Standard Mischief

Update 01may06: See the next newest post.

Countertop got the spam first, it looks like it finally got around to me. Does that mean I’ve arrived as a blogger?

New comment on your post #90 “Outlaw Mandatory RFID ?spychips? Implantations.”
Author : DEAN BERRY — REAL AMERICAN (IP: 204.52.242.50 , mail.accor-na.com)
E-mail : DINOBERRY@FRONTIERNET.NET
URI :
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=204.52.242.50
Comment:
The Second Amendment means nothing outside of hunting.

…

In Jesus’ Glorious and Holy name,
Dean Berry — Real American

http://www.deanberryministries.org

dinoberry@frontiernet.net

standard mischief$ whois 204.52.242.50

OrgName: MOTEL 6
OrgID: MOTEL6
Address: <snip>
…

This is apparently a picture of the guy, hotlinked from his website. Unfortunately for his bandwidth, it’s only 4116 bytes.

I’m normally pretty tolerant if a thread wanders off topic, but this guy’s screed has nothing to do with employers requiring that their employees get RFID implants.

I took the extra second to login and manually spank the spam so that info gets transmitted to other spam karma2 users.

I’m guessing that this was inserted by a real person using a laptop at a hotel, (I don’t think that Motel 6 is getting into the spammy comment business), but I’m posting the IP address anyway, just to make it easier to confirm my suspicions.

If you have any similar experiences, the comments are open here, thanks to Spam Karma 2.

Update: Have you ever spent an hour under the hood of a car trying to figure out why it won’t start, only to find out later that you are simply out of gas? I was poking around and failed to check the obvious stuff. Let’s just say he did very little to conceal his location and identity. I have an address and phone number, but I’m not going to post it because I don’t want to be a annoying a-hole too. Plus, it might be his mommy’s.

If I was anywhere near Wells, NV however, I’d do the internets a favor and teach the Motel 6 (where he’s leaching his free wifi) how to block a MAC address. Unfortunately however, he’d just go down to the Flying J, or the local legal brothel and start spamming from there. (Free wifi at a whorehouse, who would have thunk it? I suppose it’s there for the same reason it’s at the Flying J though.)

Why there ought to be a law! Wisconsin might become the first state to ban the mandatory implantation of RFID “spychips” into people.

http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/14418898.htm

MADISON, Wis. – Former Gov. Tommy Thompson was one of the first high-profile supporters of tiny microchips implanted in people’s arms that would allow doctors to access medical information.

Now the state he used to lead is poised to become the first to ban governments and private businesses from forcing such implants on employees, privacy advocates say.

A proposal moving through the state Legislature would prohibit anyone from requiring people to have the tiny chips embedded in them or doing so without their knowledge. Violators would face fines of up to $10,000.

The plan authored by Rep. Marlin Schneider, D-Wisconsin Rapids, won approval in the Assembly last month. The state Senate on Tuesday is scheduled to consider the measure, which would allow for the implants if the person gives consent.

…

There are damn few laws out there that I support, this type of law is one of them. It prevents corporations from abusing its influence over an employee, by preventing them from requiring, as a condition of employment, to be implanted with one of these spychips.

It’s not that I’m not sure that the free market will eventually fix this kind of stuff, its just I’m not sure that I’ll live that long. I also have less of a problem curtailing the “rights” of corporations.

…“I don’t think most people had thought about this as an issue, but it’s scary. It’s reality now,” said Michael Schoenfield, an aide to Schneider. “Companies can or will be ordering their employees to have chips implanted. We want to stop that before it begins.”

…

(Image from Wikipedia)

These types of RFID spychips are being used more and more to automate all kinds of inventory, including livestock. Don’t let yourself be treated as livestock. These chips are activated by a burst of radio waves and report off their string of embedded serial numbers without informing the host. RFID spychip readers can be hidden or disguised as a number of plain ordinary objects. The bottom line is that you never know someone is reading the secret serial number embedded in that “promiscuous” chip that you let yourself get implanted with.

Fax or call you congress-critters. Let’s get this passed in all fifty states.

Related Tags: RFID, spychips, smartchips

I’m not a huge fan of tattoos, although I do like looking, (especially at nice looking, tastefully done “tramp stamps“). However, this is pretty cool.

(click on the picture for a link to Richie’s gallery)

It’s ink that only shows up under black light. From what I can tell from the gallery, it’s FDA approved as a marking pigment for use in tracking animals and fish, this is in contrast with most tattoo pigments which are apparently not regulated at all (and that’s pretty much the way everyone likes it. Who needs more government regs?). Richie Streate, the artist here, says it’s been used for over 10 years in humans with no adverse effects.

Richie’s shop is Electric Soul Tattoo in Lancaster, California.

Related Tags: tattoo, UV ink, ultraviolet, black light, blacklight, ink

Oh, I mean Earth Day. Sorry about that. I never meant to imply a connection to communism, “warmed over”, and the present day environmental movement. It’s funny how Earth Day just seems to have been given the exact same day as Lenin’s Birthday. What are the odds, like 365 to one or something, right?

Oh wait, one of the very first Earth day celebrations took place on exactly the 100 year anniversary of Comrade Lenin’s birthday, which I’m sure is another fantastic coincidence.

This coincidence must bother at least one person, because it looks like someone made a huge effort to erase that little fact from Wikipedia. If you compare Wikipedia’s Revision as of 17:41, 20 April 2006 and Revision as of 18:34, 20 April 2006 you can see someone removed that little fact. Furthermore, the edit seems to have been hidden inside a flurry of non-commented activity leading up to today’s Earth Day. That’s OK though, because I think the 36th anniversary of Earth Day is the Propaganda one, and not the Bone China one I had been led to believe.

The remover of that fact seems to have used the IP address of 129.107.46.196 which Whois shows as resolving to the University of Texas at Arlington.

I’m going to list some other IP addresses who also edited during this big rush of uncommented activity, but I want everyone to remember that these are likely boxes that were infected by viruses and were used as ?sockpuppet zombies? thus the owners (including the above one) aren’t automatically guilty of unethical editing:

195.22.238.66
Telemedia Group SA

24.20.196.25
Comcast Cable Communications

142.161.8.53
MTS Allstream Inc.

67.191.250.48
Comcast Cable Communications

204.210.0.214
Road Runner HoldCo LLC

203.115.109.116 (which was used to do some vandal edits that were quickly reverted by a bot)
SNIP

Folks, this is the best effort of a stealth “sockpuppet” edit that I have ever seen. Slick. Of course, It was discovered by one lone blogger doing a little fact checking before posting my usual screed.

If one of my readers doesn’t insert back that little fact for me, I’ll just use my sockpuppet to fix it later. Revisionism history sucks. (If you do change it for me, would you please put a link on the talk page back to this blog entry? Thanks.)

I think that this shows the strength of Wikipedia, rather than a failure, as I was able to easily ferret this out in about 20 minutes of probing. It does, however, give me the idea for a bot that would look at the recent history of a Wikipedia entry and give you a graph of the edit timeline, the number of letters that were changed, the number of unsigned edits, brand new editors, and perhaps edits without comments. Might be useful to a reverting bot or something.

Update: I just read a bit more of the edit history page for the article and wanted to make it clear that this seems to be an often edit war on this particular article. I’ve still never seen this level of sneaky editing, however.

Update: In contrast, here’s a bumbling attempt at sockpuppetry, as demonstrated by minons of our congress-critters.

–

Anyway, besides fighting revisionism history, let me tell you what I did for Earth Day. I grabbed my backpack for the first time this year and put in some mileage over at a local National Park. I came prepared to pick up trash, but for some strange reason, I didn’t find any, which is strange because I always have in the past. I suppose someone beat me to it the weekend before. I had the park entirely to myself, because of the rainy weather, and I have come to the conclusion that I’m either using my genuine GI issue poncho totally wrong, or it really doesn’t protect you from any rain. It does, however keep you warm from the effects of rain, and is airy enough to keep you from sweating too much like I do in other types of rain gear. Really, the front of my T-shirt was soaking wet from rain blown in from the hood, and my legs were soaked too because I didn’t have any leggings on. It’s useful, keeps my pack dry, stays in my gear list, but doesn’t do a damn thing to keep me dry.

Related Tags: Wikipedia, communism, edit wars, sockpuppetry, sockpuppet, Earth Day, Lenin

Ugh , more twenty year old nostalgia. Well OK, here it goes:

Minor Threat – It Follows/Screaming At A Wall: You Tube permalink

(I don’t like embedded flash players, especially ones that start playing without asking first)

I ran across this fantastic clip. It’s a little jumpy but it shows a bit of a Minor Threat show. If you’ve never been to something like this (hardcore or punk or whatever) you might be thinking that this is some kind of out-of-control drunken brawl. It’s not. The guy in the yellow shirt in the foreground is Brian Baker (also of Government Issue, Dag Nasty, etc.) Notice that no one really interferes with him as he plays and jumps around, that’s because if they did, the music would stop. If the music stops, the mood stops. The people down in the pit are packed in firmly enough that they will break the fall of anyone diving off the stage. Later in the clip you see stage people who’s job seems to be to push fans off the stage if it gets too crowded. Rest assured even though it’s rough and tumble play, no one is trying to get anyone seriously hurt.

I’d evoke Dionysus, but that implies drunken revel. Minor Threat was the premier “Straight Edge” band. I’m not saying absolutely no one here was drunk or high, I’m saying that these guys are another kind of junkie.

Adrenaline junkies.

Related Tags: Minor Threat, harDCore, punk, straight edge, sxe