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Calif. pledges better mobile privacy disclosures Boston.com By Michael Liedtke AP Technology Writer / February 23, 2012 SAN FRANCISCO—California is clamping down on nosy mobile applications, telling them they must give people advance warning if they want to keep pulling sensitive information

California is now making a big deal on how much info apps running on your smartphone are able to pull about you before giving you some sort of warning.

I wonder if they intend to make other agencies of government … especially the federal government, warn you before you start texting, or talking, or watching that risque video on your phone, that they are monitoring and recording and will be filing everything you are about to do.

If the CHP or other state or city police agencies there are using the same scanner type gadgets as they do in Michigan to swipe ALL the info on your smartphone even for a routine traffic stop, what kind of warning are they going to give you?

Apps, facts, information rape. What the Hell’s the difference no matter who is doing it? We’re still allowing them to DO IT!!!

Well at least not many … and by the time the rest of us would find out about it, it would be too late.

There was a digital war a few years ago … did you know? It was over a digital worm the geeks code named  “Conficker”. If you want to know more about it you can surf over to Wikipedia and search for conficker and also click on the link below.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/feb/19/war-cyber-worm-attack-internet

If you choose not to read all about how the innards of this computer worm worked, then i will give you the gist of it here.

It was first detected in late 2008. Researchers first seen it in what is known as the honeypot and were amazed at how fast it could infect networks and keep spreading. They had never seen anything like this before. Because of the engineering prowess of its creators it stealthy crept into windows based computers through an unlocked port and then locked the port behind it and began fully taking control of a computer in a manner undetectable by anti malware and other security programs. The programmers were building remote controlled bot networks with this worm and added new domains and new computers to their network at an alarming rate.

There was little that could be done about the worm initially as it gobbled up more and more networks and computers and became a world wide web (WWW) menace. Millions and millions of computers became infected and then sat like zombies awaiting a command from whomever the controller was to launch perhaps a dos (denial of service) attack on whatever target it chose.

Eventually the researchers were able to figure out more or less how the worm worked and then patches were created to fix holes in operating systems and eventually malware programs were able to detect it and wipe it off systems.

Before that happened however this worm almost created a global web melt down and infected just about everything including military systems and even the computers on submarines. It was able to infect networks partially due to the carelessness of computer users and their willy nilly downloading of programs and the moving of infected programs between computers via portable media like thumb drives etc.

It is thought the recent Stuxnet worm introduced by still unknown parties into the isolated computer systems used by Iran to control their uranium enrichment process was done in this fashion. By the way, that Stuxnet worm has now likely been reversed engineered and improved upon and is another conficker type problem that will eventually have to be dealt with … this time, by us.

So what’s the situation today after they’ve deemed to have brought the Conflicker worm under control … or at least as much of control as is likely.

Microsoft estimates that about 1.7 million computers worldwide are still likely to be infected with it because patches have not been applied to the software.

They still are not too sure who invented this thing, where it originated from, or exactly what was its purpose? It is thought to have originated in the Ukraine because of the pattern of the distribution and where it was hosted.

One of the most confusing things the researchers encountered when the worm was first detected and they notified various agencies within the U.S. government about it was the lack of involvement by these agencies in trying to deal with the problem. The feds monitored the situation but other than that offered little technical assistance.

Make no mistake about it …. it was private grey matter and not government group think that brought what control there was to the situation. As time went on the researchers doing the heavy lifting concluded there was no help from the feds because they realized they were in over their heads on this one … so just stood back and watched. Isn’t that a comforting thought? Where’s the security they are always talking about?

Since 2008 a lot has been learned about worms and malware and their engineering, but this well designed and ever evolving worm is still out there and has not been eliminated. How many even more efficient and better designed worms are waiting in the wings or perhaps have already been deployed but are as yet undetected?

The potential damage these things can do to a technically advanced society is unbelievable. Think about it. In a true cyber war electricity and water can be shut off, communications and transportation systems shut down, and practically all commerce brought to a halt … without firing a shot, and with little physical damage to the infrastructure that has been disabled remotely.

That is probable in an encounter with future enemies. It’s the great counterweight to military dominance. It’s the electronic equivalent of sending in a small team of commandos to take out top government leaders and create decision making havoc causing things to grind to a halt. Even more important is it also affects the whole population of a country by shutting off the infrastructure they depend on and quickly turning them against their own government whom have also been paralyzed.

Is that why we see the militarization of police forces, the expansion of military rule over the domestic population, and the threat of military action against foreign governments by the U.S. if they use cyber war tactics against us?

There’s an old Boy Scout motto that says “be prepared”. If this scenario seems scary to you … then just try imagining if it actually did happen and YOU weren’t prepared, then who in Hell else will be there to help you, because the government will only be there to control the rioting, with bullets if necessary.

I happened to look at the Matt Cutts blog today and read some comments he made about a month ago relating to the then pending SOPA legislation that was aimed supposedly at reining in Internet Piracy on copyrighted material … but at the expense of free speech, which is one of the things once considered important in the constitution.

Cutts on his blog really wanted people to get off their hands and write and hound their senators into denouncing such a blatant power grab by a well connected selected few. The furor over the legislation made enough waves in Washington, especially from the tech community and big Internet players, that the pols slithered back under the rocks where they hide when things get too hot  to ponder their next move.

Since that time the bill has been re-introduced as some sort of cyber security scheme to see if it can gain better traction than the SOPA thing did. Obviously they will try to finesse this one by lying, and stealthy sneak it through hidden in a ton of other legislation when they think people aren’t looking.

The intent of the bill seems to be to use the copyright issue as a means of shutting down free speech on the net and to gain the ability of eliminating just about any site that the government doesn’t like. There has been a rash of legislation and regulations passed since 911 in the name of security where government has attacked people’s rights to privacy and liberty in a way never considered possible before they used 911 to scare everybody.

I keep a book of quotations and have found a few priceless quotes there that bear repeating so we can focus on the dangers of what has happened in the past when governments feel they have outgrown the limits placed on them by the constitution and the power ordinary citizens can exercise over them.

- “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote.” Ben Franklin

- Doug Casey commenting on the chances of the U.S. returning to a limited form of Republican government as set out by the founders of the Republic. “It’s too late in the game to solve the problem … but it’s still too early to line the bastards up and shoot them.”

- “Unlimited democracy is nothing more than mob rule, dressed up with lawyers”. Porter Stansberry

- “As long as my neighbors can vote themselves my wallet (via sharply progressive taxes), so long as the government is allowed to create unlimited deficits (unauthorized taxes on future generations), and as long as the government controls the supply of the only legal tender, there will be no liberty in America.” Porter Stansberry

- “People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.” Eric Hoffer

- “Let the managers manage. Let the workers work. Let the capitalists grub for money, and let the politicians lie and steal. Each to his own metier (profession or trade).” Bill Bonner

There has been a lot of news reports lately over the crack down Iran has implemented that reduces/controls people’s access to the Internet there just prior to up coming elections.

The comments about this event are of the tsk tsk variety and ain’t that a shame. What’s the Iranian government really afraid of they ask? Can’t back up their own propaganda others say.

Hey. Look around people. Iran is just copying what the U.S. and other so called western countries are doing to remove all aspects of privacy from citizens lives. They are being a bit more ham fisted about it perhaps than those of us more technologically advanced, but the results are the same.

Information has always represented power, and those in power want to keep in control of that power. The Internet is today’s greatest threat to that power and it must either come under government control by them knowing all that goes on there, or its access must be removed or limited sufficiently so that populations can still be controlled by governments that sometimes the majority actually elect.

In the U.S.,  technology backed by an army of federal agencies monitors what is said, done, and viewed on the net by its netizens. In Iran and other countries with less sophisticated electronic snooping, they just cut off access.

The Egypt spring event of last year was the latest lesson for “authorities” to observe about how frightening ordinary people power could be when organized around the net. The riots in London were another example. Police actually tried to get certain cell towers shut down.

Remember way way back in the Clinton administration when it took an Internet reporter by the name of Matt Drudge to blow the lid off how a young intern working in the Whitehouse by the name of Monica Lewinsky was getting knee burns in the president’s office … and it wasn’t from scrubbing the floor. Where was the other media on this story? Nothing was said until after it appeared on Drudge’s web site. Would it have appeared at all if Drudge hadn’t exposed it? So much for democracy being protected by a free news media.

The Internet now has become about the biggest misfit that governments have to deal with. Their huge advertising budgets and regulatory control in media like newspapers, magazines, radio,  and TV can control the propaganda there ok to their advantage, but the Internet business model doesn’t allow for that,  and indeed individuals there can get their message out to mass audiences.

It’s routine now that police and other agencies sift through email messages, phone conversations, and look at Internet sites every hour of every day because awkward constitutional rules concerning privacy and other rights have either been driven through by new found loopholes, or are just simply ignored.

Don’t you know that’s what it takes to find child pornographers today on the Internet, and don’t you want us to stop that the government asks, and it would just take too much time if we had to get warrants every time to do all this, and besides who the hell is going to know if we had a warrant or not before we did the snoop thing?

Iran, Egypt, Syria, Russia, UK, China, Canada, …. they are are just doing what the U.S. taught them, so lets not point our collective finger and pretend.

The following excerpt from an article noted in quotation marks below appeared in the Canadian edition of the Huffington Post yesterday.

“Nothing clears a room like a fart — except, perhaps, a bomb scare.

Harold Wayne Hadley, Jr., 19, was arrested at a Mississippi junior college after he allegedly wrote a note on a piece of toilet paper on Tuesday, containing the word ‘bomb,’ according to Weirdnews.net.

The note prompted 11 emergency agencies to respond to the school, but there was no bomb.

Hadley and his family contend that he was only explaining the joy of flatulating in the library.

“He was in the restroom doodling on some toilet paper … we are from the country, and he calls passing gas, bombs,” said Hadley’s aunt, who wouldn’t give her name to WDAM. “[He] put ‘I passed a bomb in the library,’ talking about passing gas, and somebody came in and found it, gave it to a teacher that recognized his hand writing and it blew all out of proportion.”

Investigators wouldn’t say exactly what Hadley wrote, but WDAM reports that it was no more explicit than “I passed a bomb in the library.”

Hadley was arrested and held on $20,000 bail. If convicted of threatening to blow up the school, he faces 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine, according to WAPT. His aunt says he earned straight A’s at Jones County Junior College and was scheduled to graduate in May.”

Slang language abounds in the English script but today it can quickly get you into big trouble because of the paranoia and fear being bred into every day living. This is not the first incident like this. Last week an email was intercepted by “authorities” where the phrase “blow away” and the word New York was used in the same sentence. It took a while to sort out but it was just a team leader trying to pep talk his sales team to blow away the competition at a New York sales meeting. Just one more reason to start encrypting your emails with PGP or whatever because all this snooping going on by agencies full of bozeoos like in the TSA is just going to be a big pain in the ass for everybody.

Taking things out of context today by over enthusiastic security types and their computerized robot scanners can cause a lot of people a lot of grief.  Remember the little thing we use to repeat about free speech. Where has common sense gone?

By all indication our farter friend never threatened to blow up anything. He was writing about a room clearing fart. Some snoopy kid picked up a piece of toilet paper that was scribbled on and even more miraculously a teacher connected the handwriting on the paper to a student. Why didn’t they just show it to the student and ask what it was all about?

If the teacher was sharp enough to know the  handwriting then presumably she was sharp enough to have  recognized the smell of a doozer of a  fart the kid was so proud of which had already preceded this event . Certainly other kids in the class would have.  This whole thing is crazy! 11 agencies respond to a kid’s fart. What’s wrong with this picture? Charging the kid is just a face saving measure on their part … and putting a kid in prison for 10 years is a lot of face saving. Will you feel safer with the kid in jail and the same security types running around the streets?

If you scribbled on a piece of toilet paper in your own  bathroom and some nosy house guest found it and reported you to the police would you be guilty of trying to blow up your house?

This is truly dangerous territory we are now treading where agencies such as Homeland Security and the IRS encourage citizens to spy on each other and even pay bribe money in some cases for them to do so.

We often wonder today how the German population fell under the rule of the Nazis. If you check your history you will find that these citizen spying gambits were the exact same tactics employed back in Germany. When is a burp a fart and when is a fart a bomb and since when can’t you say the word bomb in place of the word fart without being charged with something?

Maybe its time the people get their backs up and send a message to those that pretend to be watching out for our security that their over zealousness is over the top … and to just fart off.

I recently read an online article on Popular Science’s website where they drew up a list of the 100 hottest cars. There were quite a few comments about the list criticizing their choices.

This is my personal list of the top 10 hottest cars that i like or liked as a young car dude. I will qualify the selection process before i start by saying that with the exception of one, there are only North American built cars on the list because (a) that’s what I’m familiar with, know the most about, and ended up driving, and (b) for most people these are likely to be the best known, most affordable, and likely cars that Americans and Canadians were or are likely to purchase.

P.S. – Can’t forget about trucks since North Americans buy an awful lot of them. I will include my top three trucks as an add on to the top 10 car list.

I just loved going to the drags as a teen and more than once had to make up a story to the get family drag barge out of the garage on a Sunday afternoon for a covert trip to the drags. A friend of mine even went so far as to have a set of cut outs secretly installed on the family’s Chrysler 300 station wagon. It had a 413 in it and could that sucker ever go for a wagon … but i digress.

My top 10 in no particular order …

1 – 1969 Ford Mustang. I never owned one but the odd time when up against ones my friends owned. 351 Cleveland’s were the popular choice. Never tangled with a 428 though. In the movie Bullit with Steve McQueen the way the race ended with the charger really ticked me off. How many Mustangs have ever won Daytona?

2 – 1966 Ford Fairlane. One of my favorite parings at the drags was a 66 Fairlane 428 standard pitted against a 64 Plymouth Hemi with the old push button auto tranny. It was always a dog fight with often times parts flying about near the end of the quarter. About a 50/50 split between the two but always entertaining.

3 – 1971 Plymouth GTX. 440 with a standard 4 speed. I once owned one of these and it was a blast to drive. It was grey with a black vinyl top and i deliberately picked these colors so as not to be too noticeable by John Law. Didn’t work that way though.

4 – 1970 Pontiac GTO. Here comes the judge. Remember that bright orange color. The Olds 442 was similar but i liked the GTO better and darn near bought one. Now both of these makes are gone to that great scrap yard in auto heaven.

5 – 2011 Chevy Camaro. Wonderful looking car. Drop one of those 550hp monsters in there and you’ve got one hell of a tiger by the tail.

6 – 1972 Dodge Charger. I once owned a fully loaded charger with the 44o engine. It was smooth, fast, and stylish. A good combination that women found “hot” also.

7 – 1969 Jag XKE. Love the looks of that car, and it was suppose to top out at 160 mph. Never talked to anyone though to see if it could actually do it with the big inline 6.

8 – 1968 Dodge Super Bee. 383 auto. Perhaps my favorite because it was my first car. More bang for $3200 than you can imagine. Couldn’t quite hack it against the big 400 cube stuff in the quarter mile, but didn’t lack much for top end.

9 – Ford Torino 428 cobra jet. My friend had one and ripped the hell out of it with the four speed. It had nice lines and could go pretty good … for a Ford(-:

10 – 1969 Dodge RT. 440 in a bright reddish orange color like the Judge. This car was pure power and scary fast. Would load it up with Sunoco 260 blend which acted just like rocket fuel in it. I only kept it a year and the guy that bought it after me managed to kill himself with it.

Now for the HOT trucks …

- 2004 Dodge SRT 10. When this thing first came out with the 10 cylinder Viper engine pushing over 500 horses it was faster than most cars on the road. It is also in my opinion a very good looking truck. The wing thing at the back though they could do without.

- 2003 Ford SVT F-150 Lightning. When this iron hit the bricks it was documented as being the world’s fastest pick up with a top speed just under 150mph. No word what it would do in the quarter. Ford used an Eaton Huffer  to pump out the extra horses. Chrysler then countered a year later with the Viper engine. Would be interesting to see these two in a dual.

- 2011 GMC Denali. For just all round comfortable boogeying  with over 400 hundred horses under the hood it will keep you from getting stomped on by most other steeds out there with the exception of those noted above.

As a note of interest the hottest of all pickups that holds the present speed record established at Bonneville is a diesel powered Dodge Dakota nicknamed the Sidewinder and specially prepared by Banks Engineering. The official record is about 222mph! Although not a production model, it is streetable, and definitely not something to mess with.

There have now been at least two mini TV documentaries that I’m aware of describing the events before and after of how the ship ended up floundering on rocks at the doorstep of a small Mediterranean island.

There are several investigations still going on about how this happened and so we will have to wait to discover all the details but at this point one thing seems clear … that this was a stupid simple accident.

It appears about 32 people are still missing, but out of the 4000 or so that were on the ship it is a bloody miracle so many survived in spite of all the screw ups. We now know there were enough stupid things that happened that there is a mountain of stupidity to be shared by the ship’s owners, the ship’s captain and officers, and probably at least some of the ship’s passengers.

Lets follow the crumb trail according to the documentaries. It’s not exactly clear yet why, but the ship’s captain seems to have been determined to do the equivalent of a drive by with a 114,000 ton ship off the Italian island of Giglio. It’s not as important right now to know why he did it, as it is how he did it.

He apparently altered the ship’s course and headed towards the island at about 15 or 16 knots … which is seamanship for 18 or 19 miles per hour. At some point near the island it then became clear to the captain or some other officer that the ship was too close to shore and it tried to turn away. You don’t turn a 1000 foot ship or stop it on a dime. 100 years ago the Titantic had the same problem trying to avoid an iceberg, but after the collision it wasn’t as lucky as the Costa Concordia was to come to rest on top of a rock in shallow water only spitting distance from shore .

As the front of the ship veered away from shore, the stern of the ship was still too close and the port side of the ship impacted some rocks at high speed gouging about a 50 meter hole along the length of the hull. The huge mass of the ship and it’s high speed contact with the rocks was so great that boulders can be seen embedded in the smashed hull of the ship that’s now visible above the waterline.

The ship lost engine power after the collision and therefore the crew lost control of the ship at that point. The momentum of the ship carried  it forward into the turn it had already started to make and eventually swung it about a full 180 degrees where apparently through some fickle finger of fate miracle it came to rest on an underwater rocky ledge thus preventing it from fully sinking. There appears to be no seamanship involved with the ship grounding itself. It to seems to have simply happened by accident.

First question. What were the junior officers doing  prior to the crash? We know that there had to be at least one person on the bridge prior to the accident because the ship started to turn from shore. Whether the person actually steering the ship decided to turn on their own when they seen the problem or were given orders to do so by the captain or one of the officers we do not know … but more than one person is likely to be at fault here. There was a massive screw up when no one of authority recognized the problem before it was too late.

What kind of a screening system do the ship’s owners use when hiring a captain and a set of officers to manage a billion dollar cruise ship with 3000 passengers on board? On a airplane, there is a co-pilot for a reason. If something happens to the captain either physically or mentally another competent person is there monitoring the situation and is ready to take over.

If the captain was not on the bridge and was otherwise occupied as some stories suggest, then another officer should have been on the bridge. What were they doing? How many stupid people does it take to run a cruise ship?

After the crash, apparently no abandon ship order was given for about 40 minutes, whereupon the captain and at least some of his officers were the first to do so. Again, this doesn’t say much about the crew selection process conducted by the owners.

When the abandon ship order was finally given, the ship had a noticeable list to it by this time and was obviously going to sink. This should have been a logical conclusion most passengers would have reached long before the evacuate order was official. With the ship listing and obviously filling with water at this point why would any passenger return to their cabin (especially a lower cabin) even if it was to get their life jacket? Why did people have to return to their cabin in a ship this huge to get a life jacket?

What were the passengers doing during the 40 minutes after the crash? They had felt the ship shudder on the impact. The lights had gone out. The ship had stopped in the water and probably there was some other noises when it grounded. A noticeable list in the ship occurred. What in Hell did they think was going to happen? Wouldn’t you reach your own conclusions before some “official” told you the obvious?

Leonard Cohen wrote a song  over 20 years ago that explains what often happens at a time like this.

Everybody knows the ship was leaking

Everybody knows the captain lied ….

Human nature almost guarantees that leaders when they make a bad decision that results in a snafu have too big an ego to admit it and are in a state of shock and denial after it happens. The last thing they are going to do is admit it … so therefore they will lie about it. That’s to be expected, especially in the age we live today, and in this case the sheep instinct of many of the passengers was to wait around and be told what to do. Duh? We here. Land there. Ship sink. Get off the F***** ship!

Safety issues have been raised about this accident. The inability of getting life boats launched and even the number of life boats available. Can a passenger ship this size or larger be considered safe? The poor construction of the hull because the ship is more like a floating hotel than a ship, and money was poured into luxury items instead of safety items. A crew obviously suffering both from poor training and lack of character.

Yes the ship could always have been built better. Yes the crew was obviously deficient. There can always be improvements in the organization of things.

Safety did not cause this accident and better ship construction and design would not have prevented it. Take any ship this size no matter how well built and ram it into a rock at almost 20 mph and you’ll likely get the same result … or perhaps worst.

We now have an in our face wreck to look at for the next several months or perhaps even years as it is salvaged … and a constant daily reminder that man’s level of stupidity and the social conditioning he accepts unquestionably hasn’t changed much since the sinking of the Titantic almost exactly 100 years ago.

A few years ago a movie called The Bucket List with Jack Nicholson and  Morgan Freeman  made the rounds and gave a lot of people the idea of creating their own bucket list. For those of you that don’t recall the movie or didn’t see it, the idea was to list something like 30 things you want to do before you die, and then go do them before …  you kick the bucket.

People have been using variations of this probably for hundreds of years but the movie popularized the idea that one should try to perhaps organize the remainder of their life much like a grocery list so you don’t forget to do what you feel is important before it’s time for you go … to where ever you think you go when you leave this mortal coil.

No stats exist that i know of as to how many things people actually accomplish on their list before they have to go. Some things we can just never know. For instance if one thing on our list is to go to “heaven” or perhaps for the more adventuresome, “hell” there’s really no way of knowing is there, even if that’s the last item on the list?

An interesting twist on this bucket list theme has been introduced by an Australian palliative care nurse named Bronnie Ware. She has documented the things the dying regret the most not doing when they realize it is too late for them and the end is near. She has written a book about it called The Top Five Regrets Of The Dying.

It’s interesting to note what the top five regrets are because they are probably not what you think or would guess.

- I wish that I had let myself be happier. It seems that people don’t realize until near the end they could have let themselves be happier if they had wanted to. Change is hard to do, and for most sticking with the same old thing seemed more preferable than letting it all hang out. I suppose some may also have confused it with being responsible rather than spontaneous.

- I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. This was a sentiment expressed more by men than women. There are certain sacrifices made when work is put ahead of the family.

- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. Life tends to get in the way of a lot of things and when you are dying it is likely the most critical time when you wish your friends were there. Failing to cultivate such friendships and nourishing them has a price that has to be paid.

- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. By keeping quiet and not speaking out perhaps so as not to offend or cause a confrontation one has to suppress their feelings which by itself can lead to grief, frustration, and even health problems.

- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. This was the most regrettable of all the regrets. Not being able to fulfill one’s dreams because of the expectations of others. Most people said they had not fulfilled even half their dreams and it was because of the choices they had made … and now near the end their health was making the last choice for them.

Better look these over folks and see how many items you’ve yet to mark off on your bucket list.

The 28th of January is International Privacy Day and even though I’m a day or two behind the actual celebrity of the thing i thought it would be good to still comment on it … because with the way things are going, who knows how much longer there will be a privacy day to celebrate? Anywhere.

The world is getting connected together with the web and a bewildering array of techie equipment that goes with it.  The tech is great for convenience and communication purposes but it also is becoming a real b**ch to maintain any degree of privacy with it. Between the monitoring tools available and the digital data trails we leave behind, it doesn’t take too much imagination for one to peek and pry into what you do or say.

The technology is blurring the lines quite a bit between what the law says and what the law does. Lets face it … most users probably don’t realize how much they say and do online is being preserved in cheaper and cheaper data banks. Very soon EVERYTHING will be stored in these data farms and preserved for at least a number of years. Unless you really know the tech and what you can do to throw it off your trail, you just have to assume that everything you write, say, type, and look at online can be tracked right back to you as its source.

Gives you a real nice warm vibe doesn’t it when you have something to say or contribute and think you still can because we mouth these feel good platitudes about freedom of speech. Feeling threatened in some way because you speak out is not something most people feel comfortable with and so using another name to protect your identity  is a privacy issue. One of the tenets of a free and democratic society we were taught in school was that freedom of the press was essential to the survival of democracy.

Look around. Do you think the press is free today or that they can or will protect you as their secret information source if John Law and the courts lean on them? Reveal your source or we’ll toss you in jail reporters are told. Very few hold out any more and so with that situation, who’s going to let the press know anything important that in the past they might have blown the whistle on.

Anonymity is very frowned upon today. In spite of  it still being protected under the first amendment i think,  you are most likely  to be looked at suspiciously and as trying to hide something if found out. Writers and authors have used pen names for years for various reasons and managed to get their ideas published that way without accusatory suspicion  … but today for example Facebook will out you if they suspect you aren’t who you say.

Law enforcement offer witness protection programs for whole families sometimes …. and why? Because if the witnesses to some serious crime don’t feel protected they ain’t gonna testify and end up dead. That concept still seems valid today … especially to online users, because as most users will tell you, there are a lot of weird people out there.

It’s not that there have never been weird people. It’s just that the net tends to funnel them all into one place now and that makes it a more dangerous place for children, teens, and just about everybody. Protecting your privacy on the net by using a pseudonym is just as important as using a life preserver when on a boat. It’s just a sensible thing to do.

Professionals use tools in their line of work to protect themselves on line. Police and journalists don’t want to leave digital IP tracks behind when they are pretending to be someone else in a chat room or talking on Skype. Why should you give up your privacy and expose yourself to God knows what?

Keep your privacy. Keep your anonymity on line … and don’t feel a damn bit guilty about it. If any online service doesn’t like it and dumps you then so what, there are alternatives. It’s your life and you need to do whatever it takes to protect your privacy and that of the others around you.

Google the net for the TOR tool. Use it as a disruptive shield like the police and journalists do. It’s an effective free tool to keep the nasties out there from following your digital footprints home.

We talk about the good and bad in things … the yin and the yang. The pros and cons. What’s good for one might not be so good for the other. If someone is guilty but gets off because of some really good lawyering then that might be good for the bad guy but not so good for the other side.

The Global Brain i refer to is the Internet. Never has mankind had such an instant ability to access information, communicate with other individuals or the masses, and do so for very little money on a world wide basis. It has almost a God like presence in our small earthly world and is reminiscent of god like powers that the maker of the universe is gifted with … although granted it is only a tiny nano fragment of the universal mind.

The Internet is far from perfect and has both a good and a bad side, but in that regard is like most other things. Cars get into accidents and people die but pretty much everyone still wants a car. It represents a certain freedom that is part of the human condition and the net i think taps into that same yearning.

To the individual here on planet earth though the net represents a power unimaginable only a few years ago. Wear a gadget the size of a wrist watch and you are in touch instantly with most of the world’s humanity. The ability to exchange  ideas and to think about everything that’s going has a definite downside though often referred to as information overload.

This new found power of the individual also threatens those that traditional have held the kind of power that keeps the masses in check … and so to them the net is becoming a nightmare, and the question is how they can contain it, control it, and ultimately kill it if they have to.

So here we have this great new tool that is continually evolving and getting better … but both it and its users lack ultimate wisdom in its use, which may doom both it and us.

We need to understand the forces at work here and these are some quotes i found that may help us to understand what’s at stake.

No one is more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free – Goethe

Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn – Durant

Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest – Diderot

The road to Hell is the best paved road on the map – Bonner

That which is about to fall deserves to be pushed – Nietzsche

Democracy is the pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance – Mencken

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so – Proudhon

The central truth of economics is scarcity. There can never be enough of anything to satisfy everyone. The central truth of politics is patronage: promising to give everything to everyone. Paper money is the bridge between economics & politics.  – Stansberry

Freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same – Ronald Regan