Three advisors to the UK government on drugs policy resigned yesterday in protest at the sacking of Professor David Nutt as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). This means a total of 6 out of 31 advisors have now quit after home secretary Alan Johnson sacked Prof Nutt for claiming that cannabis is less harmful than tobacco and alcohol.

Prof Nutt said that the government had made a mistake when it decided to reclassify cannabis from Class C to the more allegedly-harmful Class B. He questioned the evidence that cannabis causes mental illness in a large number of users, and disagreed with the hypocrisy of sanctioning prosecution for the possession of a substance that he considers less harmful than the legal, government-approved drugs tobacco and alcohol.

The advisors who resigned yesterday are: Ian Ragan, director of a consultancy for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, CIR Consultancy Ltd; John Marsden, a research psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry; and Simon Campbell, a synthetic organic chemist and former head of Worldwide Discovery and Medicinals R&D Europe at Pfizer. All three argued for the reinstatement of Prof Nutt before resigning, claiming that government belittled and interfered with their advice. The scientists in particular wanted assurances their reports and recommendations would in future be taken seriously, and sought an agreement over how their advice was handled by ministers.

Dr Les King, the former head of the drugs intelligence unit of the Forensic Science Service, and Marion Walker, the clinical director of Berkshire Healthcare NHS foundation trust’s substance misuse service, resigned in the immediate aftermath of Nutt’s sacking.

Prof Nutt’s dismissal shows that the government doesn’t really care how its policies reflect on objective reality. The reclassification of cannabis was a political act, based on questionable scientific evidence. And the resignations further demonstrate the government’s lonely position relative to truth and honesty.

If, like me, you were caught out by the sudden rush on tickets for HAR2009 and so couldn’t attend the Dutch hackerfest this summer, you may be sighing and distraught that you couldn’t participate in this coming together of Europe’s finest hackerish minds.

Well, nothing can change that. But you can still enjoy many of the talks and presentations through the medium of video. There’s a whole bunch of videos of talks and the like available for download here. Check ‘em out, peeps! You might be in danger of actually learning something!!!

There’s also a movie of the event: HAR2009 Impressions by Rick Deckardt. You can download it here. I haven’t watched it yet – I only found out about it a few minutes ago, while checking out the HAR2009 wiki prior to writing this post – but believe me, I shall watch it very soon. These Dutch hacker camps happen just once every 4 years, like leap years or Olympics, so I want to wring every last drop of enjoyment out of this last one. I couldn’t go – boo hoo! – but at least I can pretend!!

The latest release of Ubuntu (9.10, aka “Karmic Koala” came out yesterday, Thursday 29 October 2009. I’m a big Ubuntu fan, and although I haven’t tried Karmic yet, I can still predict it’s great, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who longs to be free of Microsoft shackles and is thinking of migrating to Linux. Take the plunge! You can find links to download Karmic here. I suggest that you get the .iso over bittorrent, to avoid the inevitable congestion at the Ubuntu servers (they’re always very busy just after a new release) – click here to find links to the torrents.

Once you’ve installed Karmic, there are a few more things you need to do if you want to play mp3s, movie DVDs etc. There’s an excellent guide on this kind of stuff here. It’s all pretty easy and guide describes it all very clearly.

Ubuntu is a great alternative to Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OSX. You really ought to try it out; and the live CD image let’s you run it in RAM without needing to install to your hard drive, which means it’s easy to check it all out before installing. So go on! What have you got to lose*?

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[*] Nothing.

Have you seen this craziness? For those who’ve never heard of DigZine: it’s a “hacker” zine similar to Phrack. This is what puzzles me. Phrack.org hasn’t been closed down. So why DigZine?

This ought to be a freedom of speech/free press issue. 2600 Hacker Quarterly has survived as long as it has largely because it’s a printed magazine – the printed press is afforded protection by the Constitution. But the US authorities are comfortable about persecuting webzines. It’s clear to me that this is wrong. There’s no real difference between a regular, printed-on-paper magazine and a webzine. So they should both be protected from over-zealous cops. Unfortunately, that isn’t how the world works. And if a website is on servers located in the USA, that website has virtually no protection from the evil morons in power.

Incidentally, if you scroll down to the bottom of that web page, you’ll see your ip address and some rubbish about how the Dept Homeland Security will log your ip and investigate you. Then, at the end it says:

Be aware that disguising or concealing IP information shall be considered a criminal violation of section 814 of the USA PATRIOT Act. Should you suspect that your IP address and host have been improperly recorded, contact a DHS representative immediately.

This is a blatant violation of the right to privacy. Using an anonymous proxy or some other anonymiser to protect your privacy is illegal? The US government has got right into the role of Big Brother. You don’t need a tin foil hat to realiize this.

But what tips this over into absurdity is the fact that any idiot with a web browser can view Digizine.com and its archive of seditious literature. All you need to do is go to the Wayback Machine. This is an archive of the internet: snapshots of what the internet used to look like. You go to the Wayback page and type in the URL of the site you’re interested in – say, Digizine.com – then click the button marked “Take Me Back!” This brings you to a list of dates when snapshots of the site in question were taken. In the case of Digizine.com, you can see that snapshots were taken most recently in 2007. So, you choose a date from the list and click it. In this case 8 Jan 2007. And this takes you to an archived copy of the website on that date.

So, we can visit this evil site despite the DHS’s best efforts to censor it. We can view the archive of the DigiZine e-zine and read all that treacherous content that the US govt wants to protect us from! (There’s a link to the magazine archive here.)

But if you take the time to view the e-zine, you’re gonna wonder why in hell the DHS wants to block this site! The last issue was released in 2006. And the content is, on the whole, a lot tamer than what you can find elsewhere. This censorship makes no sense. Then again, when do any of the DHS’s actions make any sense?

Thing is, the content of Digizine.com is irrelevant. The point is, just about any website that the DHS want to “protect” us from can be accessed via the Wayback Machine. The US govt wants to keep us ignorant? No sweat, information always finds a way out of bondage. The internet is based on the idea that information wants to be free. And archive.org is a shining example of that freedom!

Digizine.com censored by Dept Homeland Security

Note: There’s more info on this subject here. So take a look if this post doesn’t do it for you.

Be aware that all my experience of this subject is based on Ubuntu. If you use another Linux distro, YMMV. If you’re using Windows or OSX… you’ll probably be better off looking elsewhere.

Some time ago I bought a new phone – Sony Ericsson K800i. It’s a 3G phone, so I was pretty stoked: at last I’d be able to get a decent connection speed when linking my PC to the internet through this baby. And I was right: I get between 40 and 100 Kps (320-800 Kbps). Maybe those of you with wired broadband connections think this is dead slow. It probably is, to you. But to someone who’s previously had to depend on a sluggish GPRS connection, my new phone is like amphetamine on crack.

And it is so much easier to connect via this phone than it was through my previous handsets. All I need to do with my K800i is:

1. Press Menu > Settings > Connectivity > USB > USB Internet;

2. Select USB Internet On;

3. Connect phone to PC with USB datacable (the K800i also has bluetooth and infrared, but my computer is not equipped for such things);

4. Select Phone Mode;

and that’s it! The Ubuntu network manager detects the phone and automagically sets up the connection. Sweet or what! (Remember, this is with the Sony Ericsson K800i. Other phones will be different.

Unfortunately, it isn’t always like that. I don’t know if it’s just my phone or what, but connection is very unreliable. It cuts out erratically, and I haven’t found a fix yet. So on bad days I find I have to use wvdial to connect. I’ve described this in detail before – I’m not going to go into it again. Click here to go to the wvdial tutorial.

Thing is, mobile phone service providers have got something against their customers using their cellphones this way. It’s called “tethering”, and it is generally banned in the Terms and Conditions they make you agree to when you get your phone. And some providers actively block tethering. My provider obviously doesn’t block it. But that might change any day.

Why do they dislike tethering? Because they want you to buy a Mobile Broadband USB modem, and pay an inflated rate for mobile internet connection. Rip-off merchants!

Because I wanted another way to connect to the internet other than my phone, I bought one of these USB modems – a Vodafone K3565, aka the Huawei E160X. To connect via this device, Vodafone (UK) charge me £15 per GB of data transferred. This is shockingly expensive compared to what I pay for connection through my cellphone (£2.50 for 5 days’ “unlimited” browsing). But it is a better connection much of the time, when I get Vodafone’s HSDPA signal. Transfer speeds over HSDPA can get as highh as 160 Kps (1280 Kbps). But if I’m in an area with no HSDPA or 3G signal, I get snail’s rate GPRS. Which hurts when you’re paying the con men so much.

It’s also extremely easy to connect an Ubuntu PC to the internet via a Huawei dongle. Similar to the phone: plug it in, wait a short while, and the network manager detects the device and connects. The first time you connect the dongle to the computer, network manager throws up a mobile broadband wizard, which asks you a few questions about your service provider etc. And that’s it. Well, usually that’s it. Sometimes you have to manually edit the settings before it’ll work. But that will depend on whose service you’re using.

Also, I understand that although Huawei devices play nice with Ubuntu, some other manufacturers’ models don’t. If that’s the case for you, wvdial is probably the answer. Again, click here to find out how to use wvdial.

There’s another solution, if you’re having problems: an app called Vodafone Mobile Connect. Don’t let the word “Vodafone” in the name put you off – it actually works with devices on any provider’s networks. I used it for a while very successfully. I can’t give you any real advice about it, as it’s in constant “beta” development. But the only reason I stopped using it was the fact that Ubuntu’s network manager does the job just fine. It’s certainly worth checking out if you’re having problems. There are binaries available for many Linux distros.

Well, I think that’s about it. So, let me just wish you the best of luck in connecting to the internet with your device. And I’ll bid you farewell!

Just recently there’s been a lot of hoo-hah about Pan Am Flight 103 – the US aircraft bombed above Lockerbie. America is upset that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the Libyan accused of planting the bomb, has been released from prison on compassionate grounds.

What I’d like to know is, how do the Yanks feel about Iran Air 655, the airliner shot down by the USS Vincennes?

For those who don’t know (or who “can’t remember”), IR655 was shot down by the USS Vincennes on 3 July 1988. The air liner was in Iranian airspace at the time… and the Vincennes was in Iranian territorial waters. It was clearly an unacceptable action. Yet the US government tried to justify it by claiming that the aircraft was a hostile target. Even when the USA accepted it was a civilian aircraft, they tried to defend the attack by claiming that Captain William C Rogers thought the plane was an F-14 Tomcat fighter. 274 crew and passengers were killed, including 238 Iranian civilians. The plane was transmitting a friend or foe signal identifying it as an airliner. It was flying in a commercial air corridor. But the Yanks still maintain the attack was somehow justified. The USA defends its right to murder innocent civilians.

So come on, US citizens, tell me this: if it should turn out that the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 was in revenge for the destruction of Iran Air 655, would you still bleat about it? Do you condemn the killing of Americans yet defend the USA’s “right” to kill foreign civilians?

BTW: there is compelling evidence that Megrahi did not bomb the Lockerbie aircraft. There is reason to believe that the CIA fabricated the evidence against him. So tell me: the guy is very likely innocent and is dying of cancer; do you still think he should die in prison? Will you hand Captain Rogers over to Iran so he dies in one of their prisons? Or do you think it’s okay for your country to murder innocents?

Well here’s an interesting site. Just Cause Law Collective is a manual on how to deal with the police and the courts – mostly aimed at political campaigners like the anti-G20 protesters, but it’s relevant to anyone whose activities might bring them into conflict with the cops (which means just about everyone really). There are articles on subjects like “Arrest and Questioning”, “Searches”, “Jail and Bail”, and there are also fun comic strips like the one I’ve reproduced (or “blatantly ripped off”) below. Go check it out – I promise, you’ll be surprised and shocked at what the cops get up to and what they can get away with… You’ll be damned pleased you took the time to educate yourself.

I found an interesting article today – it’s the paper by Martin Beck and Erik Tews describing their attack on wireless (WPA) security.

I’ve uploaded the pdf for your perusal. Click here to download it. Have fun!!

Disclaimer: Everything I’ve written here is just what I’ve read/heard. I’ve never actually done any. This is because I’ve read that it shouldn’t be taken by someone who uses anti-depressants. So, unlike what I’ve written about other drugs, this blog post is not based on personal experience. Bear this in mind if you’re thinking of taking DXM. Okay?

DXM is dextromethorphan. In small quantities it is a cough suppressant with no narcotic qualities. In larger quantities it acts as a “dissociative anaesthetic” like ketamine or PCP. Apparently, according to the Trip Project:

“A high dose will cause you to feel very spacey and “out of it,” and you may lose motor control (your legs may feel wobbly, for example, or at very high doses you won’t be able to move much at all). It can also produce audio and visual hallucinations, and can sometimes cause nausea and itchy skin.

“Some people use DXM recreationally. When they do, they nearly always do it at home, in bed or on their couch. DXM is definitely not a dance drug.”

Sometimes people are sold DXM pills as ecstasy. DXM can cause heat stroke, as can ecstasy. But the zombied-out feeling you get is nothing like an ecstasy buzz! I know that some rip-off merchants sell ketamine at raves, usually in the guise of something else. So I guess you might buy DXM and think you copped some Special K.

Erowid (something of an internet authority when it comes to this kind of stuff) says:

“People knowledgeable in the field recommend that only products containing DXM alone (sometimes listed as ‘Dextromethorphan hydrobromide’) in the Active Ingredients list should be used.” He lists some active ingredients that should be avoided in particular:

acetaminophen
aspirin
chlorpheniramine maleate
guaifenesin
paracetamol
phenylephrine (hydrochloride)
pseudoephedrine (hydrochloride)
sorbitol

Erowid also advises:

# Do not take DXM if you are using, or have used an MAO Inhibitor within the last 2 weeks.

* MAOI’s include harmine & harmaline, as well as many anti-depressants.
* Check with a doctor if you’re unsure whether you medication contains MAOI’s.
* When combined with MAOI’s, DXM can cause “serotonin syndrome” with fever, hypertension, and arrhythmias.

# Do not take DXM if you are using, or have used an SSRIs within the last 2 weeks.

* SSRIs include many anti-depressants, including Fluoxetine (Prozac), Citalopram (Celexa, Lexapro), Paroxetine (Paxil), and others.
* Check with a doctor if you’re unsure whether you medication is an SSRI.
* When combined with SSRIs, DXM may cause “serotonin syndrome” with fever, hypertension, arrhythmias, etc.

In the UK, a commonly available cough medicine that contains DXM and no other active ingredients is Benylin Dry Coughs Non-Drowsy Syrup. www.netdoctor.co.uk says:

“Benylin dry coughs non-drowsy syrup contains the active ingredient dextromethorphan, which is a type of medicine called a cough suppressant. It is used to suppress a dry, tickly, unproductive cough.”

You’ll find this particular cough syrup in most chemists shops. But be aware that Benylin also makes other medicines for “tickly coughs”. Just remember the name – Benylin dry coughs non-drowsy – and if in any doubt, check that it says on the label on the front of the bottle that it contains Dextromethorphan. If it says that, you’ve got the right stuff. Drink the bottleful, relax on the sofa, and don’t take any anti-depressants or ecstasy. Remember all this, and you’ll probably be okay. If everything I’ve read is true…

BBC’s iPlayer service has allowed Windows users to download TV and radio shows for quite some time now. And apparently iPlayer Labs has offered an experimental download facility to Linux users in the past – though I can’t see any sign of it on their site currently. But of course there are hackers and developers out there offering software that answers this need for us Linuxers. You can check out a whole gaggle of such third party solutions at the beebhack wiki site.

Yep, there are a few progs featured there that will allow users of Linux to download BBC programmes. But there is only one that deserves to be called the best. So which is it? Get a load of get_iplayer.

So why have I chosen this particular app? I’m sure some of you will disagree with me – it’s a command-line utility for a start, and although some die-hard geeks think that the terminal is great, an increasing number of Linuxers prefer a GUI. But to that I say: Bah!

The reason I prefer get_iplayer to its competition is that it works great whether you’ve got the fastest light-fibre cable connection ever or a slow-crawling dial-up link. For users with good broadband there are funky functions like PVR and live-TV watching. And for those of us with slow, unreliable connection, there’s a simple download function that will resume recording where it left off if the connection should be interrupted.

Really we have Apple to thank for get_iplayer. Not that Apple had anything to do with creating it! Lord no, that’s a ridiculous notion! But Apple did create the iPhone. And the BBC decided they wanted to cater to people who own the stupid things. But the iPhone is so crap, it doesn’t play streaming content. So the BBC had to allow the Apple fanboi-phones to download the shows. And cunning get_iplayer can also download the content because it pretends to be an iPhone! Pretty sneaky, eh? It’s a classic hack.

Of course, the BBC doesn’t like this state of affairs. So they keep changing their system. But the get_iplayer devs just change their code to compensate. This means you need to update your version of the app fairly frequently. No need to fret though, you just use it with an –update flag and it’s all done automagically.

Believe me, I’m not the only person who thinks this command-line tool is great. There are a bunch of iPlayer-related projects that use get_iplayer. Some of them stick a pretty GUI front-end on the program. But the apps with a graphic interface haven’t worked for me – not a one of them. Whereas get_iplayer Just Works… as a good tool should.

Okay, okay, so sometimes get_iplayer doesn’t Just Work. Sometimes it claims to have finished downloading a show when really it hasn’t. But I’m pretty sure this is to do with my internet connection – I use a mobile phone to get my computer online, and it can be awfully quirky and unstable at times – so I doubt anyone using a more conventional connection will suffer from this problem. Seriously, if you use Linux and want to download BBC TV and radio shows – and even ITV shows – check out get_iplayer. You can download it from linuxcentre.net, and also find plenty of documentation. Seriously, get_iplayer is a bloody marvel! Try it out today!

NB: unfortunately, it will only download to UK-located domains. This isn’t down to get_iplayer – the BBC want to limit the iPlayer service to the United Kingdom. But there is a way around this for would-be viewers who don’t live here, involving the use of proxy servers. Check out the docs if you want to learn more!