Couple of weeks ago I linked to Ryochiji’s farewell to his Serenity Valley cabin as he prepared it as best he could against approaching fires. Good news; his cabin survived. Barely, but it made it.
Um … I’m really not sure why various news media keep presenting this as amusing. I know socks often go mysteriously missing. But 43 (and a half!) … you’d think the family would have wondered. (Tip o’ hat to S.C.)
Tam? Tam, where have you gone? Your blog was one of the stones on which the gunblogosphere was built.
Doctors getting fed up with their profession. No surprise. Not really news. But an interesting perspective from a physician.
“Who owns your children?” Bayou Renaissance Man asks after last week’s case of a family subjected to an international manhunt for disagreeing with their son’s doctors.
What do you know about MaidSafe? Is this the future of communications privacy? (H/T PB in comments)
Teacher arrested over school shootings — that he wrote about in novels. David Codrea notes that we don’t know the whole story, but it doesn’t sound good.
Why, that would be as unthinkable as saying cops are lying thugs or that they get away with things that would send the rest of us to prison.
Why, that would even be like saying that feds and local cops are conspiring to keep information out of the hands of judges. Couldn’t happen. This is Murrica!
Sigh. Another hopeful libertarian project collapses into a rubble heap of fraud and scandal.
Oh well. Here’s something useful (and maybe even fun) to do while waiting for Truth, Justice, and the Murrican Way to triumph: make your own knife without power tools. (link fixed!)
ADDED: Per jed in comments on today’s other post: pit bull saves kid from swarm of bees. (Needed a little more good news here.)
“The boy who invented email.” Wonder why more of us don’t know this. When “experts” had dismissed it as too difficult, a precocious 14-year-old invented email.
Love this from Brigid: stripper clips and “Lab” dances.
Not sure whether this is high-tech creepy or just Cold Warish enough to be weird. Gov’t listens in on scientists listening to marine life and … well, it’s complicated. (H/T H.)
You have the right to remain silent. But only after cops tell you have a right to remain silent. ‘Cause if you remain silent before that it’s because you’re guilty. Got that? If not, stay out of California. Cheers!
Okay, I get why Americans abroad with a deadly disease (and their families) would want to be cared for in the U.S. I understand that the fedgov has some obligation to protect U.S. citizens in other countries (though that’s often more theory than practice). What I don’t get is why the CDC would go out of its way to bring an incurable infectious disease to these shores. I don’t care how many “precautions” you take. We’ve seen how well “precautions” often work.
Forget those sell-by dates. Here’s a site that tells you how long food really lasts. (And IMHO, they’re still being conservative, particularly when it comes to less risky foods.)
The U.S. Department of Justice (sic) is arguing that nobody has a right to refuse to snitch. That is, should you just say no when offered the “opportunity” to become the fedgov’s patsy, TPTB are free to punish you by means fair or foul to coerce and terrify you into doing their bidding. First Amendment does not apply. Nor any other amendment, for that matter.
So they argue and so (in today’s statist legal climate) they may prevail.
Another brick in the wall.
Another brick we’ll pull down on their evil, power-mad heads one day in the not too distant future.
The Simple Justice blog has some fine indignant words on the matter.
Well, maybe not quite nobody. But yes, it’s strange (though of course not surprising) that the uber-government — and the public government and the surveillance complex that enable it — refuse to see how much they’ve broken and how badly they’ve broken it with their foul behaviors.
Of course, to some of us, those broken things are also opportunities. For stronger tech. For alternative commerce. For weening the naive from their trust in the untrustworthy. For freedom.
This story is about the best and brightest leaving Russia. It has nothing to do with the U.S. — except that my email brings me daily reports about American ex-pats that sound just like this.
Not long ago, this sort of privilege, with its cruel disregard for the “little people,” was granted only to puffed-up Oriental potentates and pashas in lands of the notably unfree.
You already knew you were a terrorist in the eyes of “your” democratic, representative, passionately liberty-loving, and devoutly transparent government. Now read the criteria, such as they are, secretly used to terror-list you. Good work from the new Omidyar/Greenwald team and their contacts at The Intercept. (H/T jed)
But worry not! Your safety is in expert hands! (Seriously, it would be hard to imagine how a public shooting could be handled worse than the one at the Navy Yard.)
On the lighter side: Darth Vader is more highly regarded than all potential 2016 presidential candidates.
You may have been hearing about it since yesterday: the new way of profiling your computer (and, with enough other data, you) without leaving either traditional cookies or flash cookies on your system.
Those cookies you can get rid of. The new “evercookie” you can’t even see — although your own system created it on orders from a site or sites you visited.
Using TOR apparently helps, but not completely. Firefox’s wonderful NoScript add-on does the trick. It prevents a nasty little company called AddThis from executing its scripts on your device. However, I’m not clear whether other sites you’ve previously marked as trusted can execute the same script on you even if you’ve blocked AddThis.
Lots of big sites are using the evercookie technology. They then sell the info to advertisers — apparently even if you’ve set all kinds of “do not tracks” and opt outs. Some sites (Hey, we’re talking to you, WhiteHouse.gov!) use the technology counter to their own stated privacy policies. Yes, they’re lying to you. What a shock, eh?
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has developed a countermeasure called Privacy Badger and is asking people to help them test it. They also recommend Disconnect as another possible method.
Of course, we know by now that merely having privacy settings on your computer makes you suspect. And we know that you can create your own unique fingerprint merely by having privacy software and settings, using non-standard browsers, etc.
Still … just one more thing to know about beware of.
It’s time for conservatives to stop defending the police. Actually, it’s way, way, way past time. But the article is still a good beginning. (H/T Sipsey Street)
Sometimes early birds are too early. But ohboy do I understand wanting to “pick up the bucket” just to cross it off the to-do list.
That was a monster body blow Obamacare took yesterday. Not likely to be fatal, though we can hope.
I don’t know who did it or why. But the elaborate white-flag operation atop the Brooklyn Bridge is sure proof that monkeywrenching is alive and well even in the age of omni-surveillance.
So why would Huerta create a mixtape no one else could open? Well for one, there’s no worry that someday he’ll regret sending our nation’s protectors a whole bunch of mushy love songs that will sound really, really cheesy 10 years from now. Oh, and there’s this, which he posted on his Medium blog: “The NSA can read my stupid Facebook updates but without my consent it will never be able to listen to my kick-ass mix tape, even if it’s sitting right in front of them.”
Actually, that simplifies things a little too much. Huerta explains in the same post that he was inspired to create his art statement because he has “[bleep] feelings about mass surveillance, and they are not warm and fuzzy. To take the Internet, which I grew up with so much hope for in being so much more free than the world I physically occupied and turn it into a panopticon brings out the tortured artist in me; I can’t help but respond.”
So the mixtape, which he says “contains a soundtrack for the modern surveillance state” is his response. It’s basically a giant “na-na-na-pooh-pooh” (my words, not his) to the NSA and a musical tribute to documentary filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras and lawyer-journalist Glenn Greenwald, both of published news stories based on NSA documents leaked to them by Edward Snowden. It’s also “a reminder that the rules of mathematics are more powerful than the rules of even the most powerful states,” says Huerta.
So what would be on your freedomista mixtape?
P.S. Hope he’s right about the security of his encryption — even if there’s nothing on the “tape” but bad renditions of “Dancing Queen” and “Lady in Red.” Wouldn’t count on it, though.
