Month: December 2010

Inconsistency of the FBI

This is a very interesting article by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). It seems the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) arbitrarily attempts to cover up their illegal activities when complying with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

The EFF obtained two copies of two documents from the FBI via the FOIA. What’s interesting in both cases is either copy of the same document had parts redacted but the parts that were redacted between copies were different:

The report discusses the FBI’s improper collection of bank and credit card records. In Version 1, all important information about the violation (including that it relates to financial records) was withheld. Version 2 reveals most of the details and shows the extent of the FBI’s violation. In this matter, the FBI, as part of an ongoing investigation into international terrorism, sought hotel and financial records on a subject. Although the agent responsible had no legal authority to obtain the financial records, he or she purposefully styled a request to a financial institution as a National Security Letter (NSL) to hide this fact, essentially lying to obtain the bank and credit card information.

What’s even more interesting is the fact this isn’t the first time such behavior has been noticed:

This certainly isn’t the first time we’ve seen evidence that an arm of the Justice Department has withheld more than it is entitled to under FOIA. We found this in the FBI’s response of one of our earlier FOIA requests and reported on it here. More recently, the New York Times reported on the Justice Department’s attempts to keep from the public eye evidence of its embarrassing role in the US government’s “collaboration with [Nazi] persecutors.”

Even with claims of a more transparent government (remember that Obama promise?) it seems the amount of transparency differs day to day. This behavior, like so much of the behavior of our government, is disgusting to say the last. Thankfully it appears the EFF is going to be bringing this to court:

Federal agencies should not be able to hide their missteps behind white blocks. We plan to bring this to the court’s attention in our lawsuit challenging the FBI and other agencies’ improper withholding of reports submitted to the Intelligence Oversight Board.

Of course I question how much will be accomplished by asking the government to punish itself for its own misgivings.

Joel Rosenberg Arrested

If you converse with many carry advocates in Minnesota you probably know the name Joel Rosenberg. He’s the author or Everything You Need to Know About (Legally) Carrying a Handgun in Minnesota and a carry permit instructor. Yesterday he was arrested on charges of having possession of a weapon in a courthouse. The story doesn’t seem as straight forward as it’s being reported by the Red Star as this article has a bit more detail.

Either way it seems he carried his gun into Minneapolis City Hall and was requested to leave. According to a stated court order Minneapolis City Hall is a gun-free zone because it connects with the Government Center. I’m not sure how that works as Minneapolis often seems to have laws of their own that little or no sense.

With how convoluted this story is (it seems to be a bunch of he said she said) I haven’t a clue what to think. Although I don’t believe the Minneapolis City Hall can’t arbitrarily declare themselves a gun-free zone I’m not sure if any courthouse integrates into it and thus effects the law. It’s also stated that Mr. Rosenberg refused to leave upon the request of the police officer citing state law. I applaud anybody willing to stand up to an officer on a power trip but frankly I’m one to leave upon request without argument. It’s not that I feel like giving into an officer incorrectly enforcing a law, I just like to avoid conflict with other people when possible. What is really odd though is the story states Mr. Rosenberg was at City Hall on November 5th, allowed to leave, and was arrested yesterday, December 8th.

Mr. Rosenberg posted an open letter regarding the incident which the WCCO mentioned. Personally I find the wording in that letter inflammatory and rather poorly done. Multiple lines can be pulled out of context and perceived as threats. Let this be a note to everybody, be careful of the wording you use when conversing about firearms and self-defense topics. If you ever get involved in a situation you can guarantee some lawyer and the media will dig through your post history and try to use anything you’ve stated against you.

Either way this is going to be an interesting case to say the least.

EDIT 2010-12-09 10:30: Can and can’t are quite different and apparently I don’t know this. I changed “Minneapolis City Hall can arbitrarily” to “Minneapolis City Hall can’t arbitrarily.”

Voluntary Botnet

This is kind of an interesting premise that’s not at all new but being report as such by several source. MasterCard has been under a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The attack was set off after MasterCard refused to allow customers to user their card to make donations to Wikileaks. This story is so multifaceted that I don’t know where to begin.

First this shows what kind of power companies like MasterCard and Visa can wield when they decide to no longer be a common carrier (allow customers holding their card to make payments to whoever they chose). It’s even more interesting since Wikileaks hasn’t actually done anything illegal meaning these moves are purely business.

Needless to say if you piss off the Internet is pissed on you back. MasterCard is currently under a DDoS attack but not by the usual malware created botnet. News sources are saying it’s by a voluntary botnet. Basically people are downloading an application called Low Orbit Ion Cannon (not to mistaken with GDI’s weapon of mass destruction that really does a good job of shoving it up Kane’s ass). Low Orbit Ion Cannon apparently connects to an invite-only IRC server and allows your system to become part of a botnet. Once the connection is established you system sends out constant traffic to a targeted node on the Internet.

Even more interesting is the fact that performing DDoS attacks is generally illegal. Most of the times the owners of the systems that are in a botnet aren’t held accountable because they did not knowingly allow control of their system to be taken. This case is different since each participant is voluntarily becoming part of the attacking botnet. This shows once again though that simply making something illegal is not a deterrent.

Chrome OS

Yesterday Google officially announced Chrome OS. For those of you who haven’t heard of it Chrome OS is Google’s non-Android operating system that consists of a web browser and… nothing else really. Chrome OS is literally an instance of the Chrome web browser running on top of a Linux kernel. No applications exist outside of the web browser which basically means with the exception of HTML5 offline support the OS is worthless without an Internet connection.

You can probably tell I don’t find the OS all that useful especially when Google already has an operating system that could be adapted to small notebooks called Android. Either way there are a couple of interesting things regarding the web browser OS. First Google will actually offer some form of live support. My biggest headache with Android ended up being the complete lack of any support from Google. Google’s system lost all records of the Android applications I purchased and the only option is to post on their support forum which they apparently don’t monitor at all (I still haven’t received a single reply to my post). Of course Google also offered support for the Nexus One and in less than a year terminated it and sent you to HTC (who manufactured the Nexus One) for your support needs. Either way I don’t have much faith in Google supporting Chrome OS for very long.

The more interesting news item I found was the fact that Verizon will give all Chrome OS users 100MB a month of 3G data for free. I think a majority of people in the comments section are bitching that 100MB is nothing this day and age but for free what do you fucking expect? It’s enough to check your e-mail once in a while when you don’t have Wi-Fi available to you. Of course you can get unlimited data from Verizon for the rather steep price of $9.99… a day. Yikes! That’s actually worse than AT&T’s data plan which is already pretty fucking poor ($20.00 for 2GB and then $10.00 for each additional GB over that). On the upside that $9.99 a day doesn’t require a contract.

Either way I’m still not impressed with the idea of Chrome OS. Every small notebook on the planet already comes with a web browser plus a whole lot more. Being even more impressive these other notebooks are still useful if you have no Internet connection. But hey it wouldn’t be the first time Google hyped up a produce only to shit can it later when nobody really found it useful.

Stopping Violence Against Women

I often hear people talking about the problem of violence against women and their desire to find a solution. When you mention arming women many of these people will give you a long spewing of bullshit on how that’s not the solution. Well Mr. Addley of Canada gets it:

With regards to Russell Williams, we must all be reminded that none of the women encountered by him had a legal right to self defense of their own persons by reason of a readily available handgun.

Thanks to Wendy Cukier every women in Canada will remain an easy target for violence due to the fact that she will never be able to avail herself of the most effective and efficient force equalizer known today.

For if any of these young women had been able to legally carry a loaded handgun they would have possessed the necessary force to repel any menacing threat that could of come their way.

A .45 caliber handgun turns a 110 lb women into a 310lb behemoth.

I really like that last line. Nothing levels the playing field in a fight like a firearm. You can be the smallest and weakest person on the planet but if you have a firearm on your person you can stand your ground against the largest and strongest person alive. This is because of a simple fact, all people have an allergy to bullet holes.

I often find it ironic that the biggest supporters and participants in the right to carry are men. Woman should be far more gung-ho about carrying firearms as they are very likely to be targets of violent criminals. You can rest assured that a rape will be thwarted if a woman shoots her would-be rapist dead.

Because He Was Shot Robbing a Coffee Shop You Should Support Gun Control

A short while back there was a story about a Dutch Brothers Coffee employee who shot a piece of shit armed robber. The company doesn’t appear to be upset with the actions of their employee:

A Dutch Bros. spokeswoman said the barista is still on paid leave and will return to work when he is ready. She did not know whether the gun belonged to the employee or not.

“We are extremely thankful that our employee was not injured in the robbery on Nov. 24 and are appreciative that no charges will be filed,” Travis Boersma, CEO/Co-Founder of Dutch Bros. Coffee, said in a prepared statement Wednesday. “We work closely with our employees and do our best to ensure they are safe and protected while at work and will continue to do so. All procedures will be reviewed and evaluated as a result of this incident.”

So the employee will return to work, excellent. What I found funny through was looking up the scum bag’s obituary, specifically the last paragraph:

The Celebration of this wonderful young man’s life will take place at the Musgrove Family Mortuary, Friday, December 3rd, 2010 at 11 a.m. In lieu of flowers, the family would love donations made to a charity that speaks to you about Sirus. We would like his passing to inspire contributions to causes like gun control, Food for Lane County or DARE, that help people who have fallen through the cracks.

Emphasis mine. The family’s desire is to support gun control causes even though Scum Bag McGee was shot because he was using a gun to rob a coffee shop. Why not have donations put in for the family to do a speaking tour on why it’s a bad idea to commit armed robbery? Oh well you know what they say, criminals love gun control.

I Think It’s Time for a Denial of Service Attack

How’s this for creepy shit? Walmart is sucking the cock of teaming up with the Department of Homeland Security to place video displays in stores with Janet Napolitanio telling people if they see something say something. That’s right when you go to your local Walmart you’ll soon be indoctrinated by Homeland Security propaganda advising you to do something that doesn’t actually help secure anything.

Being a troublemaker and an overall anti-authoritarian man I have a proposal. I think it’s time for a denial of service attack against this new Homeland Security measure. The concept is simple. To quote Bruce Schneier, “if you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get amateur security.” If you try to get everyday Joes to report potential terrorism you’re going to get a ton of false positives. These false positives need to be investigated by the local police departments as a cover their ass measure. If the number of calls in areas where this Homeland Security bullshit is being implemented increases dramatically it’ll become an expensive failure.

Thus the proposal is simple, if your local Walmart (or any other store) implement these monitors start calling the police about every stupid little thing you see. Every person with a camera, speaking in a foreign language, looking nervous in any way, looking suspicious in anyways, tying their shoes funny, or wearing clothing that is of a color you don’t generally like gets reported to the police. Hell I’d say report yourself as well but the police won’t actually waste any effort investigating an obviously fake call (thus you want to keep your reports semi-believable but obviously amateur). Eventually the cost of investigating all these reports will grow high enough that the local police will want to videos removed.

I did find this last line interesting:

The program has already partnered with the Mall of America, the American Hotel & Lodging Association, Amtrak, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, sports and general aviation industries, and other organizations across the country, DHS said.

The Mall of America is right in my backyard (on the other end of the Twin Cities). I’ll have to actually go there sometime and see if these videos are playing and if they are start making some phone calls. Lord knows I’m still pissed that the Mall of America thinks they can ban firearms on the premises even though they are a landlord (who legally can’t ban in the state of Minnesota).

Google Nexus S

Yesterday Google announced a new developer phone, the Nexus S. Over all it’s not nearly as awesome as the first Nexus was (in comparison to other phones on the market at the time vs. other phones on the market now). Really the phone is just a rebranded Samsung Galaxy S running a stock version of Android which in of itself is a great feature (Samsung’s TouchWiz interface is all sorts of crap in my opinion).

The only real changes from the already released Galaxy S that I’ve noticed is the inclusion of a Near Field Communications (NFC) chip (which nobody else has so the feature is limited to Nexus S phones at the moment), a gyroscope, and the removal of the microSD card slot.

The first two features are kind of neat but the last one left a sour taste in my mouth. Almost every Android phone has a microSDHC slot on board which allows you to expand the amount of storage space up to 32GB (the maximum the microSDHC standard allows). The Nexus S has a fixed amount of memory on board which weighs in at only 16GB. If this was simply and included microSD card that wouldn’t be a big deal as you could simply upgrade it but the memory is fixed. I have no idea why this route was chosen when the Galaxy S currently has a microSDHC slot on board.

The phone does have a Super AMOLED screen which I’ve heard is absolutely gorgeous. Along with that the basic specs are still pretty bloody good. Over all it looks like a decent, albeit lackluster, successor to the original Nexus developer phone. It’ll be interesting to see how Android 2.3 handles when this phone is released later this month.