Chronicling the depravities of the State.
Another story found via Dvorak Uncensored. Apparently 10 year-old kids are a lot tougher than I thought:
The release said that the officers, trying to prevent the child from hurting other children, staff members and himself, slapped the boy and then used a Taser to subdue him.
It’s a good thing they had that Taser otherwise somebody could have gotten hurt!
Hey heads up everybody but I have the day off today and I’m not going to be spending most of it in front of the computer. Hence there will be little to no blogging today.
An unsurprising story from Africa appeared on the BBC today. Apparently there’s violence in South Sudan. I know what a shocker right? Of course this next part doesn’t make sense:
This is why the south’s semi-autonomous government has launched an ambitious initiative to control the violence.
In Jonglei, the biggest and most violent state in the south, teams of officials have been touring remote areas for the past three months, telling cattle-herders to hand in their guns.
So there’s massive violence and the solution is to… disarm the cattle herders. Yeah because disarmament has worked so well in other countries to curb violence. Wait a minute that’s a complete crock. Disarmament only makes live easier on the lawless who refuse to turn in their arms. That does beg the question why would any of the cattle herder turn in their means of self defense against the lawless? Well because:
Those who refuse face five years in prison or a fine of 20 cows.
The classic government mechanism for disarmament. Give us your guns or we’ll take them and either send you to jail or steal even more of your property. Of course:
“We found people were already fed up with these arms, so they co-operated with the civil authorities,” said Jonglei State Governor Kuol Manyang.
I’m guessing the reason you’ve found co-operative people isn’t because those people are sick of their guns but because you’re forcing them to turn in their guns. When citizens do this in place of government it’s called theft.
If there’s one thing I love it’s technology and gizmos. Because of my bizarre drive to have lots of electronic devices around I ended up buying a PlayStation 3 quite some time back. The feature list of this system is quite long although it’s been getting shorter as the system ages. This is really odd since most systems gain features as they get older. Well one feature I rather enjoyed was the ability to install Linux on the system. Sure it ran in a hypervisor and was gimped for the most part but it gave me the ability to write code for the cell processor and see what made it tick. Well Sony decided to take that away from me as well.
The latest firmware update released today removes the “Install Other OS” feature and removes any currently installed operating system. Of course I would put this off as some kind of April Fool’s prank but information regarding this has been out for a couple of days. And it’s truly bad form to pull an April Fool’s prank before the actual date.
This kind of shit really pisses me off. I realize this is a feature used by very few people but those few of us who used it really enjoyed it. The fact of the matter is one of the reasons I bought a PS3 was for this particular feature as I wanted to play with the cell processor which was all the rave at the time. Yes I paid for this feature and now Sony has decided to take it. Well I could always refuse to install the new firmware but then I can’t use the system for the other reason I own it, gaming. So no matter what Sony is ensuring I lose a feature I paid for.
Well it’s nice to see Sony has decided they no longer want my money. But this is only one piece of my two part rant. That’s right you’re getting two rants for the price of one! The other thing that’s pissing me off are the comments being made by people. For instance user HumanNature on Engadget had this to say:
Totally agreed. I blame Geohot for this mess. No one with a working common sense would not foresee Sony not fixing their security issue with OtherOs. I mean really, did Geohot really think Sony was going to congratulate him and let some other hacker make it easy to install like the PSP? Geohot releasing the exploit is the cause, Sony locking the OtherOs is the effect.
Do people really expect Sony to sit around and let the PS3 end up like the PSP? Like many things in life, it only takes one idiot to abuse something, and everyone will be force to pay the price.
That’s right people are blaming the well known hardware hacker who goes by the handle Geohot. What did Geohot do? Well you can go read his blog. More or less he found a convoluted way to accomplish nothing… yet. But as with all hacks it will eventually lead to bigger and better things.
Either way what he did was awesome. It should be seen as an accomplishment as it required ingenuity and understanding of the hypervisor. It was a good hack and he should be congratulated for figuring it out not blamed for Sony removing the “Install Other OS” capability on the PS3. The bottom line is Sony decided to take their ball and go home instead of fixing the flaw. This is akin to somebody finding an exploit in Windows Media Player and Microsoft reacting by removing Windows Media Player (granted not a horrible thing but I’m bias in my hatred of Windows Media Player).
Either way there seems to be a lot of blame and some hatred going towards Geohot for playing with hardware he owns. That’s the key thing. You don’t rent a PS3, you purchase it. Once you own it you can do anything you want with it. If I want to take mine to the range and blast the shit out of it I very well can because it’s my property. Geohot did what any good geek does, he developed an understanding of the device and decided to utilize that understanding to make the device to more. But the bottom line is this attempt to extend the capabilities of the device have nothing to do with game piracy as Sony claims.
Of course very few people really care about this exploit because few people use the “Install Other OS” feature. So I say the next exploit should focus on the Blu-ray player which people actually use. After all if that gets hacked it could allow the ability to play pirated games and therefore, using Sony’s logic, the Blu-ray drive would have to be disabled. Then people would actually be pissed.
Oh and I’m going to close out by saying fuck you Sony.
So I just learned something that probably everybody else already knew. There is a Unicode character for the old Soviet hammer and sickle. Note for some of you it may show up as a question mark or a box with numbers in it. That’s just poor Unicode support in action.
U+262D prints ☭ (size increased to show detail). Apparently communism prevailed.
That’s right it’s April Fool’s day. This is normally where people with websites post random pranks in an attempt to make suckers of readers. This would be the day where I’d say something about quitting the blog or how I’ve started understanding the need for “reasonable gun control.” Alas I’m not going to waste your time. Don’t get me wrong I love pulling pranks on people and this is the holiday to do it. But if I don’t get to see the reaction of the people I’m pranking it’s just not worth my time or effort.
So don’t worry about my trying to post a lame article to rile you up. Well unless of course I change my mind. Who knows. Either way happy prank day! Now go out and screw with somebody.