doubleplusundead

…who came up with the phrase “The customer is always right!” deserved to be Ceausescu’d,

Hmmm, I haven’t written a book post in quite awhile, mainly because I colored in all the pictures and the sticker books are just boring, but here we go:

What have I been reading lately

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The Atlantic – What if we never run out of oil?

Basically a look at the history of “peak oil” and how it has driven new methods of energy production / extraction wrapped up in climate alarmism.  Come for the tasty hydrocarbons stay for the preaching, but it does make the point that the constant drum beat about diminishing oil supplies is overdone.

Gizmodo – Anonymous takes down NAMBLA’s homepage to protest “Pedophilia Pride Day”

Two points in that headline make my teeth hurt:

1.  NAMBLA has a homepage

2.  There is a “Pedophilia Pride Day” (God please don’t let there be Pedophilia Pride Parades it’s only 6am and I already feel like my head might explode)

Yuck.

today is Alice Day, a day inspired by Lewis Carroll’s debated sexual attraction to Alice In Wonderland’s very underage and very real counterpart, when proud pedophiles come together in celebration of their disorder. So it’s a beautiful day for a NAMBLA takedown, and Anonymous was happy to answer the call.

I have another potential name for it – Target Practice, but then that would send us all to jail and who would be left to write inane blogposts like this one.

The New Yorker – What if the Tsarnaevs had been the “Boston Shooters”

Well then among other things John Cassidy wouldn’t have been able to write such a douchebag article.  More handwringing over guns, don’t read it.

The Verge – Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer join FWD.us

I’m telling you guys this group means bad, bad things.  Not because I am anti-immigrant, but because, frankly, I don’t trust Zuckerberg.  Immigration reform is step one on a long liberal slope.

Gizmodo – Kim Komando explains what a computer is to the unwashed masses of the 90’s.

"What happens when you press the wrong button? Does it blow up?"

Oh if only; my life would be so much simpler.

Kim Komando still hosts a weekly radio show that is pretty entertaining and last I saw she was still pretty cute, plus she is a huge supporter of our troops.

Hacker News – From Bank Fraud to Hacking Iceland Has It All

All right I admit to a little poetic license with the title, but the point is basically the same – Iceland is suddenly becoming some sort of data haven.  Yesterday the Icelandic Supreme Court ruled that the local Visa subsidiary had to process payments to Wikileaks and then today the Icelandic domain registrar announced it will protect The Pirate Bay.  How they square that with outlawing internet porn I don’t quite know.

Krebs on Security – SWATting related to exposure of ID Theft sites used by XBox gamers to harass Microsoft employees that enforce XBox Live rules. 

Specifically, two different sources placed blame for the attacks on a young hacker named “Phobia,” who they said was part of a group of Xbox gaming enthusiasts who used ssndob.ru to look up Social Security numbers belonging to high-value Xbox account holders — particularly those belonging to Microsoft Xbox Live employees. Armed with that information, and some social engineering skills, the hackers could apparently trick Microsoft’s tech support folks into transferring control over the accounts to the hackers. “I heard he got pissed that you released the site he uses,” one of the sources told me, explaining why he thought Phobia was involved.

There is just something wrong with the world when the police are being used to dish out vigilante justice to settle video game disputes.  (I should note this is all speculation.  While it may be true that what Mr. Krebs has written here is 100% accurate it hasn’t actually been proved yet.  Things can change)

Slashdot – Fifth Amendment Applies to Encryption Keys

As I understand it – There were multiple encrypted drives in the house. The FBI knew that there was child porn on one of the drives but not which one.  The FBI wanted the defendant to be compelled to decrypt all the drives.  The Judge said no because to do so would be to admit that he (the defendant) had control of the drive and therefore of the child porn and that would amount to a compelled confession and would violate the fifth amendment.  

This differs from other cases in that the government couldn’t actually demonstrate that the drive and data  in question belonged to the defendant.  In those cases the fifth amendment didn’t apply because the decryption didn’t tell the government anything it wasn’t already able to prove.

The Hacker News – Chinese Hackers Targetting American Drones

Prelude to drone hijacking? 

 Bombing Suspects Chechnyans in US legally

Boston Herald –

The suspects were identified to The Associated Press as coming from the Russian region near Chechnya, which has been plagued by an Islamic insurgency stemming from separatist wars. A law enforcement intelligence bulletin obtained by the AP identified the surviving bomb suspect as Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, a 19-year-old who had been living in Cambridge, just outside Boston, and said he “may be armed and dangerous.”

PJ Media –

Tamerlan Tzarnaev, the suspect killed, was reportedly 26 and born in Russia and has been a legal permanent resident since 2007. The younger brother was born in Kyrgyzstan, according to NBC, or Chechnya, according to Russian media. A Russian journalist reported both attended school in Dagestan, which neighbors Chechnya and also has an Islamist extremist insurgency, before coming to the U.S. CNN reported that the brothers stopped in Kazakhstan, not Turkey, before coming to the U.S.

Gizmodo – Condom Company Makes Vibrating Underwear Controlled By Your iPhone

The undergarments are loaded with touch technology, and are controlled by a smartphone app—an iPhone in the demo videos—that knows what gender your partner is. The app has diagrams of your partner’s crotch, which you drag your finger across to stimulate their actual crotch from wherever you are in the world. Or the bra, since that apparently vibrates too.

So we all know how these will be used and I expect that for the next few years we will be seeing news stories about car crashes, disrupted meeting , and miscellaneous hilarity resulting from orgasms at inappropriate times.   Good times

Thus once again leading to the age old question – Just because we can does that mean we should? 

The Hacker News – Many of the attacks involved in OpIsrael  originated from criminal botnets

Surprised?

Note:  Any discussion of the Boston Marathon Bombings will be incidental, except for my initial speculation offered in a second. 

The reason for this silence is that as far as I know there is very little hard data about perpetrators or reasons. People will have their own wildly differing theories but there is no proof. 

My personal wildly unscientific and unprovable assessment is that this will turn out to be foreign Islamic radicals in the US on valid visas; but that is just speculation based on the style of attack, AND  again there is no proof and I can certainly be wrong.  That’s all that I am going to say on the matter for now.

OK on to the show

The Verge – Microsoft will introduce boot to desktop option to bypass ‘Metro’ interface in Windows 8.1 (Windows Blue)

So they are caving – kind of – you will have the option of skipping the start screen and going directly to the desktop.  It’s a sop to IT departments that think its too hard to teach users to point at the corners or hit Win + X.

Ars Technica – FTC May Investigate Patent Trolls

Finally someone besides George W. Bush that all the world’s woes can be blamed on and the FTC is taking them on.

Ars Technica – Contrary to Initial Reports the Boston Cell Phone Were Not Shut Down

AP had a report from a law enforcement official who said that they had been shut down but all the providers and the FCC say that the system was just overwhelemd with traffic.  (see incidental reporting)

Hacker News – Climate Scientists Struggle to Explain Global Warming

This kind of sums it up –

"The climate system is not quite so simple as people thought," said Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician and author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" who estimates that moderate warming will be beneficial for crop growth and human health.

Techcrunch – More H1B visas on the way but employers will have to pay more

it (the immigration bill – ed.) nearly doubles the number of high-skilled visas (H1-B), from the 65,000 to 110,000, with a maximum of 185,000 in the future. However, as the Washington Post reports, it will also require employers who heavily rely on H1-B visas to pay fees and higher salaries.

More details here