News You Need to Know – Page 72

It’s Hard Being a Gun Nut and Technology Enthusiast

Do you know what’s difficult for gun nuts and technology enthusiast to do? Turn on the news. Most of the gunny readers of my blog are used to the glaring idiocy emitted by reporters when they attempt to talk about firearms. You get ridiculous assertions like the word magazine being interchangeable with clip, every rifle being an AK-47, every handgun being a Glock, and Uzis being high-powered firearms:

The girl was being shown how to use a high-powered Uzi sub-machine gun at an Arizona shooting range when the recoil caused her to lose control of it.

Emphasis mine. Unless there is an Uzi model chambered in .308 (and if there is please tell me, I fucking want that for reasons) it is not high-powered. Uzis, as far as I know, are commonly chambered in 9mm with a few other models available that fire other pistol calibers. Pistol calibers, no matter how you look at them, aren’t high-powered. In fact they’re usually considered anemic, which is why military personnel usually carry rifles.

When media outlets report on topics related to technology we get similar levels of stupidity. The news that nude pictures of several celebrities have been obtained form their compromised iCloud accounts has received wall to wall coverage from several media outlets. And with great coverage comes great stupidity. Here we have a CNN talking head speculating on the nature of 4chan:

In the wake of the massive leak of hacked celebrity nude photos now known as celebgate, CNN—the most trusted name in news—is on the case. The cable news pioneer put its best tech analyst Brett Larson on the job and he speculated in wildly unhelpful fashion on Tuesday about just who this 4chan guy is, anyway.

“He might be a system administrator,” Larson suggests.

I guess the top tier research team over at CNN couldn’t be bothered to do a Google search. If they had they would have gotten the website 4chan at the top hit and a Wikipedia article entry on 4chan as the second hit. In other words a few simple keystrokes would have informed anybody capable of reading (I know, that’s expecting a lot from the research team over at CNN) that 4chan isn’t a person, it’s a website.

Because of my interests in guns and technology I feel as through I’m receiving a double dose of stupid every time I turn on the news or open a news site. I can only assume that the media’s coverage of basically everything else is just as ill-informed.

Citizen Patrol Aimed at Defending Against Police Shootings

Neighborhood watch, as it currently exist in the United State, is a concept born of the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese. The watches were created in response to the lack of intervention from onlookers of the crime. Today there are still groups of individuals who patrol their neighborhoods in the hopes of preventing crime. But there is one crime most neighborhood watches fail to consider. Shooting by the largest violent gang operating in our neighborhoods, the police, often go unchallenged by neighborhood watches. A group of individuals in Dallas are looking to change that. They have established a neighborhood watch expressly for the purpose of protecting the people from the police:

A new group calling itself the Huey P. Newton Gun Club launched armed self-defense patrols Wednesday with one stated purpose: to protect Dallas neighbors from police.

Group leader Charles Goodson said recent unrest in Ferguson, Missouri over the killing of an unarmed black teen named Michael Brown by a white police officer is only part of the reason for the new Dallas patrols.

The group is named after Huey P. Newton, a founder of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s who was killed by a rival militant in 1989.

“We don’t think that what happened to Michael Brown in St. Louis is an isolated incident. We have so many Michael Browns here in the city of Dallas,” Goodson said.

Another leader, Huby Freeman, said the group wants to educate neighbors about the right to bear arms and the need for it.

“We believe we can police ourselves and bring security to our community, ridding our community of black-on-black crime, violence, police terror, etc., etc.,” Freeman said.

Police brutality is a major problem in this country and it’s nice to see people looking for a solution other than begging the state to be a little less vicious. It’s unfortunate but police officers are unlikely to face consequences for committing acts of murder. Even if evidence against an officer is damning it’s common for him or her to receive a paid vacation and then get reinstated once the media is no longer covering the event. Once in a great while an officer will get fired from the department but that’s a rare enough occurrence to almost be relegated for folklore.

Who watches the watchmen? In most cases nobody. But if this idea takes off there could be watchmen overseeing the watchmen and that could decrease police brutality. If nothing else it would be nice if there were neighborhood watches that would intervene when police officers decided to go all ‘roid rage on somebody.

A Scared Citizen is a Good Citizen

The Islamic State (IS), formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Syria (ISIS), has been front page material for weeks now. After being unable to make citizens fear Iran and North Korean and only having moderate success at making citizens fear Vladimir Putin the state and its corporate media partners have been trying to make the IS the thing for fashionable citizens to be afraid of. But the IS is way the fuck over in the Middle East so why should an American citizen fear it? Here we see Allen West, one of the state’s most effective agents at instill fear in the hearts of neocons, entering stage right:

Judicial Watch reports that ”Islamic terrorist groups are operating in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez and planning to attack the United States with car bombs or other vehicle borne improvised explosive devices (VBIED).”

“High-level federal law enforcement, intelligence and other sources have confirmed to Judicial Watch that a warning bulletin for an imminent terrorist attack on the border has been issued. Agents across a number of Homeland Security, Justice and Defense agencies have all been placed on alert and instructed to aggressively work all possible leads and sources concerning this imminent terrorist threat. Specifically, the government sources reveal that the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) is confirmed to now be operating in Juarez, a famously crime-infested narcotics hotbed situated across from El Paso, Texas.”

This article combines the IS, illegal immigration, and drug cartels into one giant fear smoothy! Oh, I also forgot to mention, that it is almost certainly bullshit. Why would Mexican drug cartels, which are not exactly apostles of Islam, work with an organization that seems bent on destroying anything not Islam? If the only answer you can come up with is “Because drug cartels hate Americans.” then you don’t understand how drug cartels work. Americans are their biggest source of revenue. The last thing they want is for their customers to get slaughtered en masse, which the IS is supposedly interested in doing.

Another question one should be inclined to ask is why anybody would give weight to a government terror warning. Since 9/11 this country has lived in a constant state of terror warnings. Statistically if we looked at the number of terror warnings issued since 9/11 versus the number of actual instances of terrorism in this country we would see that the percentage is almost in the negative (for those of you who don’t believe I understand how percentages work please look up hyperbole)!

But the state needs a scared citizenry. Tyrannical bullshit is very hard to sell by itself. That’s why tyrannical acts are usually preceded by a period of fear mongering. The United States government has been trying to get widespread support from the citizenry to turn this country into a prison. We’re told that our “unprotected” border will let ~~communists~~ (removed from the latest version of the Newspeak Dictionary) violent drug cartels, terrorists, and other people who want to kill every American across. And since the threats looking to cross today are far more dangerous than the nuclear armed militaries that were supposedly trying to cross previously we’re also told that the police must be militarized. Supposedly if our police officers aren’t roaming the streets in armored personnel carriers, clad in body armor, and armed with machine guns we’re all going to be killed by terrorists!

But fences, guard towers, and barbed wired are interesting in their ability to equally keep things outside of an area and inside of an area. The more secure a border becomes the more difficult it is to cross it when escape is your goal. Uprising are also more difficult to successfully pull off when you’re facing a force that is much better armed than yours. People know this, which is why selling tyranny is difficult unless you have a good pitch. Fear is probably the best pitch of them all.

Whenever you hear people like Allen West, Bill O’Reilly, Anderson Cooper, and Wolf Blitzer talk about why you should be afraid of the week’s boogeyman just remember that their revenue is generated by generating fear. Fear leads to page clicks, video views, and better Nielsen ratings. They’re also in, what George Carlin referred to as, the big club. If you’re in the big club the tyrannical shit being enacted by the state doesn’t impact you. But we’re not in the big club so we should be wary of people peddling fear because what they claim we need sure as the hell will impact us.

Once Data Leaves Your System You No Longer Have Control

I try not to waste your time talking about celebrity news on this blog. But once in a great while celebrity news can act as a launching point for something that’s actually important. The recent breach of several celebrities’ iCloud accounts is one of those rare times:

Someone claiming to be the individual responsible for the breach has used 4Chan to offer explicit videos from Lawrence’s phone, as well as more than 60 nude “selfies” of the actress. In fact, it seems multiple “b-tards” claimed they had access to the images, with one providing a Hotmail address associated with a PayPal account, and another seeking contributions to a Bitcoin wallet. Word of the images launched a cascade of Google searches and set Twitter trending. As a result, 4Chan/b—the birthplace of Anonymous—has opened its characteristically hostile arms to a wave of curious onlookers hoping to catch a glimpse of their favorite starlets’ naked bodies. Happy Labor Day!

This breach appears different from other recent celebrity “hacks” in that it used a near-zero-day vulnerability in an Apple cloud interface. Instead of using social engineering or some low-tech research to gain control of the victims’ cloud accounts, the attacker basically bashed in the front door—and Apple didn’t find out until the attack was over. While an unusual, long, convoluted password may have prevented the attack from being successful, the only real defense against this assault was never to put photos in Apple’s cloud in the first place. Even Apple’s two-factor authentication would not have helped, if the attack was the one now being investigated.

There is a valuable lesson in this story. Once data leaves your system you no longer have control over it. With the skyrocketing popularity of online data storage services (often referred to as “the cloud”) this lesson is more important than ever.

Smartphones are pervasive in our society. Millions of people are walking around with an Android, iOS, or Windows Mobile powered device in their pockets. These devices, by default, upload a lot of personal data to Google, Apple, and Microsoft’s online data storage services. While many conspiracy theorists will claim that these services are enabled by default for nefarious purposes the truth of the matter is consumers demanded these services. Automatically uploading data to online storage services helps protect against data loss. Since most computer users are unwilling to take the time to manually backup their data, and bitch an awful lot when they lose data, manufacturers have begun doing backups automatically. But security and convenience seldom go hand in hand. By backing up data to online services users have begun to lose control of their data. Once the data is been uploaded to a third party service that third party now has control over that data.

There are ways to alleviate many of the risks involved with using online storage services. The most effective method of reducing the risks involved is to encrypt data with a strong key known only to you before uploading it. That way the third party only has access to an encrypted blob and not the means of decrypting it. Using a strong password and two factor authentication and also help protect your online accounts but neither of those practices will offer much protection if there is a flaw in the service itself (as was the case with these iCloud breaches). Ultimately the most secure option is not to upload your data to begin with.

As a general rule I don’t upload anything to a third party service unless I’m OK with it becoming publicly accessible. While I don’t take selfies or record my sexual exploits, if I were to do so I wouldn’t upload them to iCloud, Dropbox, Azure Cloud, or any other third party online storage option. The iPhone is pretty good about giving you options to keep your data on your own services, and I utilize those options heavily. It’s been ages since I’ve used Android so I’m not sure if it has the same options (its options were sparse when I used it) and I have no idea what options are made available in Windows Mobile as I’ve not used that platform. But I highly encourage people to utilize such options when available. Apps, on the other hand, are seldom as flexible since most seemed geared towards getting people to utilize third party services. You may have the automatic upload features disabled in your phones operating system but if an app automatically uploads that data then all of your efforts are for naught. So it’s important to not only be familiar with your operating systems but also the applications you utilize.

Keep your shit under your control. If you fail to do so there’s no way to regain it.

Collectivist Thinking and Bigotry are a Dangerous Combination

The the collectivist viewpoint, where individuals are seen as nothing more than a cog in the great collective machinery, and bigotry, and unwarranted hatred of a group of individuals, often go hand in hand. When one fails to see individuals and instead focuses on collectives it becomes much easier to despise entire groups with little or not reasoning. This leads people who think collectively to get very upset about individual action that doesn’t affect anybody else.

A recent story of a transgender teen not being allowed to attend school as a woman generated some outrage. Many neoliberals, social activists, and libertarians were outraged by the fact that her actions affect nobody else and therefore no ground exists for the prohibition. On the other side of the isle are the neocons and social conservatives who, well, basically echo this dude I came across on Facebook:

The opening of his final paragraph really takes the cake. According to his collectivist viewpoint the entire female population of the school will suffer if this transgender teen is accommodated. Earlier he stated “…think about a man dressed as a girl who wants to use the same bathroom your daughter is using…”, which demonstrates that he fears transgender individuals since he doesn’t want one of them in the same bathroom as another person’s daughter (it also demonstrates that he enjoys appealing to emotion when attempting to drum up support for his bigotry). It also demonstrates another common problem with collectivist thinking: failing to understand the target of one’s bigotry. A transgender individual isn’t somebody who simply wears the clothing of the opposite gender. The term for that is cross dresser. Transgender individuals have software running on the wrong hardware.

Not understanding the target of one’s bigotry is almost as common as collectivist bigotry itself. Think of the neocons who hate Muslims. Most of them have a very warped understanding of Islam that is almost entirely shaped by cherry picking facts that fit their bias. Sexists and racists have the same issue. These misunderstanding usually lead to fear and hatred.

In the case of the dude whose comment I screen captured appears to view transgender individuals as sexual predators (after all, the transgender teen obviously only wants to use the women’s restroom so she can peep on other women even though she offered to isolate herself by using the restroom in the nurse’s office). This view leads him to believe that every girl in the school will suffer if this transgender teen is allowed to live her life in accordance to her gender. And that is ridiculous but inevitable when somebody develops a hatred of an entire group of people. When all you see are groups then any individual in a “bad” group necessary harms every individual in a “good” group.

I don’t subscribe to collectivism. While it is useful to refer to groups when discussing philosophy, religion, political beliefs, and other ideas commonly held by multiple individuals, we cannot make judgements about every individual in a group based solely on their membership in that group. Each and every one of us is a unique entity and can only be validly judged as such. Just because somebody is a communist, for example, doesn’t mean that they favor executing anybody who owns means of production. I believe the world would be a far better place if people started backing away from collectivist bigotry.

Children Recite Pledge of Undying Allegiance in a Foreign Language; Neocons Freak Out

We’ve all heard the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s a pledge written by a socialist (which should make it poison to neocons) many of us were required to recite in school before we had the ability to understand what it meant. In it the reciter promises to lay down his life for a piece of colored cloth that represents his or her rulers. Neocons, being an incredibly patriotic bunch, often jerk themselves off to the Pledge of Allegiance. But neocons also hate all things Middle East. So it’s no surprise that they’re flipping their shit over a school that allowed children recite the Pledge in Arabic:

A Colorado high school principal is defending his decision to allow students from a cultural club to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic — and denied that it was attempt to push an Islamic agenda.

Tom Lopez, the principal at Rocky Mountain High School in Fort Collins, told Fox News he has received a number of telephone calls and emails from outraged parents – but he stands by his decision.

“These students love this country,” he said. “They were not being un-American in trying to do this. They believed they were accentuating the meaning of the words as spoken regularly in English.”

The school recites the Pledge of Allegiance once a week and on Monday a member of the Cultural Arms Club led the student body in the Arabic version of the pledge.

What really gets me about this is that the United States doesn’t have an official language. Neocons love to say “If you can’t speak English then get the fuck out!” but they have no legal grounds, thankfully, for expelling people who can’t speak English. In fact neocons should be overjoyed that somebody has translated this oath of mindless obedience into other languages so children of foreign lands can pledge to die for this forsaken government.

Now let’s discuss the real problem here: children being told to recite a oath of undying loyalty by school officials. Having the pledge in school, in my opinion, is an attempt to get them while they’re young. Tell them that America is the freest country on Earth enough times that they begin to believe and also get them to mindlessly recite a pledge to fall over dead for some suit-clad assholes in a far away marble building enough times that they may actually do it. If there’s anything to be angry about it’s this attempted brainwashing of America’s children.

Bad Decisions with Weapons are Dangerous

If you regularly read any gun-related news source you’re already aware of the 9 year-old kid in Arizona who accidentally killed a firearm instructor with an Uzi:

A nine year-old girl in the US has killed her shooting instructor by accident while being shown how to use a high-powered submachine gun.

The instructor was giving the girl a lesson at a shooting range in Arizona when the recoil from the automatic fire caused her to lose control of the Uzi.

Charles Vacca, 39, was shot in the head and died after being airlifted to a hospital in Las Vegas.

I feel bad for the kid. She will probably suffer a lifetime of guilt for what happened. But none of this was her fault. Ultimately the fault lies with the instructor. A firearm instructor is supposed to have a deep understanding of the weapons platforms he’s giving instructions on. That implies knowing that giving a small child a difficult to control weapon is a bad idea. For somebody my size and with my training an Uzi isn’t terribly difficult to control. It does want to continuously raise its point of aim but that can be controlled. If you know what you’re doing. Most 9 year-old kids are unlikely to know what they’re doing with a fully automatic firearm.

Some people want to put some blame on the parents. I’m not familiar with how much firearm knowledge the parents had. When you have little or no knowledge about something it’s difficult to make informed decisions, which is why you usually seek instruction from a professional. From what I’ve read, and details are pretty scarce, the parents did the right thing by taking their child to a supposed instructor (while he may not have been certified by any well-known organization an individual with little knowledge on the subject is unlikely to know how to verify subject specific credentials). So I can’t see any grounds for blaming the parents.

In the end this was a tragic situation and will likely result in a girl scarred for life.

Statists Gonna State

Statists, in general, are slightly confusing to me. The more statist one is the more confusing I find them to be. As you can imagine neoconservatives and neoliberals really throw me for a loop. Their philosophy appears to be nothing more than a thinly veiled desire to ruthlessly rule over others. Consider the wish made by a host of Fox News:

Responding to co-host Greg Gutfeld’s commentary on how President Barack Obama is dealing with ISIS, Guilfoyle said:

“Can I just make a special request in the magic lamp? Can we get like Netanyahu, or like Putin in for 48 hours, you know, head of the United States?”

I’m no fan of Obama but I fail to see how replacing him with another tyrant; and make no mistakes, both Netanyahu and Putin are tyrants of the highest form; is going to make anything better. Especially when Guilfoyle is living in the United States and therefore would have to live under the reign of Netanyahu or Putin even though she faces also zero threat from ISIS (I’m sorry but all the fear mongering about ISIS coming here to get you is bullshit just as all the fear mongering about al-Qaeda coming back to kill us was bullshit). I’m left to believe that Guilfoyle is a masochist and is upset that the current tyrant heading this country isn’t inflicting enough pain so we need to replace him with an even more vicious tyrant. If pain is what she wants there are numerous clubs that can provide it in an entirely voluntary way.

On the Michael Brown Shooting

I’ve annoyed a lot of electrons writing about the civil unrest going down in Ferguson, Missouri but I haven’t dedicated any time to the shooting that lead up to the unrest. There’s a reason for this. As of this writing there is no evidence supporting any side of the story. But there are a lot of people who are parroting the claim that the officer, Darren Wilson, was assaulted and a lot of people parroting the claim that Michael Brown was an angel. Let’s look at the source of these claims.

First, let’s look at the claim that Brown robbed a convenience store before the shooting. When Wilson’s name was released the Ferguson Police Department also released surveillance camera footage supposedly showing Brown stealing cigars from a convenience store. Others have used that footage to demonstrate that Brown did pay for those cigars. Which story is true? Who knows. Heck evidence exists that Wilson didn’t know Brown was a robbery suspect during their encounter, which would make the entire debate pointless.

Second, let’s look at the claims that Wilson was attacked by Brown. Claims have been made that Wilson suffered facial fractures, which would indicate he was in a physical confrontation with Brown. The first place I saw this claim made was the Gateway Pundit, which cited two unnamed sources. The x-ray imagine included with that article was sourced from this article describing blowout fractures, it isn’t an x-ray of Wilson himself. Fox News also picked up the story and also cited unnamed sources. In other words there is no evidence that Wilson was engaged in a fight with Brown. What we do have are some claims made by unknown sources. It could be true just as well as it could be false.

Third, some jimmies have been rustled over the claim that Brown was a gangster. This claim, as far as I can tell, was based on a picture released by a Kansas City police officer of a man with a wad of cash in his mouth holding a gun. According to the people circulating the picture it is of Brown. But, as it turns out, it’s probably a picture of an accused murder suspect in Oregon.

And that’s the problem with discussions about the shooting itself. No evidence exists to support any claims being made. None. Everything released so far is either speculation or fabrication. Until evidence is released about the shooting I’m going to continue to remain mostly silent about it. There’s just no point in shifting electrons to make words appear on your screen regarding it.

The Angry Mob Has Arrived

A lot of people have been debating whether or not Michael Brown robbed a story and how that justified Darren Wilson’s actions. I feel as though that argument misses the big picture, which is how the situation in Ferguson has been handled by police. To say it was handled stupidly would be giving too much credit Ferguson’s law enforcement. Roughing up and arresting reporters, tear gassing news camera crews, arresting photographers, and tear gassing nonviolent protesters is not a good way to handle civil unrest generated by a general feeling of police corruption. Keeping the name of the officer who shot Brown secret for so long didn’t help matters nor has the secrecy surrounding the internal investigation.

The people of Ferguson are pissed and when the angry mob rises it comes knocking. Protesters apparently tried to storm Governor Nixon’s office yesterday. That doesn’t surprise me but the fact that the building’s security was able to keep the angry mob out does.

In all likelihood this situation is going to burn itself out soon. Riots have a habit of simmering down fairly fast, which is why they’re seldom effective at enacting any meaningful change. But the National Guard could always decided to follow in the steps of the previous law enforcement officers tasked with putting Ferguson back under the state’s foot and bring this entire mass to the flashpoint again. It will be interesting to see how this entire situation turns out. My guess is that the internal investigation, that is to say Wilson’s fellows in the state’s police force, will find no wrongdoing on Wilson’s part. That’s the usual outcome of these investigations. If that happens things could get really interesting.