they get a special software-key from the company.

But Facebook managers are providing very limited information about which groups are being favored with the new key, prompting some activists to complain about possible political favoritism among Facebook managers, and many other activists to experiment with techniques and tricks to get the needed upgrade-key. …

Facebook’s software changes do not impact the individual pages that Facebook subscribers use to stay in contact with friends and to tout their relationships, statuses and accomplishments. The upgrade only effects the software that links Facebook’s “groups” of like-minded people, each of which is managed by one or more group administrators. …

The new software-upgrade will automatically archive all groups. Once archived, each group’s past activity will be still be visible on Facebook, but the groups’ administrators will lose access to their lists of group members. That means the administrators lose contact with everyone in their groups, and will be forced to recruit all those members again – unless Facebook provides them with the special upgrade software.

The entire process/policy change seems clunky, arbitrary, and unfair (as is Facebook’s famous wont). Wiping out entire groups? Why? Restoring some groups while leaving others not knowing whether they’ll live or die? What for? I go on wondering: How did Facebook become so rich and powerful when it treats its members like sh*t time and again? And when its management style resembles a chimp with ADHD?

But I find it hard to believe FB would be as blatantly, stupidly biased as the article implies — giving the privilege of the “special key” to The Brady Campaign with its mere 1,000 members, for instance, while withholding it from a libertarian group that has 60,000 members, and so on. Would FB managers deliberately, publicly promote “left wing” groups while at the same time utterly destroying conservative, libertarian, and (presumably) anarcho-capitalist ones?

I suspect another shoe will drop and this won’t turn out to be quite what it seems. Still … O’s right. The very fact that FB can — and will? — arbitrarily wipe out groups it doesn’t favor could be dangerous stuff. So heads up to freedomistas in general and gunfolk in particular.

And be glad when social media becomes decentralized — as it will and should. (More on that.) (And more, with emphasis on freedom.)

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S.W.A.T. magazine (which I so mind-bogglingly write for) now has a digital edition — as well as a jazzy new look to its website. I hear that an online store is also on the way.

The digital edition includes only selected articles. But the setup is very nice and publisher Rich Lucibella (who himself uses an “alternative” browser and operating system) has laid down the law to his techies that everything must be cross-platform compatible. Good for Rich. (Oh, how often we non-Microsofties get a front-row seat in the theater of terrible web design! It’s amazing how many companies apparently want only IE users to patronize their businesses.)

Anyhow, getting down to the subject at hand, although this isn’t “officially” available on the S.W.A.T. site as far as I can see, Rich Lucibella sends this gift: a copy of my May 2011 article “Knife Rights Under Attack.”

Many thanks to Rich, editor Denny, and Doug Ritter of KnifeRights.org, the true Second Amendment group for knife owners.

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