Blaming stuff is becoming something of a fad, I guess. If recent reports are to be believed, it’s not all hip and whatnot to blame ghost stories for violence, video games for everything, and specifically Watch Dogs for teaching children how to hack Glenn Beck’s iPad. And speaking of Watch Dogs, the game du jour, it apparently has such a target on its back these days that it’s being blamed for pre-crime. Confused?
Category: Human stupidity
Malibu Media (X-Art) goes into meltdown mode over FightCopyrightTrolls
Plaintiff is the target of a fanatical Internet hate group. The hate group is comprised of BitTorrent users, anti-copyright extremists, former BitTorrent copyright defendants and a few attorneys. Opposing counsel is one of its few members. Indeed, as shown below, opposing counsel communicates regularly with the hate group’s leader. Members of the hate group physically threaten, defame and cyber-stalk Plaintiff as well everyone associated with Plaintiff. Their psychopathy is criminal and scary.
By administering and using the defamatory blog www.fightcopyrighttrolls.com, “Sophisticated Jane Doe” (“SJD”) leads the hate group. SJD is a former defendant is a suit brought by another copyright owner… She is a self-admitted BitTorrent copyright infringer. SJD’s dedicates her life to stopping peer-to-peer infringement suits.
The US is at war… with itself
Police SWAT teams are now deployed tens of thousands of times each year, increasingly for routine jobs. Masked, heavily armed police officers in Louisiana raided a nightclub in 2006 as part of a liquor inspection. In Florida in 2010, officers in SWAT gear and with guns drawn carried out raids on barbershops that mostly led only to charges of “barbering without a license.”
Republicans more or less flat out admit that corruption is controlling Washington
GOP Rep. Acknowledges That Members Expect Donations For Votes
Rep. Vance McAllister (R-LA) openly acknowledged on Thursday that members of Congress expect to receive campaign contributions for voting a certain way on bills.
During an event with the Northeast Chapter of Louisiana CPAs, the congressman shared an anecdote that illustrated how “money controls Washington,” according to the Ouachita Citizen. He said that many approach their work in D.C. as a “steady cycle of voting for fundraising and money instead of voting for what is right.”
McAllister discussed a bill related to the Bureau of Land Management, which he voted against. McAllister told the crowd that an unnamed colleague told him on the House floor that if he voted “no” on the bill, he would receive a contribution from Heritage, a conservative think tank.
“I played dumb and asked him, ‘How would you vote?’” McAllister said. “He told me, ‘Vote no and you will get a $1,200 check from the Heritage Foundation. If you vote yes, you will get a $1,000 check from some environmental impact group.’”
… because she’s black
This might be the best line from a law suit I’ve read this week:
As my book came out in 2005, it is my belief that she stole my writing. Research indicates that she is black. As I am a well-known Asian Supremacist, I believe she may have done this as an act of retaliation.
As Techdirt notes:
The complainant, Kenneth Eng, ain’t lying. His editorials (read: racist screeds) got AsianWeek in hot water back in 2007. Using the “voice of Asian America” as a vehicle for a rant entitled “Why I Hate Blacks” wasn’t well-received. Apparently, this is what Eng does when not writing dragons-and-guns books. (He also posts videos praising the Virginia Tech shooter and gets arrested for assault and harassment in his down time.)
Update on the update on the NSA vs EFF case
Judge Says NSA Can Continue To Destroy Evidence (Techdirt)
In short: because we’re ordered to delete some data by the law to avoid spying on Americans, to now ask us not to delete any data would violate the law that says we have to delete some data. And, to figure out how to do this would be crazy confusing, because the NSA is a giant bureaucratic machine of spying, and you can’t just throw a rock into it like that. Or something.
After the hearing, the judge sided with the NSA/DOJ, basically saying that the original temporary restraining order blocking the destruction of evidence (from back in March) still stands, but that the issue of whether or not it actually also covers data collected under Section 702 will be briefed at a later date, and until that time the DOJ/NSA are free to continue destroying evidence.
High School Principal Cancels Entire Reading Program To Stop Students From Reading Cory Doctorow’s ‘Little Brother’
Little Brother had been selected and approved as the school’s summer One School/One Book reading pick, and the school librarian Betsy Woolley had worked with Mary Kate Griffith from the English department to develop an excellent educational supplement for the students to use to launch their critical discussions in the fall. The whole project had been signed off on by the school administration and it was ready to go out to the students when the principal intervened and ordered them to change the title.
In an email conversation with Ms Griffith, the principal cited reviews that emphasized the book’s positive view of questioning authority, lauding “hacker culture”, and discussing sex and sexuality in passing. He mentioned that a parent had complained about profanity (there’s no profanity in the book, though there’s a reference to a swear word). In short, he made it clear that the book was being challenged because of its politics and its content.
Ultimately, the entire schoolwide One Book/One School program was cancelled.
I would recommend that everyone go ahead and read that book. It’s quite excellent at describing the dangers of creating a unchecked surveillance-based society.
Tom Cruise’s career is ruined because the internet
No, not really, but it is what Amy Nicholson claims. After reading the Techdirt article, and the comments, it was found that she’s probably just trying to drum up interest for her book, which sounds like a full on advert for Tom Cruise. It wouldn’t surprise me if she was at least in part financed by the church cult of scientology itself.
You can probably picture it in your head: Tom Cruise, dressed in head-to-toe black, looming over a cowering Oprah as he jumps up and down on the buttermilk-colored couch like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Cruise bouncing on that couch is one of the touchstones of the last decade, the punchline every time someone writes about his career. There’s just one catch: It never happened.
This is what she claims didn’t happen:
Not really relevant, but still funny, imho:
How the internet was broken
The Register has published a thorough article on how the NSA has subverted the security of the Internet in the name of national security.
The damage created to IT security is deliberate, sustained and protected even inside the agencies’ compartmented planning cells by arcane contrivances of language. Breaking the safety and value of crypto systems, in sigint speak, is “enabling”. Deliberately sabotaging security, in the inverted Orwellian world of the sigint agencies is said to be “improving security”.
The only European countries apparently not signed up to help break the internet are Luxembourg, Switzerland, Monaco, and Ireland. And Iceland.
Update on faithInHumanity–;
This is an update for this post
I won’t say I told you so, but…you know what, screw it, I told you so. I told you the horror story out of Waukesha, Wisconsin, where two girls attacked a friend, nearly killing her, invoking the name of Slender Man, the creation of one user on internet site Creepypasta, would result in yet another moral panic iteration. Truth be told, it wasn’t a difficult prediction to make and I certainly wasn’t going out on a limb. This kind of thing is sadly as predictable as the weather in San Diego, but not nearly as pleasant. Already the focus is being cast exactly where it shouldn’t, even by police officials.
“This should be a wake-up call for all parents,” Russell P. Jack, Waukesha’s police chief, said in a statement Monday. “Parents are strongly encouraged to restrict and monitor their children’s Internet usage.”