A government memo saying a railway was hacked in a targeted attack was incorrect, according to a spokeswoman for the Association of American Railroads.

“There was no targeted computer-based attack on a railroad,” according to spokesman Holly Arthur. “The memo on which the story was based has numerous inaccuracies.”

Asked if there was an “untargeted” incident that disrupted train service nonetheless, Arthur declined to comment, leaving the public in the dark about what exactly was right and wrong in the memo.

I don’t think it’s just the public who is in the dark – and I’m not talking about the railways!

In approximately April 2006, members of the Mega Conspiracy copied videos directly from Youtube.com to make them available on Megavideo.com.

So? Were these copied videos copyrighted and the licensing ignored, were the licenses followed, or were they in the public domain?

On or about August 31, 2006, VAN DER KOLK sent an e-mail to an associate entitled “lol”. Attached to the message was a screenshot of a Megaupload.com file download page for the file “Alcohol 120 1.9.5 3105complete.rar” with a description of “Alcohol 120, con crack!!!! By ChaOtiX!”. The copyrighted software “Alcohol 120” is a CD/DVD burning software program sold by www.alcohol-soft.com.

The last time I checked, it wasn’t illegal to possess CD/DVD burning software. More germane to this investigation, did they actually use it to make unlicensed copies and distribute them? Or, was this email possibly even a joke? Again, there’s no context given.

On or about November 13, 2006, VAN DER KOLK sent an e-mail to another individual that contained 100 Megaupload.com links to infringing copies of copyrighted musical recordings by the artist Armin van Buuren.

But why did he send them? And who did he send them to? For all I know, he sent them to an individual at a recording company to verify they were infringing. Or maybe he was pirating them. Again, no context is given to tell.

And on and on and on, for 72 pages. It’s amazing the government’s case is so slipshod after they’ve apparently been collecting and sifting through email from megaupload for years. That long-term surveillance suggests a fairly high priority was given this case. Unless they’re hiding a ton of documents, or the emails are much worse then the indictment suggests, the D.O.J. is going to have a hard time proving their claims of racketeering and laundering. Given that, it’s stunning that New Zealand (who took a NZ$10 million bribe for granting Dotcom citizenship there – maybe they were pressured like Spain was) arrested him and several other members of the company, seized everything, and are preparing to extradite them all to the U.S.A. I’m sure these aren’t nice people, and they’ve probably committed some offense or other. However, no trial has been held, extradition hasn’t even occurred yet – no due process has been followed to the end! All of those assets were seized merely on the accusation of the U.S. government.

The hell with the arguments of infringement vs. theft. This is exactly the kind of nightmare scenario that many people have predicted SOPA/PIPA would bring about: an entire site taken down, instead of just the infringing content. And it’s already happening before the legislation has been voted on. (It’s actually been going on since at least June 2010). An entire site has been shut down wholesale, many people have lost legitimate content, and the effect is already having a chilling effect on all file-sharing sites, no matter their perceived legitimacy by Hollywood – which gives further strength to arguments about the current “intellectual property” regime having chilling effects on innovation.

A more important issue that also falls under the jurisdiction of I.C.E. is counterfeit drugs. 60 Minutes did a story about this growing problem. In it, David Elder, from the F.D.A, said their resources haven’t been able to keep up with the increase in volume of counterfeit drugs coming into the country through the mail.

“We don’t have the authority to actually destroy this on site. This product could very well come back into the country through a different mail facility. Maybe it gets through, maybe it gets stopped.”

“But they’re banking on one of these times, you’re going to miss.”

“Yeah. I think they are.”

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said “40% of drugs taken in this country come from other countries. 80% of the active pharmaceutical ingredients in drugs takin in this country actually come from other countries.” The show then discussed Heparin, which once had one of it’s ingredients that comes from China replaced with a counterfeit ingredient. That resulted in over 80 deaths just in the USA. “Drug companies say they already have their own systems in place to protect their supply chains”. Yet “the company [that makes Heparin] told [60 Minutes] in a letter that the counterfeit ingredient so closely mimicked heperin that it was able to evade the quality control systems and regulatory oversight of more than a dozen companies and nearly a dozen countries.”

Now, I’m no fan of China, especially with their human rights record. But consider this: among the leaked wikileaks was one about Apple’s late attempts at dealing with piracy in China. The article described China’s priorities when it came to fighting various piracy and counterfeiting rings:

Chinese officials readily cooperated with pharmaceutical companies on their raids, but that hasn’t translated to software, as Microsoft has discovered, or electronics, as Apple is learning, said Nachum, the professor. Whereas a defective pill could cause sickness or death, a shoddy iPod has less dire consequences.

Our government has the wrong set of priorities: Instead of regulating the biggest pirates (the bankers) and the worst pirates (counterfeit prescription drug makers), they surveil an internet file-sharing company for years, on the say-so of the entertainment industry, and abuse all due process in their attempts to save $500 million in lost potential profits. Apparently, that $500 million is more important than justice for those 80 people’s lives, or preventing another incident like the one that killed them.

Now, it may seem like SOPA is the end game in a long fight over copyright, and the Internet, and it may seem like if we defeat SOPA, we’ll be well on our way to securing the freedom of PCs and networks. But as I said at the beginning of this talk, this isn’t about copyright, because the copyright wars are just the 0.9 beta version of the long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry were just the first belligerents in this coming century-long conflict…

But the reality is, copyright legislation gets as far as it does precisely because it’s not taken seriously…

The triviality of copyright tells you that when other sectors of the economy start to evince concerns about the Internet and the PC, that copyright will be revealed for a minor skirmish, and not a war. Why would other sectors nurse grudges against computers? Well, because the world we live in today is made of computers. We don’t have cars anymore, we have computers we ride in; we don’t have airplanes anymore, we have flying Solaris boxes with a big bucketful of SCADA controllers; a 3D printer is not a device, it’s a peripheral, and it only works connected to a computer; a radio is no longer a crystal, it’s a general-purpose computer with a fast ADC and a fast DAC and some software…

The grievances that arose from unauthorized copying are trivial, when compared to the calls for action that our new computer-embroidered reality will create…

…[2011] was the year in which we saw the debut of open sourced shape files for converting AR-15s to full automatic. This was the year of crowd-funded open-sourced hardware for gene sequencing…The trajectory of 3D printing will most certainly raise real grievances, from solid state meth labs, to ceramic knives.

And it doesn’t take a science fiction writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers…Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or merely hysterical fears, they are nevertheless the province of lobbies and interest groups that are far more influential than Hollywood and big content are on their best days, and every one of them will arrive at the same place — “can’t you just make us a general purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?”

The video of Cory Doctorow’s speech is also available at boingboing. The content of Joshua Wise’s transcript is licensed CC Attribution here, and available here.

This time, they were neither. OK, admittedly, the last time was before the RealID bullshit – before the whole crisis-preparedness-I’m-a-hero mentality had reached down to the level of the local government institutions. I thought our state legislature was going to stand up to the Feds over this issue, as they’d originally passed legislation saying the state wasn’t going to implement it. Since then, our state legislature apparently (quietly) backed down, probably due to the normal threats over federal highway funding like always. (I’m still debating who are bigger liars – the state legislature lies more often, but their lies aren’t as grandiose in their scope as the ones Congress spins. It’s a question of quantity vs. quality).

After reading up on the requirements on the DMV website, I came prepared with the proper documents. (“Papers Please!!!”) And I waited for the better part of an hour, mostly in line. Apparently, technological improvements – like shared online databases and digital cameras – have caused the DMV staff confusion, which has resulted in issues delaying the process for just about every person getting a license. Their process is grossly inefficient. Well, I’ll be blunt, and just say their process sucks choad. First, I waited in line. That was confusing in itself, as they have a line, and they have numbers, and it was never made clear that either one is really separate. (In fact, the lady in front of me took a number, used it before she made it to the front of the line, but ended up behind me for the mug shot line). Then I talked to a clerk, gave her my old license, was given my eye test, and handed her some money. Person #2 was solely there to call people up to the mug shot line. Person #3 was actually taking the mug shot as well as taking finger prints. Person #4 “overrode” the fingerprint reader (whatever that means). Person #5 was Person #3 again. So, in all, 4 total people to do the job that one did the last time I did this. Person #4 seemed to have NO other purpose than to override the fingerprint machine – a piece of technology that at a guess, I would say was previously a bar-code scanner in a grocery store that went out of business in 1980. Since the reader took 10 minutes to get my fingerprint – a process that only used to take a few seconds – the only reason I could see to replace the ink pad they used to have is to provide that one individual with a meaningless, but secure, job. This is a wonderful example of the government using the magic of technology to create new jobs! He did seem irritated that he was being called out of the dazed stupor that he was wandering around the place in. (Hey, buddy, I didn’t buy the piece of shit that you’re responsible for – if it’s broke, why don’t you fix it, instead of glowering at me. Better yet, replace it with something that wasn’t machined from scrap left over from the Korean War!) And Person #3/#5 made me re-identify myself after the fingerprint reader was overridden. (You can never be too safe about terrorist doppelgängers – they can snatch bodies right under your nose!)

Every person I talked to in there demanded that I identify myself (Person #3/#5 made me jump through those hoops twice!) by providing my Name (first, last AND middle initial), full address (including city and zip), and any other details that they verified against my old driver’s license, before they’d say anything else to me. Now, picture it: they are holding a state-issued photo identification of me at the same time they are grilling me on my identity, which raises the questions: If the last state-issued photo ID of me isn’t up to par for visually verifying my identity, then why is the written information on there (like my name and address) to be trusted either? Why is this new driver’s license going to be any more trustworthy than the last one, which isn’t trustworthy now? How do any of these precautions that they feel are necessary, give them knowledge beyond a doubt that I didn’t rent an apartment for a month, then bring the electric bill in there as my proof of residency to obtain a license with a fraudulent address? There’s also the issue of trust going both ways, with no level of government being immune to corruption. How do I know I should trust a single individual in there with my old license or my money? If the DMV is hiring people who can’t remember me from one minute to the next, how do I know they’ll remember to get my money to the treasurer, or my paperwork filed with whatever mysterious agency now makes the licenses and mails them out? How do I know that agency will do it’s job? This is how trust is decayed amongst individuals of the same society, when the state decides to war on it’s own citizens with the justification of protecting them.

At the end of this silly process, they punched a hole in my old license, handed me a bunch of paper, and told me those things constituted my temporary licensing until the new one arrives by mail in approximately two weeks or so. I wonder if it will have gold foil on it to reduce counterfeiting?

When I started this blog, and even up to my last post last December, I didn’t have to worry about spammers – my site was unknown even to them. Eventually, they started posting their comments, and I’ve avoided dealing with it, which just made a bigger mess. No more! I’ve added some plugins, blacklisted some IPs, and I’ve spent two days wading through the 751 comments made to my posts here. Of those, 740 were without a doubt spam, leaving 11 legitimate comments – and of those, some are still questionable. It’s been an exercise in frustration, as I’ve seen exactly how the SEO and marketing types have made their impact in the blogging world. That impact isn’t a pretty one – I saw easily a dozen “blogs” where the content was randomly generated, and another dozen where the “authors” were copying and pasting word-for-word articles from other sites (blog or otherwise). The thinking is that it isn’t the quality of the content that matters, but the page-ranking from sites like google and alexa that determines the real value of any given site. Furthermore, they combine their random word generation and plagiarism with domain parking to make their quick buck. The biggest piece of this strategy involves posting the same comment to as many blog posts around the internet as possible. Googling any of the comments I marked as spam shows the exact same wording showing up on many other blogs. (This method of googling for comments seems like a good idea for a spam plugin!) The only thing that changes is the spammy website and email they fill in with each comment they make, a simple change that’s easily automated. Of course, the links on my blog (and all wordpress blogs with out-of-the-box settings) get an attribute added to them that tells spiders (including google-bot) that it’s an external link and not to follow it. I.e., they’re wasting both of our time with their spam.

Still, some of these comments can get my goat. Take these, for example (each of these was posted at least twice):

Very good article, very much, but there is little requirement is to make your web site can be a good link, in order to promote together.

Really? Are you telling me that if we link our sites together, then the content on both our sites is somehow magically improved? I don’t think so – and as pointed out, it doesn’t even improve our google search rank! I know people who religiously look up their alexa page rank and do the SEO routine – and they aren’t making any more money from their site(s) than I am from mine. If the point of your site is to attract customers to a real business, then by all means, do this stuff. But in that case, your site is little more than electronic version of an ad in the yellow pages, and the only user experience that matters to you is how many of them are using your contact page and if the business they bring is offsetting the cost of your brochure site. For an obscure little blog like mine, SEO is a waste of time. I know I have few (if any) real human readers, but I’m doing this as an outlet for my frustrations, not to attract attention. Improving the quality of my writing (especially when I look at it six months later) is my priority, and SEO has no place here. (This means if you even mention SEO or it’s procedures in your comment, I’ll remove it!) If, in the future, this blog takes off, it will because of quality content, not some get-quick-rich scheme.

And, speaking of get-quick-rich schemes:

Why have you taken away my comment? It is truly valuable unlike the majority of the comments posted here… I’ll post it again please do not eliminate it as a number of people will it incredibly helpful. Hey guys i want to show you about this great system i’ve been using during the last two months called [product name removed by me]. This might be mainly for the website administrator and also anybody else intrested in making money or starting to publish blogs. I personally made approximately $3000 with this inside my first month. It basically is a system that generates blogs for yourself 100% on autopilot that gets you hundreds of visitors for your site from google along with search engines. Do not take my word for this… Check their website out and i guarantee they will hook you in. Its just amazing Make Money Blogging – [product name removed by me]

OH, I wish I knew who this person was in the real world! I wouldn’t even consider a purchase of software sold by someone whose spelling and grammar are at a grade-school level, nor would I purchase anything from a person believing they’re the one to decide what comments are valuable on my site. If you can make $3000 a month with this amazing system, then why did you spam my blog with it, not once, but twice? If I had an automated system making me that kind of money, I could think of better things to do with my time than trolling and spamming blogs. While I’m using WordPress software, I’m not using their hosting – the hosting and domain are paid for by me. As such, I retain all rights and all editorial decisions. This is the way I wanted it, having written on blogs run by other people. Do you see any ads on this site? Again, all costs are coming out of my pocket, and I’ll remove any and all comments I feel like, for any reason, from “said comment is offensive” to “I’m just in a bad mood.” Until you’re paying my bills, your input on the direction of this site will receive it’s due consideration – which is none.

Then there was this one. While I find some sick humor in it, I can easily see a spammer actually having this experience:

Hi there, I found your blog on Google while seeking for first aid for a heart attack and your post looks very interesting for me.

I hope the heart attack case didn’t die while you were reading my blog!

Apparently, the extreme right and the extreme left in this country have much in common with the Chinese government. And, similar to this country, most people don’t care:

But while Liu’s and Qi’s lives have been temporarily derailed by the president’s visit, the general public in China hasn’t showed too much fervor over it.

A survey by China’s leading Web portal Sohu.com and the English newspaper China Daily asked, “What’s your viewpoint on Obama’s visit to China?” Almost 40 percent of respondents said “I don’t care” or “I have no expectations.”

When asked “On what issues do you think China and America will reach more agreements after Obama’s trip?” 56 percent answered, “I don’t think the two countries will reach any more agreements.”

And when our NBC News team went to Wangfujing, one of Beijing’s most popular shopping areas, to speak with people about Obama’s visit, more than half of the people we approached were unaware he was coming.

The comments I see on there show the typical left/right attitudes in this country are just as collectivist as any rascist/chauvinist/nazi/communist ever was:

ok, way to use this as a way for you to bash China!!! It’s obvious that the Chinese are trying to prevent something that the Chinese find “cool” (combining Obama with Mao) from being used by right wing Anti-Obama people in the US to call him a “communist”…but of course, a gesture of good hospitality and going all the way to help one’s honored guest is simply “another sign of Chinese repression” to you people. It just goes to show how stupid you at MSNBC are about China.

Thats where we are heading w/that Great Socialist Oba Mao . He’s here to ruin are country that are father’s so bravely fought for . To keep people like Chairman Mao from taking us over . GOD HELP US !

It’s amazing to me that these two small groups of extremists can have such a large influence in our country when their spelling and grammar – let alone their lack of original thought – clearly show a complete lack of reasoning skills.

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
Luke 2:14 KJV

While I haven’t seen the kind of mobs that result in injuries and deaths (because I hate shopping and avoid that scene like it’s the black plague) I did see complete disregard for one’s fellow man at my local grocery store three days before Thanksgiving. There was one person with his two children who were polite – everyone else, in every aisle, in every checkout lane, and in the parking lot, behaved like they were landed nobility in medieval Europe. Oh, sure, Wal-mart has added “crowd control,” but that’s not the root of the problem. What has Wal-mart done to narrow the gap between rich and poor that causes such madness in the name of saving a couple of bucks on goods made for pennies in Asian sweat-shops? Not a damned thing – but it’s all good, since they’re still profitable, right? Usually, when I’ve pointed this out to friends or family, I’ve been told they have nothing to do with it, they’re just trying to live on a budget. Well, maybe it’s good for the checkbook in the short-term, but in the long-term? Bah-humbug!

These are often the same folks who have nothing to say until a holiday like Thanksgiving, and then post something like this on Facebook:

Happy Thanksgiving everyone and a special thanks to our troops who give us all the opportunity to be with our family when they cannot be with their family.

Exactly what threat did the countries we’re occupying present to families gathering on Thanksgiving anyway that keeps the military overseas for years at a time (away from their families!) with no clear strategy? Oh, right, if we weren’t making resource grabs for oil we wouldn’t have cheap gas to drive to our relatives for dinner. This isn’t support of the military, it’s a thoughtless perversion of “patriotism”. Maybe these folks prefer the New International Version of the above bible verse that reads:

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.

The ironic thing is those who hold this bizarre view of the world also tend to hold a strong desire to experience the world’s ending as described by John of Patmos’ hallucination – as if they will all be members of the 144,000 sealed servants.

I am thankful for those who post more thoughtful insights like this instead:

Watching planes fly over, and seeing stores open, on what was such a reverent recognition of the hard work EVERYONE put in over the past 12 months, I wonder if our country will ever be able to UNITE in celebration of anything ever again.

Now compare that to a national bookstore chain, which I won’t name, but sounds like “Barnes & Noble.” First off, as a corporate entity, their first interest is to make money. If that means not carrying books because a single loony fundamentalist finds something objectionable and threatens a boycott, they have no problem with that – and I don’t care for whack-jobs deciding what’s appropriate for me, as an adult, to read or not read. Oh, they can claim it’s to protect their children all they want – but your children are your responsiblity, not mine, and if you can’t keep tabs on what your kids are reading, that’s your failure as a parent and you’re the one who should be punished for it, not me. (I’m sure you will be, when that kid is a 30- or 40-something, still living at home mooching off your retirement and forcing you to work until you’re dead!) A corporation like B&N will also give information to the government without a warrant – a library will fight that, and I prefer to patronize establishments that look out for everyone’s rights instead of their own perceived best interests.

Now, there’s a specific reason I’m picking on B&N. They have a membership program for $25 per year that “awards” you discounts on purchases. If you do a lot of shopping at B&N (like I used to), it’s a smart thing to get and will pay itself off quickly. However, as I’ve spent more time looking for books that aren’t brand new, or esoteric, or whatever, I’ve spent no money at B&N over the last year. So when I got the renewal notice in the mail, I followed the directions to get on their website to make sure it wasn’t automatically renewed. Automatic renewal is spun as a “convenience” for B&N’s customers, and if you’re still shopping there regularly, I’m sure it is. However, their website, like many others in the world, looks good but has some serious functionality issues. I couldn’t associate the web account I set up with my membership number, and as a result, couldn’t change the “renewal preferences” so easily as the mailing proclaimed. So I sent them a message via their online form:

I don’t want to have my membership automatically renewed, but can’t find any option to do that, nor am I able to register my member number to review my member profile.

Here’s the email I received a couple of days later from B&N:

from Barnes & Noble Member Services
to xxx@xxx
date Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 1:36 PM
subject Re: BN Member – Member Number:xxxxxxxxx (xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
mailed-by barnesandnoble.com

Nov 23

Dear Member,

Thank you for the information you have provided us regarding your Barnes & Noble Membership. In order to assist you, we need you to reply to this email with one of the following information below:

-Phone number
-Last four digits of the credit card #
-Last store in which your Membership was used.

Please accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience.

We look forward to your next visit.

Sincerely,

Mayra

Customer Service Representative
Barnes and Noble

http://www.bn.com/

Original Message Follows:
————————

Member Number: xxxxxxxxxx
IP: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5)
Gecko/20091106 Shiretoko/3.5.5
First Name: xxx
Last Name: xxx
Email: xxx@xxx.xxx
Mailing Address: xxx
city: xxx
State: xx
Zip Code: xxxxx
Country: xxx

I don’t want to have my membership automatically renewed, but can’t find any option to do that, nor am I able to register my member number to review my member profile.

This electronic mail message contains information that (a) is or may be CONFIDENTIAL, PROPRIETARY IN NATURE, OR OTHERWISE PROTECTED BY LAW FROM DISCLOSURE, and (b) is intended only for the use of the addressee(s) named herein. If you are not an intended recipient, please contact the sender immediately and take the steps necessary to delete the message completely from your computer system.

Not Intended as a Substitute for a Writing: Notwithstanding the Uniform Electronic Transaction Act or any other law of similar effect, absent an express statement to the contrary, this e-mail message, its contents, and any attachments hereto are not intended to represent an offer or acceptance to enter into a contract and are not otherwise intended to bind this sender, barnesandnoble.com llc, barnesandnoble.com inc. or any other person or entity.

This was my response:

Apology NOT accepted. I have requested you to not charge me money for a membership I no longer desire, and find it interesting that you want more info to do that than you would to automatically renew the membership – and that you want me to send more personally identifiable information in a plain text email. Clearly, protecting me from identity theft/fraud is not your motive, and if you DO charge me, I will simply send these emails to my bank and have them cancel the charge.

Have a nice day, but don’t expect me to visit your stores anytime soon.

Sincerely,

This is exactly the kind of thing I expect from a national book chain (and some local ones too), but I can’t ever imagine and have never experienced with a public library.

It’s rather tragic for me to think that we had a ballot initiative in my county to increase spending on libraries that would have resulted in an increase of $30/household in property taxes – and it failed.

A sort of doubt has always hung around the character of Tolstoy, as round the character of Gandhi. He was not a vulgar hypocrite, as some people declared him to be, and he would probably have imposed even greater sacrifices on himself than he did, if he had not been interfered with at every step by the people surrounding him, especially his wife. But on the other hand it is dangerous to take such men as Tolstoy at their disciples’ valuation. There is always the possibility – the probability, indeed – that they have done no more than exchange one form of egoism for another. Tolstoy renounced wealth, fame and privilege; he abjured violence in all its forms and was ready to suffer for doing so; but it is not easy to believe that he abjured the principle of coercion, or at least the DESIRE to coerce others. There are families in which the father will say to his child, “You’ll get a thick ear if you do that again”, while the mother, her eyes brimming over with tears, will take the child in her arms and murmur lovingly, “Now, darling, IS it kind to Mummy to do that?” And who would maintain that the second method is less tyrannous than the first? The distinction that really matters is not between violence and non-violence, but between having and not having the appetite for power. There are people who are convinced of the wickedness both of armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who believes that it is necessary to use violence in certain circumstances. They will not say to somebody else, “Do this, that and the other or you will go to prison”, but they will, if they can, get inside his brain and dictate his thoughts for him in the minutest particulars. Creeds like pacifism and anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics – a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage – surely that proves that you are in the right? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone else should be bullied into thinking likewise.