Month: December 2013

Honest Cops

You may not be able to legally lie to a copy but they can certainly lie to you. This rather one-sided law makes it no surprise that so many cops have a difficult time with the truth. But once in a while you get a cop who is up front and honest with you:

They wanted to know where two guys were, and Crinnian later found out police believed they violated parole.

“I said, ‘I have no idea who you’re talking about I’ve never heard of these people before,’” he said.

To prove it, he said police asked to search his house, Crinnian refused multiple times. He said they needed a warrant.

Then he said one police officer started threatening him saying, “If we have to get a warrant, we’re going to come back when you’re not expecting it, we’re going to park in front of your house, where all your neighbors can see, we’re gonna bust in your door with a battering ram, we’re gonna shoot and kill your dogs, who are my family, and then we’re going to ransack your house looking for these people.”

What’s worse is that the cops could have done exactly that and received little more than a slap on the wrist. It’s amazing how far modern policing has fallen from the old motto of protect and serve. The new motto should be to assault and terrorize.

The NSA is Tracking Cellular Phone Locations Around the World

I’m sure this isn’t going to surprise anybody. On top of reading our e-mails and text messages, listening to our phone calls, and attempting to decrypt our encryption communications the National Security Agency (NSA) has been busy tracking our location using our voluntary tracking device (often mistakenly referred to as a cellular phone):

The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.

The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.

At this point I feel that it’s safe to assume that the NSA has utilized every technology we use in our daily lives to inflict an Orwellian world upon us. It’s obvious that the people in charge of the agency have no conscious whatsoever. Anybody with a conscious would have objected to at least a few of the activities the NSA has been involved in. In fact things are so bad at the NSA that it gave its employees talking points so they could justify their actions to their family members during Thanksgiving.

Writing Circuits

File this under awesome geeky shit:

Good-bye, breadboard. Scientists at the University of Illinois have come up with a conductive, water-based ink that lets you draw working circuits on an ordinary piece of paper. They’ve packaged the product into a rollerball pen, called Circuit Scribe, and if you want to be one of the first to get hold of one, the team is crowdfunding the project on Kickstarter right now.

A pen that can draw working circuit pathways? That’s pretty damn cool. In fact I can think of several practical jokes involving conductive ink. On a less nefarious note, these things would have been a ton of fun in my college electronic classes.

The United States Government Moves to Kill More People with Drones

Apparently not enough people were being murdered in the Middle East by America’s fleet of remotely controlled bomb droppers. The Pentagon has loosened restrictions in regards to avoiding civilian casualties when using drones to bomb the shit out of somebody:

The Pentagon has loosened its guidelines on avoiding civilian casualties during drone strikes, modifying instructions from requiring military personnel to “ensure” civilians are not targeted to encouraging service members to “avoid targeting” civilians.

In addition, instructions now tell commanders that collateral damage “must not be excessive” in relation to mission goals, according to Public Intelligence, a nonprofit research group that analyzed the military’s directives on drone strikes.

I’m sure the people in the Middle East will finally understand how hard the United States is working to bring them freedom and democracy.

WristCoin

You’re going to notice a complete lack of new material here today. This is due to the fact that I spent last night putting the final touches on the initial design of an application I’m writing. A couple of weeks ago I purchased a Pebble wristwatch. If you haven’t heard of it it’s a wristwatch that connects to your smartphone via low powered Bluetooth and presents notifications in a manner that doesn’t involve digging your phone out. My interest in the device stems from the fact that it’s programmable.

For my first program on the watch I’ve decided to write a Bitcoin price checker. Since I’m horrible with names I’ve dubbed the application WristCoin. Obviously the application is still in the pre-alpha stage, which means it’s riddled with bugs and isn’t feature complete. But I’ve published the source code on GitHub if anybody is interested in following my progress.

WristCoin requires both the 2.0 beta Pebble firmware and the 2.0 beta Pebble smartphone application. In its current state WristCoin grabs prices off of Bitstamp and displays the last price on the Pebble. I will be adding more exchanges in the near future and the ability to bring up more detailed pricing information for each exchange. Progress on the application will heavily depend on my free time but it’s small and shouldn’t take a great deal of time.

The application, as you can guess based on my views regarding intellectual property, is public domain so you can do with it whatever you wish.

Another Reason I Want to Move to Iceland

I often mention my desire to escape the United States. There are only two things I can see for the future of this country: economic collapse and an all pervasive police state. When these two things are finalized I want to be watching from afar. Central America and East Asia are two possible destinations I’m considering. Another possibility, the one currently at the top of my list, is Iceland.

Iceland has a lot going for it. The island nation has a history of statelessness, an anarchist as the mayor of its capital city, the wherewithal to strike against the bankers that caused its financial crisis, the fortitude to stand up for whistle blowers, and the balls to tell agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to get the fuck out.

In addition to all of those things Iceland, unlike the United States, also has a police force that isn’t bat shit insane:

Icelandic police have shot dead a man who was firing a shotgun in his apartment in the early hours of Monday.

It is the first time someone has been killed in an armed police operation in Iceland, officials say.

That’s right, yesterday marked the first time that armed Icelandic police officers killed a person. I don’t think there’s an individual state within the United States that has made it an entire year without its police officers killing somebody. Iceland’s history of focusing on arbitration over brute force continues to shine through even though its stateless era ended almost a millennium ago.

Ironic Gun Control Propaganda

The more irrelevant “major” gun control advocacy groups become the more apparent their desperation to be noticed becomes. Linoge retweeted the following propaganda piece put out by Moms Demand Action:

ironic-gun-control-poster

The irony is almost thick enough to drown in. Let’s consider what Moms Demand Action is, well, demanding. The organization has been pushing several gun control initiatives including a renewal of the “assault” weapon ban, a ban on standard capacity magazines, universal background checks, and a ban based on an arbitrarily selected bore diameter (one half of an inch). What do all of these things have in common? They requires the government to use its guns to enforce. In other words Moms Demand Action are trying to use the government’s guns to restrict the rights of Americans.

Politicians Should Give Stock Options to Volunteers

Have you ever been approached to work on a political campaign? I’m guessing a notable percentage of those of you reading this post have. What form of compensation was offered? Probably nothing.

Political campaigns are always looking for volunteer labor. They want people to work on phone banks, do door knocking, march in parades, work booths at local fairs, stuff envelopes, and other menial tasks. If a volunteer asks to be compensated for his or her time they usually receive one of several excuses. The most popular excuse is that the campaign needs every penny in order to get its politician elected. That may be true but in many cases a surplus of campaign funds exist after the election. Furthermore, most politicians receive a salary if they’re elected.

This raises a question. Why don’t campaigns offer volunteers a form of stock option? Politicians could offer to use part of their salary to compensate their volunteers if they are elected? Why don’t campaigns offer to divide any surplus funds amongst volunteers after an election concludes?

I’ll tell you why. Politicians are interested in expropriating wealth. In other words they’re thieves. And any good thief knows you don’t pay for something that you can steal.

Consider this the next time you’re approached to work on a campaign. The politician, if elected, will likely receive an excellent salary and benefits package. Meanwhile you will receive nothing. In fact you will receive less than nothing when you consider the amount of time and money (because politicians, being thieves, also ask you to donate money to their campaign in addition to your time) you sunk into the campaign. Don’t be a sucker. Demand the campaign grant you stock options paid out of surplus campaign funds and the politician’s salary if he or she is elected.

Los Angeles Considering a Prohibition Against Feeding the Homeless

The state’s war against the homeless wages on. Last month a Hawaiian politician decided to step up the war by walking around town and smashing shopping carts being used by homeless individuals. Lost Agneles, not wanting to be outdone, is now considering a complete prohibition against feeding the homeless:

Two members of the Los Angeles City Council recently proposed an ordinance that would ban private charities and individuals from feeding homeless people in public. The politicians behind the legislation, Tom LaBonge and Mitch O’Farrell (both Democrats), have said they are responding to concerns from residents who are uncomfortable with the homeless spending lots of time around their homes.

Again my theory that the state will never be useful for helping the homeless is proven true. The state’s idea of helping the homeless is to make their lives so miserable that they flee to another city.

That’s the Kind of Thing an Idiot Would Have On His Luggage

Security is an interest of mine. Most of my time spent studying security is focused on computer security but physical security is something that also interests me. What needs more physical security than nuclear missiles? Apparently a lot of things because the security on the United States’ nuclear arsenal was downright pathetic:

Today I found out that during the height of the Cold War, the US military put such an emphasis on a rapid response to an attack on American soil, that to minimize any foreseeable delay in launching a nuclear missile, for nearly two decades they intentionally set the launch codes at every silo in the US to 8 zeroes.

[…]

However, though the devices were supposed to be fitted on every nuclear missile after JFK issued his memorandum, the military continually dragged its heels on the matter. In fact, it was noted that a full 20 years after JFK had order PALs be fitted to every nuclear device, half of the missiles in Europe were still protected by simple mechanical locks. Most that did have the new system in place weren’t even activated until 1977.

Those in the U.S. that had been fitted with the devices, such as ones in the Minuteman Silos, were installed under the close scrutiny of Robert McNamara, JFK’s Secretary of Defence. However, The Strategic Air Command greatly resented McNamara’s presence and almost as soon as he left, the code to launch the missile’s, all 50 of them, was set to 00000000.

I usually admire that reality often imitates comedy but not when it comes to nuclear weapons:

The fact that the United States was more concerned about being able to easily kick off the apocalypse than preventing it speaks volumes.