Standard Mischief

A bunch of congress-critter staffers can’t get together a decent sockpuppet.

Wikipedia, my favorite encyclopedia in the whole world is under attack. It started with some creative PR work over on U.S. Rep Marty Meehan’s Wikipedia entry. Apparently staffers went in and removed the fact that Meehan ran on a pledge of strict term limits. There’s a good article on the edits in the Lowell Sun.

Edit: even though I never quoted from the Lowell Sun article, I’ve de-linked because of their association to the Righthaven lawsuits.

From the wikipedia entry:

Meehan first ran for Congress in 1992 on a platform of reform. As part of that platform Meehan made a pledge not to serve more than four terms. He won the 1992 election and was re-elected to Congress every two years since, including the latest election (2004). On the House floor in 1995 he scolded members who might go back on their promise to limit their tenure in office. “The best test of any politicians’ credibility on term limits,” he said, “is whether they are willing to put their careers where their mouths are and limit their own service.” [2] In the year 2000 when he again ran for Congress, exceeding four terms, he stated that not to run would be a disservice to his constituents who continued to want him to be their Congressman. [3]

Now however, it has seemingly escalated into edit wars on a number of the congress-critters articles. Apparently the sons and daughters of wealthy campaign contributers can?t figure out how to use a proxy, because a number of IP addresses point directly back to the Senate. There is interesting chatter on what to do about this (emphasis mine):

Wow, an RFC against the entire US Federal Government? Count me in! What an awesome idea! –Cyde Weys 15:13, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Organized POV pushing, IMO, will be the major threat to Wikipedia in the upcoming decade – much more serious than scalability, server issues, or the threat of litigation. My current experience with this has not been encouraging – blatant POV pushers have been given the run of Wikipedia as long as they are canny enough to not violate specific rules like the 3RR. We need to start treating organized POV pushing at least as seriously as we do blatant vandalism, or Wikipedia will be useless as an information resource. How long before every major corporation has PR agent(s) assigned to Wikipedia editing? Crotalus horridus (TALK ? CONTRIBS) 20:24, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

I’m in favor of banning the entire IP range for both House and Senate for a minimum of seven years. These people’s salaries are paid with our tax dollars, and I’m not interested in seeing my money going towards Wikipedia vandalism. If people still want to contribute, they are welcome to do so on their own time, at home, when they’re not using government computers. Astarf 20:29, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree. We need to nip this in the bud before it goes further. No one should be allowed to make campaigns of disinformation, as this is not at the heart of wikipedia. 30 January 2006

Endorse. There needs to be greater punishment than a 1-week block for those IPs involved in violations. But I also like JeffBurdges’s idea below for creating a Congress IP watchlist. –Aaron 20:50, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

I’m in! Let’s see how it feels for them to be censored by us, for a change ! Elfguy 20:55, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Endorse. I can’t believe they’re doing this to wikipedia. Shows how popular it has become.Matthewvelie 21:05, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Besides being personally offended by the attempted annoying AND anonymous actions of teenybopper staffers, I?m suitably unimpressed with the caliber of their actions. Use someone else?s Wi-Fi, use a proxy, got to a cafe, try to pull together a sockpuppet that does not lead directly back to your doorstep. Oh and try to understand how easy it is to revert your edits and remember the press that?s going to be churned up will not look good to your patron-critter. Even if you get to keep your job. Thanks.

Update: Looks like frequent commenter Countertop beat me to this story.

The interweb is alight with the buzz that Google is fighting the DoJ over turning over a ton of search results, and that’s a good thing, right? Damn right it is.

The DoJ is requesting the info because they are trying to resurrect a law that the supremes struck down a few years ago, the “Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998″. ^[1] MSN, AOL, and Yahoo all rolled over without a peep.

So here we have a law, that immediately got slapped with an injunction, never was put in to force, struck down by the courts, and the DoJ is spending tax dollars trying to revise this affront to free speech instead of catching terrorists or something. Great.

Anyway that totally proves that Google is not evil right? Not so fast. If you use Google regularly, just think about all the info they have access to. Milly has.

Now the potentially bad. You use Google a lot, right? If someone was peering over your shoulder, watching every Google search you made; making a note of what you looked for; what you found; and sometimes where you visited from the results; (and maybe every email you sent and received); and did so for years and years: they’d grow to know quite a bit about you, eh?

Google gives you a cookie with a unique number in it that’s sorta like your Socialist Insecurity number except it’s a lot easer to get, and get rid of. That cookie is sent back to Google every time you interact with Google. Even if your ISP provider changes your IP address. Even if you use your laptop at a coffeehouse or a friend’s house. And because Google does not have a “data retention policy“, all of that data presumably gets warehoused, forever, just in case they ever find it useful.

So if Google ever gets served with a “National Security Letter“, or they lose their court case, or they change their privacy policy moments before they sell off parts of themselves, your personal private data goes from the “Don’t be evil” company to someone who might not have the best ethics.

I figure we all learned this during the dot-bomb. Go bust on your crazy stock selling Ponzi scheme and you have to sell off all your assets when you go into receivership. Guess what? The domain name have value, so does that little sock puppet mascot. And hey, so does that list that has all your former customers and what pets they have and their address and credit card info that you swore you would never sell.

OK. so let’s talk about what we can do about this. One thing you can do is upchuck your cookies after every session. This is fairly easy to do on most browsers, look for a setting that says something like “session cookies”. I do this with every cookie that does not provide a direct known benefit to me. However, the Google cookie holds your preferences, like “English results only, don’t filter my results please, and give ‘em to me 20 at a time”.

So I’d like to keep that cookie around, but I don’t like the sixteen digit unique tracking number Google gives me.

I used to just save my preferences, and then just edit the Google cookie to remove their 16 digit hex number that use to be my Google ID. I would change it to all zeros. Recently, however, Google starting enforcing a “check digit” on their cookie, and if your zeroed cookie didn’t pass the test,Google would swap it out with a new one.

Enter Milly again. She figured out a way to crunch the checksum and wrote a little bookmarket program. It works similar to my Merriam-Webster tool. To use it, you just drag it over to your tool bar, go to Google and click on the button. It will then prompt you to set your prefs. Done.

Please understand though, If you do all your Google searching from a computer that has a static IP address, this little hack will do little or nothing for you. Presumably Google will track you search requests by using your static IP address. In this case you can use something like the Scroogle Scraper. This service from Scroogle.org, however, does not let you search “Google groups”, “Google images”, etc…

Another possible workaround is to use an anonymous proxy such as the Cloak. That, however is above and beyond the healthy level of paranoia I like to cultivate. Perhaps if I was a terrorist.

Now if you want to do what I do and upchuck all your other cookies each time you restart your browser, except for the special Google one we just “zeroed out” (and any others you wish to retain), here is the step-by-step with screenshots.

Update: 2006-01-22: This step-by-step is for Firefox only. There are other worthy browsers out there, and there’s IE out there too, but this procedure won’t work on ‘em. Sorry about that. It should work fine on Firefox running on either Linux or Windows. Sorry, but I do not have any experience running Firefox on a Mac.

Update: 2006-01-21: Let me clarify exactly what this hack does. Google normally gives you a sixteen digit number that is your and yours alone. You then give this number back every time you interact with Google. Google uses this number to track you. What we are doing here is changing that unique number to something different, all zeros. My cookie is zeroed out, Milly’s cookie is zeroed out, and everyone else that follows this step-by-step shares the same cookie. Therefore, singling out your search requests from mine is significantly harder.

The standard mischief is detailed below the fold.

^[1] “Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998“, which comes in at only 3402 words and no, I did not read the whole damn thing.
(more…)

We sometimes get crows in my neighborhood. They come on Tuesdays for the all-you-can-eat trash buffet. That’s thanks to annoying neighbors that don’t want to bother with a trashcan with a lid. I usually throw my bare plastic bag to the curb too and I like to think that the crows don’t mess with my trash bag because the crow is my “power animal”, but it’s more likely because I pour a quarter cup of ammonia into the bag before I seal it up.

(You can click on the image for a pop-up, larger, uncropped, 174 K image, but why? It’s just some crows.)

Scientists think crows are pretty clever, some even think they are as smart as chimps. There have been documented cases where crows were seen carrying nuts down to the street when the traffic lights were red, and then retrieved them after the next light cycle, after traffic had cracked them open. That?s pretty clever.

But I?m sure the crows aren’t that clever, because the crows appeared today, Wednesday.

So I?m sure crows are observant enough to tell the difference between a weekend and a workday, probably by watching commuters, or perhaps by noticing the light rail trains that run beside their rookery. They can remember things, and they can count to at least two. On the second morning of the work week, the crows know enough to arrive in my neighborhood, but trash day was yesterday. Crows hate Martin Luther King Day.

Michele, in her blog, had a few choice words to say about what happened after she left comments over at Say Uncle’s. She wrote to disagree with the interpretation of the law that everyone else had jumped on the bandwagon with. Then she said that after that, she received a bunch of nastygrams from irate readers in her inbox.

Although Say Uncle requires an email address to post, that blog, as well as this blog, does not publicly display that entered in email address. The email address further does not seem to appear over in her blog. Never-the-less, she claims to have received “quite a bit of email in my inbox” and that she spent “close to an hour getting rid of them”.

Then she goes on to say that she, despite everyone else, actually read the whole law that was passed. “…unlike these bloggers, I READ THE WHOLE DARNED THING! All 242 pages! …”

Well, I’ll just have to accept that. At least she didn’t claim to have read every single word in Atlas Shrugged.

Anyway, she’s pretty sure the law does not apply to comments left anonymously in a blog. She didn’t cite her legal certifications, but unless her middle name is SCOTUS, it’s anyones guess what exactly this law will shake out to being applied as. So, who wants to be a test case?

She does, however raise a few good points about the whole thingy, and she does properly admonish people for taking the word of the MSM, without verifying the whole thing independently.

OK, so I’d like to lay out some ground rules here. Whenever someone blogs about a law, a rule, regulation, a bill or an amendment, they should:

1. Cite the bill, (or whatever), number, AND the name of the bill, and,
2. Hyperlink to the text of the bill, and
3. Make a bona fide effort to count the approximate number of words in the bill, and,
4. (Optional) make fun of the excessive length of the bill/law/whatever.

So, let me try to comply with that rule now.

The original news story that started the brouhaha

The Say Uncle posts are here, here, and here

Michele’s response is here

Declan McCullagh’s (the original news-critter) response (although not directly addressing Michele by name).

The bill, HR3402, “Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act of 2005″, that was passed by congress and signed into law (thanks Michele):

1.go here: http://thomas.loc.gov/
2.push the “radio button” for “Bill Number”
3.enter in “HR3402.ENR”

The total word count of that bill (using wc -w file.with.the.saved.bill’s.text) is 73,788. (hah!)

The law that the above bill modified. Sorry, but I am unable to get a proper word count, I bona fide tried. This is where you will find “annoy”.

Finally, I have a proposed a law to properly “well-regulate” the future writings of the Peoples of the united states of America. Why, there oughta be a law!

§ – Section 1 “Short Title”

This law may be referred to as the “Michele-Mischief Blogger Law Orating And Typing act” or “MM BLOAT” for short.

(a-z) Bloggers are required to name and hyperlink to the laws and bills that they blog about. In addition, they are to make a effort to count the total number of words in the laws and bills they cite.

(subsection A) This law applies to bloggers, online newspapers, newsletters, sandboxes, wiki-wikis, and government employees.

§ – Section 2 “purpose”

This bills sole purpose it to narrowly define how a blogger is to cite pending legislation, bills, law, case law, government regulations that carry the force of law, pending government regulations that carry the force of law, and any other legalese type crap.

§ – Section 3 -Definitions (TBD)

§ – Section 1789 – NOTE: This section explains where congress gets the authority to write law that overrules the plain language that is contained in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, AKA “Tamara’s Law”

“Commerce Clause“

§ – Section NCC-1701-BS – Regarding Natural Laws, Constants in Physics, Theories in the Hard Sciences.

Subsection 6.02214199 * 10^23 – Regardless of the what ever else might be contained in this law, no blogger shall be required to cite and hyperlink any Natural Laws, Constants in Physics, or Theories in the any of the Hard Sciences unless congress, fed-gov executive branch or any other type of government, pseudo-government, or poly-government is actually trying to repeal via legislation, any Natural Laws, Constants in Physics, or Theories in the any of the Hard Sciences such as, but not limited to, the “law” of gravity, the value of “pi”, or Avogadro’s number.

§ – Section 2038-01-19 § Rough word count

(a) As a rough guide, and to display the obfuscation potential inherent in long passages of legalese, bloggers are required to make a bona fide effort to produce a word count of the subsection of law they are blogging about. Exceptions for users of Micro$oft versions of operating systems are exempt if they have made a bona fide attempt to use an operating system based on some kind of unix, including, but not limited to OS X, Linux, Knoppix live CD, etc.. within the last 366 days (except on leap years, where it shall be 367 days).

(x) Non exempted bloggers are to make an effort using any available tool, to count the number of words in a passage including, but not limited to the core utility, under unix, called “wc”.

§ – Sectionn 1337 5p34k4g3

Irregardless of misspellin’, commas and; other punctuation, and irregardless, of the, original intent, of the written law, the law, means exactly what the judge, wants the law ? to mean, instead of what it actually says…

§ – Section 1337 congress-critters

Regardless of any other section of this law, the law shall never be considered to apply members of congress, or their assistants and staff, in any official or unofficial capacity, whether said blog is written anonymously, pseudonymous, ghost written, or written in an official or unofficial capacity.

I’m actively seeking amendments and revisions in comments.

I overpaid for this can, I think it was 11-something bux at a gun show, but if it saves you half an hour under the greasy metal beast it’s totally worth it.

I don’t know what’s in this stuff, or why its not sold everywhere on the planet, or why people keep telling me that they no longer make the stuff because of EPA regulations, but it works. It seems to dissolve rust. It’s fully an order of magnitude better at penetrating than olde water displacing number forty.

Once I had to move a lot of studs off of an engine block to transfer them over to another block. I’m not exactly sure why the rebuilt block didn’t come with the whole 10 bux extra worth of studs. I would have even ordered and paid for them if I had the documentation that told me what I needed. If you ever do an engine swap, you will burn up an amazing amount of time running around to pick up this or that, but it’s not like I could have ran out and bought new studs at the local, convenient, 24 hour, metric weird hardware emporium. So I either had to reuse the studs I had, or overnight them from someplace like MSC (also recommended, a mecca of pure unobtainum).

I used the Kroil, let them sit for 30 minutes, and then put on double nuts locked together so I could back the stud out. The short story was that I got every single stud out intact for reuse.

Tonight, I tackled Toyota half shaft number 4. I should have tried the Kroil first, but I thought I had my magic mojo in the silver slapper I had rented. About to give up in frustration, I gave it the holy sprinkle drenching of Kroil, and stepped out for a brainstorming half mile hike. I attacked with the prybar when I got back and actually made some progress. I reattached the silver slapper and finally got the damn thing out. The bearing was rusted pretty well to the steel casting it was mounted to.

Besides hardware stores, lots of shooting supply mail order places carry it too. I’ve used both the liquid and the spraybomb cans and they work equaly well. Try Froogle.

–
Extra tags, for Google’s sake: driveshaft, half-shaft, camry, repair

–

Although it’s not a complete step-by-step, the driver’s side half-shaft was covered in my blog here.