Internet

Take That, Wingnuttia! And You Too, Sensible Liberals!

creative direct action, Funny, Internet
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Is there a blog you hate so much you’d like to nuke it from orbit or have a cow shit all over it? Then you’re in luck.

Every couple of months, when I’ve had my fill of pissing cats, noisy neighbours and depressing Dutch grocery stores, and the urge for a a little injection of cultcha is pressing, I head to Crooked Timber. This occasional visit is just enough to feed my neurotic craving to feel I’m in with the big and clever bloggers just because I actually get the occasional academic in-joke and having done that, I then don’t feel the need to go there for months, having fully assuaged my need to feel self-congratulatorily and smugly intellectual for a while.

But today instead of propping up my intellectual vanity, CT (see how hip I am?) is encouraging my childish desire to throw mud at other bloggers, with this very nifty online toy:

Net Disaster allows you to indulge your worst fantasies of blog conflagration, to dispense vomit from a great height on a website you hate – or more simply, to annihilate with the Hand of God, an appropriate fate for most online fundiewindbaggery.

Simply enter your URL of choice, pick your method of disposal, point, click and KERSPLAT! Or KAPOW!, depending on the mode of destruction chosen. No-one gets hurt, except on your screen and in your head, and best of all no damage is caused and no one can sue (though I wouldn’t put it past certain wingnuts to ponder lawsuits for intentional distress and emotional suffering).

Next time you feel the need to piss on Powerline, flood Fox News or set wasps on the WaPo and the White House feel free – but don’t be surprised if you if you get caught in return fire or even a friendly fire incident.

Oops! FDL got acid-peed on. How very clumsy of me. Hmm, who’s next, I wonder…

“What Did You Do In The Information War, Daddy?”

Activism, Internet, Manufacturing consent, Pointlesss centrism, Sensible Liberals
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The notion of free speech may not last very much longer if the US Department of Homeland Security succeeds in its ongoing attempt to steal the whole bloody internet:

DHS Wants Master Key for DNS
Posted by Zonk on Saturday March 31, @01:33PM
from the they-own-all-the-locks-and-doors dept.

An anonymous reader writes

“At an ICANN meeting in Lisbon, the US Department of Homeland Security made it clear that it has requested the master key for the DNS root zone. The key will play an important role in the new DNSSec security extension, because it will make spoofing IP-addresses impossible. By forcing the IANA to hand out a copy of the master key, the US government will be the only institution that is able to spoof IP addresses and be able to break into computers connected to the Internet without much effort. There’s a further complication, of course, because even ‘if the IANA retains the key … the US government still reserves the right to oversee ICANN/IANA. If the keys are then handed over to ICANN/IANA, there would be even less of an incentive [for the U.S.] to give up this role as a monitor. As a result, the DHS’s demands will probably only heat up the debate about US dominance of the control of Internet resources.'”

This is not just about paranoid American security bods trying to control their own national corner of the internet: this is about the blatant theft by Bushco, dressed up in its spiffy Homeland Security costume, of the DNS root servers, the basic infrastructure of the whole world-wide web.

The root DNS servers are essential to the function of the Internet, as so many protocols use DNS, either directly or indirectly. They are potential points of failure for the entire Internet. For this reason, there are 13 named root servers worldwide. There are no more root servers because a single DNS reply can only be 512 bytes long; while it is possible to fit 15 root servers in a datagram of this size, the variable size of DNS packets makes it prudent to only have 13 root servers.

They are housed in multiple sites with high bandwidth access, to try to prevent attacks such as distributed denial-of-service attacks. Most of these single-site installations are still in the United States. Usually each DNS server in a given site is actually a cluster of servers behind a load-balancing set of routers.

However, a number of root servers lie outside the United States:

i.root-servers.net is in Stockholm and many other locations using anycast

k.root-servers.net has globally visible nodes in Amsterdam, London, Miami, Delhi and Tokyo

m.root-servers.net is in Tokyo, Paris and Seoul using anycast

The modern trend is to use anycast to give resilience and to balance load across a wide geographic area. For example, j.root-servers.net, f.root-servers.net and k.root-servers.net are served using anycast from a number of sites worldwide. The use of anycast
has allowed the growth of non-U.S. root DNS servers until most DNS root instances are outside the U.S.

Details of all the root servers can be seen at the root-servers.org website.

[My emphasis]

This isn’t just about market dominance. This is about invasion, colonialism and the pursuit of imperialist aims by other means. The theatre of war just happens to be virtual. The US government, or any other individual governmment for that matter, has no right to claim control over resources it does not own and which are not located on its territory. But it’s doing it anyway… eminent domain apparently works online too.

But where is the chorus of protest from the geeks?

From what I can see the majority of American IT professionals, with notable exceptions, have been remarkably quiet so far on political matters except for their ad infinitum online arguments about some spurious utopian future with libertarian transhumanisam, polyamory and rocky road ice-cream for all. The doors of their comfy padded cages are slamming shut and they don’t hear a thing. Their freedom (and ours) is being stolen from under their noses.

But hey, look, shiny new gadgets! Oooh, iPhone!

Geeky types like to think of themselves as rebels, outside the mainstream and cleverer than the rest of us lesser mortals. So why are they being so bloody supine while Bushco steals the web?

I have a question for any IT professionals reading this: dammit, people, you are the ones that control and support the IT infrastructure, you could stop this if you wanted to. You could put the skids under the entire Bushco venture if you had a mind.

But do you actually want to ? Homeland Security pays well…

So this is my question – do you really give a damn about freedom or are you just happy to be the future well-paid technocrats of the New Fascism? C’mon geeks, get up off your asses and fight for once, us non-geeks are relying on you.

A “balanced” survey

Blogs, Internet, Manufacturing consent, Media, Meta, US politics
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From Kos, found via Steve Gilliard:

Of course, there never were any Dean bloggers paid to act as spokespeople for the campaign. Yet this survey is perpetuating the lie that we were. And on a survey distributed amongst other journalists, no less. Several reporters who got this instantly recognized who the questioned refered to and passed it on to me.

Jerome Armstrong and I asked Ross to correct the question and issue a retraction, and Ross has refused. It’s telling that every single reporter we’ve had to contact to correct the record has done so immediately, and with full apologies. Professor Ross, mister blog ethicists himself, is the first to refuse. That’s the first irony. The second is that it was his college — the Columbia Journalism Review’s Campaign Desk, that gave me and Jerome the first mainstream defense in response to the WSJ hit piece. They awarded it the first ever Lipstick on a Pig” award for spectacular hackery.

But really, it’s telling that while most working journalists have been more than willing to correct the record, it’s the campus ethicists that run most afoul of those ethics they claim to uphold.

Update: Oh, and I forgot to mention. Why did Ross call us out? From an email to me:

I had a bunch of examples that seemed anti-business and anti-Republican so I wanted something different.
So the GOP and WSJ efforts to find moral equivalency on the Left to the Armstrong Williams and other such scandals worked. That’s why Jerome and I fought the original WSJ story so hard. Once it’s in print, it’s impossible to kill. It’s like playing whack-a-mole.

Fact is, the examples of unethical behavior are all on the Right, and so he threw us into his little survey for “balance”, even if such balance doesn’t come close to existing.

This is the best example I’ve seen so far of how this need for “balance” leads journalists astray. Because it’s somehow become unfair to single out one side, even if this is no more than the simple truth, they make shit up. If Ann Coulter is a rabid nutcase, Michael Moore has to become one to. Bush is a coward? Then clearly we need to mention the allegations against Kerry, true or not.