Ooh ooh another quick post about Dredd (2012)

I just thought that anything about Dredd (2012) that doesn’t include Ma-Ma’s long fall to her death from the top of a Megablock while on Slo-Mo is not complete.  So here it is.  Poor Leana Headey – I hope her Game of Thrones death (if Cersei ever does die) is quicker… though it’s kinda hard to tell if Ma-Ma is actually enjoying this fall…

Also, shouldn’t Dredd have failed Anderson because she lost her gun?  She’s told right from the start that  losing her firearm would be an automatic fail.  And letting the computer-whiz kid walk – regardless of his bad treatment etc, he aided and abetted some pretty gruesome and unforgivable crimes… surely he should have got some cube time for that?  Don’t agree with me?  Then don’t suffer in silence… it’s been Web 2.0 since forever, douchebags – use the drokking Comments willya!

 

Murmurations

Murmuration near Gretna, by Jim Duncan.  Borrowed from bbc.com

When Others observe our homeward commute

Pouring onto bus or train

And disgorged at the other end

Or, wrapped in our own steel boxes

Are funneled along our roads

Are we to Them as the murmurations of starlings

Twisting and wheeling in their skywide displays

Before the dark drives them

To their own nighttime roosts?

Dept. Homeland Security blocking “illegal” websites?

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