Wikileaks; "Cablegate"

So, sometime while I was away, wikileaks revealed the first batch of their so called #cablegate files.(220 out of 251,287, going to take a long time at this rate, and a longer time to read through them all).

So far I've read a few of them, and I personally don't see that any of them are that worthy of a -gate, though I'd expect the more important stuff be be released later. Mostly its just pretty basic diplomatic stuff, some of it interesting, some of it not. A fair bit of American ego-centrism to be seen, but that's to be expected.

Anyway, I'll probably blog about anything I find really interesting, and read through a few ones that look like they might provide interest, and I'll probably leave trawling through the rest to epic dedicated bloggers and journalists. I should probably do coursework and revise, anyway :P

One more thing of interest was that earlier this morning Wikileaks was being DDOS'd. There are no clues as to who pulled off the attack, but I think we can all guess. What amused me was that they even bothered, its obvious to anyone that it wasn't going to make any difference; some of it has already been released to newspapers, and its not like they couldn't just create a new site and upload it on there, it would get spread around fairly quickly, this being the internet.

And even if somehow all of that failed, Wikileaks has had the forethought to spread around insurance files(tpb anyone?) that, though encrypted we can assume hold some very important and embarrassing information.

So yeah, apart from that, Last night was awesome, was my friends birthday, so we went to the Headphone Disco, and they actually played a few good songs!..well, okay, good relative to the rest, and only about 9 out of the whole night, but that's far better than usual. So yeah, overall it was pretty fun. Was nice being able to order drinks without shouting into the bartenders ear, at the least, which probably contribute to how drunk I was by the end of the night. I can honestly say I was very much surprised at my lack of a hangover when I finally woke up.

Then today we went to Nandos, which was nice. I had a half chicken(I wasn't expecting a huge amount, but blimey their chickens are small), chips and garlic bread, then I was going to have mango sorbet, but they ran out, so I had vanilla ice cream instead, which was nicer than expected. Filled me up nicely :P. I had teh hot sauce of course, being housin, and it was very tasty as well as being spicy, something a lot of hot foods do not have. Hot sauces should have ample amounts of taste as well as heat, or you might as well just eat Capsaicin.

Democracy? More like police state, amirite?

So Nominet, the semi private company which controls the .uk part of the internet are discussing plans, at the request of the Serious and Organised Crimes Agency(SOCA) to change the terms and conditions to allow the removal of a website if there are reasonable grounds to believe its related to criminal activity, so in other words, a request from the Police.

Now, this may seem okay, but we've already seen the Police do not seem to have the required faculties to tell a joke from criminal intent and giving them the power to remove sites without a court order does not seem the action of a democratic country that values free speech.

In fact, why don't they just get it done with already and add hooks to the English Flag? When they do, I might just move over to Best Korea, or China, at least they admit they don't value free speech.

Suddenly Britain being a police state in Civ games is not so bewildering to me.

Now, if you want to tell nominet what you think of this;

If you have any comments on this issue please email policy@nominet.org.uk, and include the title, "Dealing with domain names used in connection with criminal activity" in the subject line.

Bank Protest

Now, what, you may say, is a Bank Protest? Well, its where you all go and withdraw your money from your bank on a certain day.

Now this action if it happens of course, will cause a total destabilisation of the economy, followed by a collapse of the government.

Why on earth would such a thing be beneficial!? you cry.

Well, in order for things to get better, they have to get worse. It become increasingly apparent that the only way any change will be made in our governments is not working with the system, but by destroying that system, and rebuilding it.

When we speak out, we are ignored, thus, the only choice we are left with is to act.

Now, this protest, if it comes off as planned, with have far reaching ramifications; however, it would be for the best, at least in teh long run. short run it would suck pretty majorly. Anarchy is not a coo guy, which is why we have governments, even though they are corrupt.

So I'm of two minds, on the one hand, better future is a very cool guy, on the other hand, disruption and such is not something the human mind can walk into happily. Also I have my money in a ethical bank, so most of these reasons are moot. So I dunno, its up to everyone to decide personally, I suppose.

Anyway, for more info(and a way better explanation than I could give, go to This site; (theres a button at the top left to translate to English :P)

So, tl;dr

Withdraw money from banks

>Crash global banking system

>revolution

>???

>profit?

FUUUUUU

So I loaded up my blog today, saw a vid ad under my post.

It started and I had this really bad feeling

Bad feeling was confirmed. Somehow a certain pseudo religion(can't say its name or I'll get even more of it) ad snuck onto my blog

There was much ragefacing.

Stop COICA!

So, as many of you know, the government of America is seeking to pass COICA: a Bill that will effectively allow them to take any website they like off the web, without any process. And when I say website, I mean website, not illegal content on a website.

Here, have some carefully cooked pasta:

The "Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act" (COICA) was unanimously approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on 11/18. The COICA, designed to stop internet piracy, is among one of the most vaguely worded and draconian pieces of legislation ever proposed.

We firmly believe in compensating artists for their work.
We firmly believe in paying for content.

This bill goes far beyond stopping pirates.

This bill gives the federal government the right to shut down websites based on vague and arbitrary evidence, even if no law-breaking has been proved. We need to rally and let the world know. If this becomes a law, the government could immediately remove any website. They would be able to prevent access to anything from youtube to google.

This law would apply internationally as well. The entire internet would fall under the purview of this bill. The potential for abuse is staggering. There are no hearings. There's no due process. Any site that offends the sensibilities of the federal government would simply be gone.

Aside from that, here are some other articles to read about COICA: EFF, BlawgIT , Now, I cannot speak for their integrity, though they seem fairly unbiased, but these are the ones I have seen and I'm too tired to find any others before I go to bed.

We would, however, like to emphasises that though some of us may inhabit 4chan, or be pirates, that we are not representing 4chan, /b/, nor are we part of Operation Payback. This is NOT a raid, we are not trolling, or doing this for the Lulz. We are instead merely concerned citizens of the internet, standing up for our right to freedom of speech.

If this bill goes through, this is what the future of web surfing could look like. You know when you were at school and every time you went to a site where it mentioned games you got blocked by the schools web security? Imagine that, but you can't get round it with a proxy. Video very much related.

Internet Freedom Under Attack - The best bloopers are here

The Petition against COICA is here, but that is by no means all that is needed to stop it; If the Government listened to advice(That is, non corporation advice) this Bill would never have got off the drawing board.

For those of you have Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, these are all good places to start, and I urge you, as a fellow internetter, to not pass this by, don't leave it to other people, don't expect this problem to disappear, because the only thing that is going to disappear is our rights.

I also want to highlight that just because you are not American(I'm not :P) does not mean this does not affect you, and even if websites are just blocked and not taken down,( the wording is somewhat ambiguous, from what I have seen) there is no doubt this will cause other countries to pass similar acts, and even if that were not the case, Freedom of speech and non censored internet is(or at least should be) a human right.

Right, now the DnD I was going to attend has fallen through, so, goodnight, Internet :)

Back.

So I was reading through a few other blogs, and a little thought came to mind

"Hey, didn't I have one of these things?"

So, I decided to try again.

First things first, Hot Topic pulled the Rage Guy shirt after certain elements of 4chan initiated "Operation Black Rage" In which they made racist rage guy comics, posting them around, trying to get them out. Somehow this worked, despite;

1) Some channers trying their utmost to foil the scheme because it was full of people thinking 4chan owned memes

2) KnowYourMeme having an article up revealing it to be a hoax after about a few hours. It seems Hot Topic staff have not yet mastered the art of "Google"

That being said, their pulling the shirt before the whole thing escalated to the point of mainstream media notice probably served them well, since now the whole thing will be entirely forgotten in a few months.

(http://www.geekosystem.com/hot-topic-ends-fffuuuuuuu-shirts/)

Edit: Scrap that, they've re-continued it.

Secondly, as any of you who follow my twitter know, I've recently become a total moralfag and follow anyone internetfreedom related, resulted in a huge, huge increase in the rate at which my twitter feed moves. This resulted in me happening upon this article which I found very amusing, since if I remember correctly it was not that long ago that Obama was criticizing china for their censorship(And I do), while at teh same time pushing a bill that will allow the American government to blacklist and refuse access to any website they deem bad, and while this may be intended solely for the combating of piracy, it could be used for much less idealistic reasons, and as most of these bills are, is being rushed through so as to avoid voter attention. Not a promising sign.

Now obviously, the links about COICA are somewhat biased, however, even when viewing this bill from as unbiased a viewpoint as I can, this still, really doesn't seem like a good idea to me, sure it could stop piracy, but its too broad, too brutal, and way, way too easily abused.

In Other, slightly less internety news, alcohol, depression and lack of food coupled with a natural tendency to procrastinate(Yes, I procrastinate, who'd have thought it?) do not contribute well to coursework completion. :/

That being said, I opened my bottle of Glenfiddich 15 year old, added a dash of water to release the esters, and boy is it lovely.