Standard Mischief

Via ladyada’s rants,

This thingy is by far the most annoying flash anything I have ever clicked on. Oh, let me count the ways.

1. It has the volume already stuck on eleven. When you click on the “volume control, it puts a little red “X” over the speaker picture, but it doesn’t stop the noise, it just tones it down to 3 or so.

2. it’s got an ad for a CD or something “breathing”, continuously in the upper left corner.

3. it’s got this flashing thingy distracting me in the upper right corner.

4. You cannot possibly sweep your pointer over top of anything without having big bubbles pop-up, phrases in red text tumble out, or photographs expanding out at random moments. Constantly.

5. It emits various jingles at random intervals

6. It’s about electronic circuits or something. I really can’t stand all the distractions to figure it all out.

Holy crap! Excuse the swearing, but wow! I have a battery of tools that I’ve installed on my browser (Firefox) to stop stuff like this from happening, but it all doesn’t work in this case, because the text and the ads are integrated into one humongous flash orgasm of motion, light, and sound, I can’t block just part of it, so the whole site becomes an all or nothing thing.

First off, I use the Flashblock extension to stop flash ads in their tracks. Flashblock gives me a button to press when I (rarely) actually want to see the flash object. Most of the time, there are annoying little flash ads on the sidebars that I rarely click on.

Second, I use the Adbock extension combined with Adblock Filterset G Updater to keep it updated automagicly. In the prefs of that last tool, I keep a custom block list designed to target web-bugs, slow counters, and other such annoyances. For instance, I block anything named 1×1.gif.

I use the Customize Google extensions to block them from doing snoopy stuff, and enhance the search experience by putting links directly to other engines on the same page and really cleaning up and improving the image search function, but it does a number of other things like block what really are the least obtrusive ads on the inter-tubes.

If there’s an annoying animated ad that somehow got through all those defenses, Nuke Anything Enhanced allows me to rightclick-kill anything on the spot.

Also, if I’m on a page such as ell-jay, or I’m forced to go to a web forum to harvest some nugget of information, I can either set Firefox by default not to load images or (more likely) Just hit the ESC key when I arrive at the page. The ESC key freezes every animated gif on the page, and that functionality is already built in to Firefox at the factory, no plug-ins needed.

If I’m somehow caught on Myspace, or other extremely poorly formated unreadable page, using the Bookmarklet “Zap Stylesheets” will at least usually make the page readable again.

All theses tricks allow me to speed read, seek and find information faster, and save me bunches of time by not dealing with distractions. If the whole web was a series of awful flash pages, I’d probably go back to a strict hardcopy only policy. Once you start to tune out the web crud, you’ll never go back.

OK, so here you go:

(Click on the picture for higher-rez picture (167 KB), as a pop-up if you allow javascript)

So here’s what I did. I took a standard dollar bill that I legally possessed and did some stuff to it. I took a Sharpie? marker and XX-ed out “federal reserve”, and wrote in “NOT FEDERAL NO RESERVES”. Then I added “WORTH ABOUT 18?” and “IN 1968 MONEY” (that year being the year we went off the gold standard.)

Although I don’t intend to confuse anyone in to thinking this is a virgin dollar bill, I failed to remove or obfuscate ?The United States of America?, I hope that’s not a problem. I think I’ve really added something here, and I’m thinking of selling this piece on Ebay for say $1.50 or so.

I also want to let everyone know that I find Sharpie? markers useful for all kinds of stuff, including enhancing the playback quality of purchased prerecorded music.

I also want to make it clear that I, in no way, shape or form, want to cause any harm to the MD-34 bridge over the Potomac (that being the last piece of infrastructure I think I took a photo of.)

So what do you think? Is this art, or is this terrorism? Or do only the Attorney Jackasses get to decide that?

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you should probably read this over at SayUncle’s and this here in my own blog.

(Whew, three posts for this day! I’m gonna take the rest of the week off)

Rather, to go with the earlier post, this is a list of the part of my feed list where the feeds are full text, and comments are allowed, and it’s not too much of a pain in the ass to post a comment. I also prefer places that don’t hold every single comment until it’s blessed by the pope. I find crap like that tends to choke the discussion. Anyway, here you go, with the feeds in plain text:

Standard Mischief

http://standardmischief.com/feed/

Of course I keep tabs on my own feed. How else do I tell if something is broke?

SayUncle

http://www.saysuncle.com/feed/

I probably pump more content into the comments here than in my own blog.

View From The Porch

http://booksbikesboomsticks.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Usually something good and/or funny daily

Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey

http://jacquelinepassey.blogs.com/blog/atom.xml

There use to be considerable libertarian chatter here, but recently has tended to be more personal and gambling related. Some SpecFic chatter. Recently she has been voted ?most stuck-up bitch in teh blogsphere?. The people who hate her and just have to tell her that are even more amusing. Much more entertaining than non-Libertarian non-Girl.

The Countertop Chronicles

http://countertop-chronicles.blogspot.com/atom.xml

I stuck him here near JMPP just because.

Ravenwood’s Universe

http://www.ravnwood.com/index_20.rdf

Not as prolific as he once was, when he blogs, it’s good.

ladyada’s ranting

http://www.ladyada.net/rant/?feed=atom

If you can’t tell by now, I have a thing for women who can drive a stickshift, shoot straight, speak the truth, have their financial shit together, or own there own handtools.

In this case, among other things, she knows what end of a soldering iron to hold. Not a lot of blog here.

the IDIOT

http://www.saltypig.com/blog/atom.xml

The potty-mouthed poster child for the armed and polite libertopian society we all want. He was actually my first commenter and didn’t really like my ?mutant-libertarian? leanings.

Hmmm, was it something I said or is this another quirk of Blogspot? I notice the Blogspot blogs most of all flip-flop their feeds. Anyway the damn feed is broke now.

sheer potentiality

http://philwelch.net/atom.xml

Phil pumps a lot of insightful comments into JMPP, not so much here. Infrequent blogger, but when he does post it’s about half insightful, and about half personal.

The Gun Blogs – Online community for gun bloggers

http://www.thegunblogs.com/node/feed

SU’s place for everyone who wants to try their own gun blogging, for free.

Dr. StrangeGun, or how I learned to love the odd…

http://drstrangegun.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Not a lot of content, but insightful.

Tinotopia

http://www.tinotopia.com/fulltext.xml

Not a lot of people blogroll him, which is surprising. “Knee-jerk” libertarian, but he doesn’t exactly splash that all over his banner. He’s had an online presence for forever, so Tino probably already got there firstest with the mostest. Cranky consumer.

Curiouser and Curiouser

http://www.memestreams.net/users/acidus/?type=rss

Whitehat Hacker. Memestreams feeds are annoying because whenever another memstreamer comments on the original post, the feed is updated like it’s a fresh post in my feed aggravator.

Fish Or Man

http://fishorman.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Insightful commenter from SU’s blog. Not a lot of content.

Lean Left

http://leanleft.com/feed/

My attempt at “balance”. So far it’s pretty good.

the munchkin wrangler.

http://munchkinwrangler.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Not a lot of content, but when this breeder isn’t talking about his kid, it’s always good.

McAdamSandwich’s Quest For Knowledge

http://mcadamsandwich.blogspot.com/atom.xml

not a lot of content, but it’s usually funny or interesting.

PawPaw’s House

http://pawpawshouse.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Ex-tanker, LEO, Republican. We don’t always see eye to eye but he’s always worth reading. He has a buddy named Junior, who has a good website or two but needs to blog by himself.

TriggerFinger

http://triggerfinger.org/weblog/servlet/export/rss

Another commenter from SU. Good stuff.

Penn

http://penn.typepad.com/penn/rss.xml

Leah Penn, an interesting commenter from JMPP. The blog is 25% insightful, 75% used as a personal file cabinet. Fairly regular blogger.

Since we are talking about revising laws…

…What happens when “We the People” take a stab at it?

I mean, it can’t get any worst then our crummy Rep-o-crats and the damn Dem-o-publcans, can it?

Wikocracy is a experiment in free-for-all law revisions. Everything is up for grabs here, laws, regulations, judgments, legislation from the bench, from the executive branch, or from congress. Even the very mother documents that birthed this great county are up for revisions. Nothing is sacred.

This is a test…

To see what happens when everyone can write and revise the law. It may sound like a free-for-all. But that’s exactly the point– to make the process of law-making free for all.

On this platform, you can freely edit the USA PATRIOT Act, The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, your State’s law on gay marriage, your city’s zoning ordinances. If you’d like to change a law that is not yet on this platform, you can easily create a page and import the text you want to change. You can also write your own laws, post blogs, collaborate and spar with other users. Check out our FAQ if you have specific questions.

Although there are some suggested guidelines and tips that will facilitate this experiment, there are no rules. Nothing on this platform is legally binding. One person’s changes can be revised or reversed by the next. Over time, this platform could reflect a collaborative statement of what we think the law should be. Or it could reflect a moment-by-moment statement of the most recent editor’s views. This will be as bloody or as civil as you make it…

This is only a test.

I predict this will get ugly real fast. Might be fun to watch though.

(Thanks Claire)

For March 31, the “Button Guy” over at http://www.biggiantbutton.com/ (which is a big flash app which every day links to a new site) linked to my blog buddy, Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey. To tell you the truth, I think the idea is pretty silly, and I said so over there, but he has done something cool to earn himself a linkback. What follows is some basic standard *nix mischief.

I grabbed the flash file off his server using cURL and saved myself a copy:


standardmischief $ curl http://www.biggiantbutton.com/button.swf -o button.swf

Then I used a program called flasm to peek inside it:

standardmischief $ flasm -d button.swf|less

That should give you an idea of what’s inside that little app. I think it looks on your local system for the day of the month and then sends you somewhere based on a table inside the app. You can see it if you do something like this:

standardmischief $ flasm -d button.swf|grep -o 'http:[-a-zA-Z0-9/\._]*'|head -n31

Did you follow that? Good, OK, then I got this obvious “sock puppet” comment here:

?Hey there, stumbled onto your blog via the blog linked from the Big Giant Button today.

…?

Umm, OK, Hi Jay Button Guy. You do know that nowhere in the world is it April 1st yet, so that big button should not have sent you here yet unless your clock is off.

Suspecting a joke, I grabbed his flash file again, naming it differently this time:

standardmischief $ curl http://www.biggiantbutton.com/button.swf -o button2.swf

This is where he earned the linkback. Using the flasm line above, I got the same output as before, but the original files are different:

standardmischief $ md5sum button.swf
23fbd93380ce9dcd7ce7455abe605842 button.swf

standardmischief $ md5sum button2.swf
fbb59a2e1792dd06cd3940cf0b7d07f6 button2.swf

There’s an extra 220 bytes too:

standardmischief $ la button*
-rw-r--r-- 1 standard mischief 35348 2006-03-31 20:10 button2.swf
-rw-r--r-- 1 standard mischief 35128 2006-03-31 10:02 button.swf

So I assumed that he spoofed my regex expression [-a-zA-Z0-9/\._]* with something like this:

http://www.joecartoon.com@standardmischief.com

Which should send you back here. But that does not seem to be the case. I’m also not 100% sure that he really did link to me, or that is further is part of the joke.

Really gives that old gray matter a workout.

Because the decompiler output matches exactly (except for the filename):

standardmischief $ flasm -d button.swf> button.txt
standardmischief $ flasm -d button2.swf> button2.txt
standardmischief $ diff button.txt button2.txt
1c1
< movie 'button.swf' compressed // flash 7, total frames: 1, frame rate: 12 fps, 550x400 px
---
> movie 'button2.swf' compressed // flash 7, total frames: 1, frame rate: 12 fps, 550x400 px

I’m guessing that he threw in some kind of junk that breaks the Flash standard, but that’s just a Wild Ass Guess right now. Updates, if any, to follow.

Update: Sorry about the crappy whitespace around the code examples. I can’t figure out the style sheet right now to fix it. Bash can ignore extra whitespace, I hope you can too.

Update: What a letdown! See the comments.