Winning the Internet

There was an Internet outage this morning and this response won:

Relying on connected things such as Alexa for alarm clocks or starting your morning cuppa joe isn't a good thing.

Is Hollywood Dead?

The New York Times is running a long article about how the pandemic and streaming is taking a wrecking ball to Hollywood.

All of it may be true. But this is my opinion:

Imagine, if you will, that you swing by a highly-rated restaurant and pick up a couple of meals to go, with all of the trimmings. You set the table, pour out some good wine, and have a candlelit meal with your loved one. You put the various courses on plates, serve them, and enjoy them immensely.

Is that the same as going to eat at that restaurant? Not even hardly. The experience of going out to eat is lost, even the bad things that can happen (finding a parking space, getting a ticket or being carjacked). It's a takeout dinner at home and, other than the actual food, is no different from bring home bags from McDonalds or cartons from local Chinese kitchen.

So it is with watching a movie at home. Watching a movie at home is watching television. Whether it's interrupted by commercials (broadcast networks, basic cable) commercial-free (premium cable) or on a steaming service, it's still sitting at home, watching television.

Sure, you don't have the annoyances, like some schmuck using his phone during the movie,[1] but you also miss out on the experience of going to the movies.

The entertainment industry consoles itself by thinking of how they came back from the pandemic of a century ago. The counter to that was that even if movie theaters closed in 1918, they reopened in 1920 because there was no other choice. People didn't have movie projectors in their homes, let along orchestra pits.

It's quite possible that going to a movie after the pandemic runs its course,[2] may be a lot harder. Movie theaters may be few and far between. But still, even if Regal and AMC both go Tango Uniform, those buildings are still going to be there. Not all of them will be converted into Fleecing the Faithful operations.[3] or will be razed. Some will be there for those willing to take the risk that some people will want to see movies in a theater and not watch them on their televisions (or phones).
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[1] Something that should merit summary execution.
[2] Not "brought under control". Thanks to the fecklessness of Donald Trump and those infected with Toxic Libery and Freedom Syndrome, the chance of bringing the pandemic under control, as was done in other nations, has long been closed.
[3] AKA "megachurches".

Down the Rabbit Hole

The Jon Swift memorial list of blog posts for 2018.

Expect to be enraged, have your thoughts provoked, and some bit of entertainment.

The Internet of Shit

Smart devices in your home are being used by hackers for DDoS attacks:

Devices in people’s homes and offices that are connected to the Internet — things such as routers and cameras, rice makers and thermostats — could increasingly be taken over by hackers in the coming weeks and used to commit crimes or even paralyze businesses and government institutions.

If you wouldn't leave your front door open, then why would you leave the cyber-equivalent of your front door open?

(And really, folks, do you really need an internet-enabled crockpot or a coffee-maker?)

Russian Oddity

Infidel753 noticed this first: There's been a big uptick in blog traffic from Russia. (It shows up in the Google Stats page for blogger.com users.)

Pageviews from Russia are running four times as many as from America.

That tells me something, but I don't know what.

Facebook: a Veritable Festival of Morons

This was on my FB feed:

The possible reason that less than 2% of people will "like" that photo may be because 98% of them will either recognize the photo as being one of the cast of the movie Tropic Thunder or will at least recognize the man in the middle of the group-- Ben Stiller.

Never Read the Comments In a News Article

They are a haven for trolls. And, increasingly, the trolls are being paid to be trolls.

The Chinese and the Russians have been leading the way on this. But our government isn't too far behind.

Bye-Bye, Netflix

They're probably feeling the cold breath of Death as you read this:

A federal appeals court has struck down Federal Communications Commission rules that prohibit Internet service providers (ISPs) from restricting access to legal Web content.

I know a number of people who have kept their broadband service but have dumped their cable TV service. If it is now legal for ISPs to restrict traffic, I bet that the very first thing they will do is crack down on Netflix, and then, Hulu Plus.

Between Netflix and Hulu, you'd pay about $16 per month to have access to damn near everything that's on TV. That's opposed to the $70-$100+ you'd pay your cable provider for access to the same channels.

So while Comcast, Verizon, Charter, Time-Warner, AT&T and all of the rest might promise that they won't restrict what you can download, you can bet your next paycheck that within 30 minutes of the ruling coming down, they were working on (or dusting off) their plans to do just that.

NSA- Spying on the Gamers

Oh, NSA, is there not any low to which you will not sink? For now comes news that the NSA has been infiltrating and spying on gamers in World of Warcraft and Second Life:

To the National Security Agency analyst writing a briefing to his superiors, the situation was clear: their current surveillance efforts were lacking something. The agency's impressive arsenal of cable taps and sophisticated hacking attacks was not enough. What it really needed was a horde of undercover Orcs.

The NSA and the GCHQ had so many spies in those games that that they had to set up protocols to ensure that the spies weren't spying on each other.

If you play either of those games, the NSA was watching you, just in case in your six or more hours of game-playing each day, you found the time to hatch a terrorist plot or two.

For Second Life players, the real stab-in-the-back is that the fucking then-CEO of the company fucking invited the NSA in to spy on the players six years ago.

For all of the spooks' infiltrations into the gaming universe, they seem to have accomplished nothing that even remotely justified the efforts that those freedom and liberty-hating trools put into their gaming.

However, it also could be that some of the geeks at the NSA and GCHQ did this just so they could justify untold hours of gaming while getting paid for it. In which case, the NSA/GCHQ's gaming efforts were more like a form of economic sabotage of those agencies.

A Dark Blog

I was going through my blogroll and looking at blogs that hadn't posted in over a year. One of them is Pen & Sword, by Jeff Huber. His last post was on January 8, 2012.

I searched for his name and the blog title. CDR Jeffrey L. Huber, USN-Ret., died on January 24, 2012 at the age of 57.

Fair winds and following seas, Commander.

Did You Buy an Off-the Shelf Encryption System? If You Did, Guess Who Is Reading Your Shit.

The NSA and their British butt-monkeys, the GCHQ. the NSA has managed to gain control of the U.S. encryption standards process to ensure that they have the ability to read your shit.

So all the stuff that the banks tell you that your online banking is secure is a lie. The NSA can go and fuck with your shit any time they want.

All the assurances that your medical records are secure are lies, lies, and more lies. DasGov can go surfing around them any time they feel the urge.

On another note, the MTAHNS is now saying that they are open to the idea of new legislation to try to curb the NSA.

First off, I have zero confidence that the NSA would pay attention. Telling spies that they can listen to X but not Y is like telling a cat that she can claw up your chair, but not your sofa.

Second, it is worth repeating everywhere that none of this discussion, absolutely none of it, would be happening without Ed Snowden having blown his whistle. Much of it has been known for years, but not all of what he has revealed.

You can bet your last paycheck that our spooks would very much like to dump his carcass into an abandoned mineshaft. For he has pulled back the curtain on their rotten edifice of lies and backdoors into systems once thought secure.

A Modern Oxymoron

The MTAHNS has announced that the spooks will have their own Internet propaganda outlet blog. Because they are all about transparency.

Right. "Transparency" in the intelligence world is about as rare as a unicorn in a meat-packing plant.

Since it's a pretty common slur among the high-and-mighty that bloggers are kids wearing pajamas, living in their mother's basements and subsisting mainly on stale pizza, you have to wonder who they have running this particular blog.

Note that the first post was by that noted fibber, Clapper the Perjurer.

Piffle. If I want to read propaganda from those folks, there's lots of "journalists" who are happily serving up the DNI's party line. Look for any article where Rep. Mike Rogers or Sen. Feinstein are quoted without any challenge whatsoever.

When Newspapers Began to Slit Their Throats, and the Difference Between Product Placement and Whoring.

When they began to put them online.

The clip didn't say, but the service was probably the Compuserve Information Service, as they were located in Columbus, OH. The newspapers were probably happy to do that, as Compuserve often kicked back ten percent of the connection fees generated by some services. Some of the owners of large-traffic discussion forums made a shitload of money in the late `80s and early-mid `90s, when Compuserve's consumer-grade users paid an hourly connection fee. By the time the Web came along, getting the news for free was ingrained, with predictable results.

On another topic, I've been watching some episodes of the new version of Hawaii Five-0 (cable on-demand, functionally monitored by the NSA/FBI, no doubt). They take product placement overboard.

Product placement, as you likely know, is when a show highlights the use of certain products. This goes at least as far back as the `60s FBI series, where the use of Fords was so prominent in the show that that when Mad Magazine satirized it, they had the FBI logo reading "Ford Better Idea".

Five-0's big product placement is Microsoft's Windows 8 and other Microsoft products. Each show features an extended look at the tile-screen for Win 8, the shots are long enough to qualify as computer porn. Which is pretty icky, as anyone who would be that aroused by Windows 8 belongs in a rubber room at the bottom of a disused coal mine.

The shots (and the references to Windows products by the actors) are beyond product placement. It's whoring. Bill Gates can at least buy dinner for Steve McGarrett.

Your Local Cable Company Sucks. Doesn't Matter Which One.

Lots of truth in this one:

Friendly Warning to Other Bloggers

I am trimming the blog rolls. If you have not made an entry in your blog in the last 2.5 years or longer, then I'm probably going to zorch the listing.

So far, I've found at least three blogs which had their own domains and those have expired. One on Blogger appeared to have been either hacked or transferred.

A couple won't be deleted, because the bloggers have passed away and their blogs are nice memorials to them. Jon Swift and William the Coroner come to mind.

So if you are one of the latent bloggers, post something!

Shorter Maker's Mark: "OK, We Fucked Up. We're Sorry."

Maker's Mark has changed its mind about watering down its booze:

You spoke. We listened. And we’re sincerely sorry we let you down.

So effective immediately, we are reversing our decision to lower the ABV of Maker’s Mark, and resuming production at 45% alcohol by volume (90 proof).

I suspect that they are just the latest company to find out that the Internet has an amplifying effect on public opinion. Especially when companies are doing moronic things.

I don't know if any of the 84 proof crap made it to the shelves, but it'll probably be a "New Coke" grade collectable if any did.

(H/T)

6,475 Posts-- Which is the Most Popular?

This one, by far.

Go figure.

No Shit, That's Just What ARPA Had In MInd

WikiLeaks' long-term survival depends on a number of unknowns, including the fate of its principal founder, Julian Assange, who is being held in Britain while awaiting possible extradition to Sweden related to sexual assault allegations. But the Web site's resilience in the face of repeated attacks has underscored a lesson already absorbed by more repressive governments that have tried to control the Internet: It is nearly impossible to do.

Why is that a surprise to anyone? The Internet, first known as the ARPAnet, was designed to provide resilient communications between mainframe computers that would survive a nuclear attack. Especially when there are a shitload of mirror sites and there are over 1,200 such sites as of three hours ago.

Yeah. I'll Take Those Fuckers' Money

I added Google's "AdSence" two months ago. Big whoop, I've made ten clams in that time and since Google pays when the balance is $100, well, you can do the math.

But anyway, this morning there was an ad by the Confederate party congratulating one of their anti-government candidates who was elected to make sure that government won't be able to do a fucking thing for the next two years.

I don't mind taking their money, not too much. Anyone who knows the thrust of my blog will probably get a good laugh from it (if they see the same ad). But yeah, it still galls me to see an ad from the party of Seditious Bastards on my blog.

Like Hell They Aren't Doing This Already

I call bullshit on this one:

Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

Does anyone seriously believe that the NSA isn't already ahead of this issue?