“Romneyhood” and the Paul Ryan Medicare Plan…

I wrote this in the comment section of a local newspaper which had a not-so-subtle attack on Social Security and Medicare.

I expect it will be voted down or deleted by the Romulans, so I will paste it here too.

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George W. Bush’s two $2 trillion wars on the Chinese credit card and the annual $600-700 billion appropriated to the Pentagon’s “operating budget” which includes weapons systems they don’t even want is what is causing the deficit problems.

People who draw money from Social Security paid into Social Security.

People who are on Medicare paid FICA taxes.

Bush drew on Social Security’s surplus to fund the tax cuts for the 1% and spent Medicare’s surplus on the Medicare Part D program that was written by drug company lobbyists to make sure that Medicare has to pay full retail price for prescription drugs. (The Veteran’s Administration gets drugs for half the price that Medicare pays for them.)

Now we have the clown in the magic Mormon underwear and his sidekick that wants senior citizens to eat out of the dumpster who are promising to finish it off with their austerity programs.

The most horrific thing about that idiotic Paul Ryan plan to replace Medicare with a coupon so you can be gouged by health insurance profiteers with junk insurance plans that are worse than what a Walmart employee gets, is that the coupon is indexed for inflation, but healthcare costs typically rise at 2-3 times the rate of inflation.

Once you get out 4-5 years, the coupon will have long since lost any buying power it had when the system was implemented.

This is Sarah Palin style novice budgeting. Anyone who has a pen and a piece of paper can sit down and figure out how quickly that Paul Ryan’s Medicare-replacement coupon will be meaningless based purely on average inflation and average rise in cost of medical care.

For everyone else, the Romney/Ryan “Romneyhood” plan takes us back to the old system of “lose your job, lose your health insurance” and being kicked off when you get sick, and having them deny you for pre-existing conditions.

Under President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, there are cost caps in place to help people who are currently victimized by the insurance cartels, as well as rebates if they don’t spend enough on your medical care, punishments for employers who don’t offer any healthcare, no pre-existing conditions, and free preventive care and cancer screening with no co-pays, to name a few.

The prescription drug prices for seniors on Medicare has already gone down thanks to the PPACA, and it will continue to do so as the “donut hole” is plugged at the expense of the drug companies (not the tax payers).

The Wikipedia article has the facts about the PPACA, without the spin of Fox Noise and the scaremongering of the far right.

The truth is that the PPACA is a clone of the Republican health care reform proposal with ideas that originally were proposed by the Richard Nixon administration, and ultimately turned into Romneycare in Massachusetts. (and there are good ideas in there)

The big difference is that Mitt Romney signed the Romneycare plan into law with taxpayer funded abortions even though he could have used his line-item veto to strike them. The PPACA “Obamacare” doesn’t cover abortions in any circumstances. Mitt Romney’s law in Massachusetts is far more liberal than “Obamacare”.

Romney’s campaign manager, Andrea Saul accidentally endorsed “Obamacare” by way of endorsing “Romneycare” a couple of days ago.

The truth about Romney is that he’ll say or do anything to get into office. He has a huge amount of disrespect for the electorate, and he feels like he is “owed” the presidency.

Anyone who understands basic math could sit down and tell you that the Romneyhood healthcare plan that is co-sponsored by Paul Ryan is going to be bad for everyone. If it does save any money, they want to give it to the Pentagon!

Can anyone tell me how we are going to get rid of the problems facing us when the neoconservative Republicans ARE often the root cause of the problem?

http://www.gottavote.org - GET REGISTERED TO VOTE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act – The facts about “Obamacare”.

Compassionate Conservatism at work, $72 million for NASCAR while people sleep on park benches.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-07-18/u-dot-s-dot-house-gives-vote-of-support-to-military-sponsoring-nascar
As millions of Americans continue to be thrown out of their homes, go hungry, and sleep on park benches, the GOP-controlled House of Representatives approves $72 million dollars for military propaganda at NASCAR events.

Oh well, you fish where you catch them, right? It will probably be inserted as a rider on some unrelated bill and Obama will end up signing it. He seems to be like Bush in at least this regard. Neither one of them ever met a spending bill they didn’t like.

So how is that Tea Party thing working out for us? I’m sure they can go get that $72 million from Social Security or Medicare or something without “technically” raising the federal deficit.

Is Mitt Romney really going to be an outsourcer-in-chief? Plus, the Gary Snyder Show starts censoring my comments.

The Gary Snyder Show is a local political radio talk show here in northeast Indiana.

Like a lot of talk radio shows, they tend to have a “conservative” bend. They want to call President Obama anything that will stick, and they don’t want anyone mentioning foul language like “George W. Bush”.

Well, I called in yesterday to talk about Bain Capital and Mitt Romney, and I did get a little side tracked. I reminded people of what happened last time we had a majority Republican government, under George W. Bush. Namely, millions of jobs lost, the stock market crash of 2008, millions of people evicted from their homes and foreclosed on, only to be thrown out by their local sheriff.

I even pointed out that you could go on Google and search the White House Archives from 2002 where Bush was setting up the housing market to fail by declaring that he got Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to dedicate $500 billion in home loans to people who couldn’t even afford a down payment on a home.

Bush and his Republicans not only set us up with the subprime loan crisis, but then they also passed tax credit laws that effectively had the US federal government paying companies to export our jobs to countries like India, Mexico, and China. I mentioned on the radio that Bain Capital and Mitt Romney made a fortune in the outsourcing business, and while the big shitpile (I didn’t call it that on the radio, but I can call it that here) was busy falling apart, Bain Capital got millions of dollars in federal tax credits for the expenses they incurred while they were firing American workers and sending the jobs to other countries.

It was about that point where I got the bum’s rush off the line, and he took in other callers who seemed to either have no idea what is really going on, or have a financial incentive (because they are millionaires) in seeing Mitt Romney win the election so that their taxes get cut under Paul Ryan’s euphemistically-named austerity plan “The Path to Prosperity”, which, if Romney gets in, will likely pass, resulting in a huge new tax increase for the middle class and cuts of hundreds of millions of dollars from Social Security, food stamps, and the Medicare program.

The problem isn’t JUST Romney, Romney just personifies the problem very nicely.

The big problem  that causes blue collar manufacturing jobs to be lost all over the United States are these largely Republican-backed global free exploitation treaties. They are the reason that if we attempt to put “Buy American” provisions in our own laws, like Obama’s 2009 Stimulus Plan, then other countries will go after us for it in the World Trade Organization.

We should repeal and renegotiate a lot of these trade treaties, because that is what is enabling outsourcing.

With NAFTA, CAFTA, and the WTO, it becomes economical for American companies, like Bain Capital, to send jobs to China, where there are no worker protection, minimum wage, or environmental protection laws, then load up all the goods onto a cargo ship and burn diesel fuel to get it all back to the United States.

I don’t have a problem with international trade, except when it is being used as a smoke screen so they can simply go poison the water and the air somewhere else, and exploit workers somewhere else. This is what our trade agreements with most of the world are designed to do.

Our trade imbalance with China is mostly because it has become the great American pastime to go buy frivolous impulse crap we don’t need.

When you say that rich business criminals like Romney are partly responsible for the problem, that’s true.

It is also true that the people buying stuff they don’t need that was made under slave labor conditions in China are an even bigger part of the problem,

And remember, the entire world shares its water and air. Americans don’t “live in a bubble” where we are magically shielded from all the bad environmental policies that just happen to be implemented on our behalf.

When something goes into the air or water in China, it will end up here sooner or later. Right now, there are “garbage patches” swirling the oceans caused by all this garbage from China, PCB (Polychlorinated biphenyl, a carcinogenic) being released into the global water supply from China, TONS of carbon dioxide, and a smog cloud from China’s dirty coal that ends up causing smog in California.

Outsourcing is just a really clever way for rich business criminals to promote slavery and massive environmental destruction by moving the “jobs” around to whatever country lets them get away with it.

If you want to know what American companies are doing overseas, just remember what companies like Westinghouse did when they were making things here. Hint: A good portion of Indiana has a PCB pollution problem with no remedial action plan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_biphenyl#United_States

Look under “Indiana”…

It’s clear that corporations can never be trusted to do the ethical thing, because they are only concerned with maximizing profits no matter what the human cost is.

The responsibility falls on us to make sure our government is keeping them from wallowing in their own excesses, but that’s hard to do when they finance all of our elections to keep honest people who would do something about these problems out.

You can say that Barack Obama is hardly better than Mitt Romney, but he *is* better than Mitt Romney. With Romney in charge, we can look forward to a repeal of our environmental protection laws, devastating Republican austerity plans, and the loss of our remaining US-based manufacturing sector. Whether having our middle class quality of life slowly deteriorating under Obama or just going ahead and putting the gun to our head and pulling the trigger with Mitt Romney is a better choice. I’ll leave that to you, it is your vote after all…

Holy Conflict of Interest, Batman!

Well, that settles it. I’m not going to see the new batman movie.

Click here to tell serial MAFIAA whore, Senator Patrick Leahy, to quit being a dick.

You might remember Senator Leahy, he’s still trying to resurrect SOPA. He’s calling it IPAA now as a sort of policy laundering.

The IP Attache Act would use your tax dollars to try to change the copyright, trademark, and patent laws of other sovereign nations to favor the MPAA/RIAA scumbags here at home, and then eventually these laws would make it back to the US in the form of a treaty or “Congressional-Executive Agreement” later on.

The US government won’t stop trying to take over the internet. They don’t want you listening to people like me, they want you to go listen to fake news that they control. Cable TV news channels don’t mention things like SOPA, CISPA, and IPAA, and they lose credibility when they refuse to cover real news stories.

People are finding out just how badly Fox News, NBC, and CNN are lying to them and tuning out. This puts pressure on the US government to shut down sites like Wikipedia and WordPress, and to censor Google.

Back to the MAFIAA (MPAA/RIAA), you shouldn’t give these labels and movie studios any of your money. The more money you give them, the more money they can use to hurt other people and buy laws with.

I’m going to vote for President Obama this year, but I really wish he’d get rid of Joe Biden. It’s obvious why he chose Biden as his VP., because Biden is buddy/buddy with the big Hollywood criminals that want to ram internet censorship laws down our throats.

Obama already had more than enough support in Delaware, and they only have four electoral votes anyway. He could have picked a VP that would have shored up his support in states that were competitive. Evan Bayh from Indiana was on the list.

Obama only won Indiana by about 1% of the vote in 2008 (including mine), but he would have gotten more support here, and maybe even won the state again this year (which is now unlikely and could help cost him his re-election) with Evan Bayh as his VP.

He chose Biden because Biden can go pump campaign donations out of the MAFIAA. Unfortunately, that means they control the Obama administration. Things would not get better in this area under Romney, so I just have to deal with the “yuck” factor when voting for Obama/Biden.

Worth mentioning: That raid on MegaUpload’s file locker site? Joe Biden told them to do it.

Mental health problems and substance abuse are skyrocketing across the United States.

I saw a couple articles about this. Talk about telling you what you already know…

Health.com has compiled a list of the top 10 most depressing US states to live in. Indiana is pretty high up on that list, and so is Kentucky. There’s a real gem of a quote from Kentucky’s Governor about the problems in his state.

“When people don’t have good jobs to support families, I think that leads to depression and anxiety, which in turn leads to substance abuse,” Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear told the AP in 2008.

As usual, the state solution to the drug problem is throwing people with a drug addiction problem in prison. Really, since the “Ronald Raygun” administration, the United States has been entangled in a “drug war” whose costs get larger and larger every year, which hasn’t produced any decent results to speak of at all in reducing the number of illegal drug users (politicians tend to call them “offenders”, which I believe is going too far unless they commit an actual crime against person or property while under the influence).

Our nation is being bankrupted by a prohibition on things like Hemp (also known as Marijuana), which are basically harmless outside of the legal consequences of getting caught with some. In the 1930s, these anti-hemp laws came along because it was generally associated behavior of poor people and minorities. In modern times, these radically socially-destructive laws and the anti-hemp propaganda persist mostly because the drug companies don’t want a cheap and effective anti-depressant and painkiller to compete with. They want people who are effectively abusing their expensive prescription drugs with a wink and a nod from a drug dealer in a white coat. The US mental health system and the APA have been totally lobotomized and replaced by the drug industry. Psychiatrists are supposed to provide other therapies than drugs, but many of them (especially the ones that give services to the poor) simply don’t. If you’re poor, you get like five minutes with a psychiatrist that barely speaks any English and it’s literally like “here’s your drugs, now get out”.

And those five minutes will cost you something like $100, plus the cost of whatever drugs this person prescribed…. Even the people who are lucky enough to get on Medicare or Medicaid end up below the poverty line once you factor in the thousands of dollars a year in co-pays, spend downs, and other rip offs. It’s no wonder so many people turn to alcohol and illegal drugs, they’re cheaper.

Access to quality mental health services in Indiana is basically impossible in most areas. You end up with scumbags like the “Bowen Center”, and that’s about it. The psychiatrists in these places aren’t interested in helping people, they’d rather just add to the problem by insulting you, and basically making you feel like a big blubbering baby for asking them for help.

The United States doesn’t lead the world in anything desirable these days. Or as Jeff Daniels put it in the new HBO series “Newsroom”, “We’re seventh in literacy, second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, one hundred and seventy-eighth in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: Number of incarcerated citizens per capita,  number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies.”

Truth be told, we could bring those numbers up a lot of we expelled the non-competitive states from the union and replaced the government of the rest with some real liberals. I don’t foresee that happening.

I recommend RT America’s video that recently exposed the psychiatry industry in the US for what it really is. In this video, they expose the truth about what happens when you take antidepressant medication. You might lose your sex drive, get fat, and develop a dependency on the pills, but they don’t actually solve the depression. I myself have been dealing with bipolar disorder for many years now, and I can personally vouch for everything this video says. In a way, talking about the criminals who run this country and are trying to rip us all off and turn us into prescription drug addicts helps me deal with my mental disorder better than taking their stupid pills did.

I don’t recommend doing drugs, illegal or prescribed.

The consequences of drugs are always negative even if it’s only because of the laws that we have (the big pharmaceutical industry and the American Psychiatric Association do more *actual* harm than hemp ever has), but whether you do use them or not, you should familiarize yourself with police misconduct and a surveillance state that is shaking everyone down and treating everyone, law abiding citizens alike, as if they are criminals and guilty until proven innocent.

The ACLU has a TON of information on this subject, there are a series of videos on Youtube called “Flex your rights”, and former Texas police officer turned good guy Barry Cooper has a multi-DVD set titled “Never get busted again” and “Never get raided again” that I think everyone should watch. It should be the law.

Cooper goes over how to keep the police out of your home and other valuable information that everyone should know. You might not think you’re doing anything illegal, and you’re probably a good person. There are over 10,000 crimes defined by federal law alone! This is before we even begin to talk about state and local laws. You can get effectively get busted and thrown in jail in this country for farting wrong. This is not a joke. This goes double for states with private prisons, where it is not uncommon for judges to be paid cash bribes to convict as many people as possible for anything possible and throw the book at them in the sentencing phase, and for politicians to take bribe money in exchange for things like mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

I don’t have a criminal record, not even a parking ticket, but at least one in every three Americans by my age has been arrested for something at some point. The legal system is getting corrupted and totally out of control, and it would do everyone a lot of good to be smart about police encounters, before it is too late.

I’ve ended up telling cops that they could search my car before, because I didn’t have anything illegal in it. I got profiled because that’s what the police do. About ten years ago, the police in Brownsburg, Indiana had absolutely nothing better to do with their day than pull over a car with three teenagers in it. That was my car. One of the occupants of the car was a friend of mine and the other was a friend of his that wanted a ride to Marion and said he’d pay me to drive him up there. I thought that would be a great way to make some extra money, but on the way out of this guy’s house I noticed that he had packed his bong and a large bag of hemp(!), luckily I was smart and told him to get that shit out of his suitcase and I checked to make sure he didn’t have anything else before he got in my car.

On my way out of town, three cop cars lit up and turned their sirens on, pulling me over for going 32 miles per hour in a 30 mile per hour zone. They made us all get out of the car, patted all of us down (it’s called a terry frisk, and yes it’s legal, and all they have to do to start yanking things out of your pockets is claim they thought they felt a weapon while they were doing this), asked to search my car… I told them OK, since I was sure nobody had anything illegal.

They ended up giving me a warning for speeding (bogus, just an excuse to pull us over) and letting us all go. It turned out, they had been watching this guy, and they saw him in my car. If they found his hemp in my car, Indiana law would have said that hemp belonged to me, and there was easily enough on him before we left the house that I would have been charged with a felony and sentenced to a minimum of five years in state prison. That’s a little steep for offering someone a ride for $50, isn’t it? I think it is.

Consider my story a warning. The police aren’t interested in arresting criminals, they’re interested in arresting anyone they think that they can make charges stick to, whether the person committed any wrongdoing or not. And sometimes, the people you associate with can get you into trouble because of the choices they made for their life.

Of course none of this is fair. You don’t have the luxury of assuming that life will be fair. Criminals own this country, they bought and paid for it a long time ago.

That’s just how the system is, folks. Being angry about it doesn’t directly help you. We know that the politicians are corrupt and that the police tend to be violent, racist, homophobic, and brutal. You need to expect that. You hear about it all the time, and it’s true.

If you’re ready for them, they can’t ambush you. Now, anger at bad governance can be useful… It leads to protest, civil disobedience, and in the long term, things might change. Until then, you have to play with the deck you’ve been dealt.

Indiana refuses to bring a criminal to justice because of the gas prices to go get her (or something)

TL:DR | A child’s grandmother stole $97,000 from his college trust, and went and gambled it away in some casinos. The Lake County, Indiana prosecutor’s office refuses to go get her, even though they know where she is, because it would cost them some money to extradite her from Louisiana.

Full story here.

I’m sure that if she had robbed $97,000 from some of the bankster criminals, they would have went after her anywhere on Earth, but since her victim wasn’t rich, they don’t give a shit. If you don’t commit a crime against the rich, Indiana apparently will only bother to enforce its arrest warrants one state away in any direction.

Here’s the Lake County Prosecutor’s website if anyone wants to tell this bastard what they think.

Also, the victim of this crime which Lake County Prosecutor Bernard Carter refuses to do anything for has resorted to taking up a collection to pay the costs of sending some Indiana police officers to go arrest this woman.

What Bernard Carter is doing is against the Indiana Constitution, Article I, Section 12.

 All courts shall be open; and every person, for injury done to him in his person, property, or reputation, shall have remedy by due course of law. Justice shall be administered freely, and without purchase; completely, and without denial; speedily, and without delay.

Voters in Lake County should oust Bernard Carter for his unconstitutional behavior.

Vista 8: Now with 500% more Microsoft spyware.

With Vista 8 it’s all about SUCKERS, SUCKERS, SUCKERS!!!!

For kicks, I loaded up the Windows 8 “Consumer Preview” in VirtualBox.

I was expecting the usual. More crap that nobody asked for. More anti-competitive Microsoft tie-ins. More lock-in with Microsoft services. More EULA mess. More spyware. I found pretty much all of this.

The setup process was much like Windows 7 up to a point, except there are now three entire pages full of toggle switches where the user must agree to sacrifice their privacy to use Windows 8 fully, in addition to a EULA written in legalese that goes on forever, which nobody who isn’t a lawyer will fully understand. If they don’t, then there will be huge swaths of missing features. (And since it is proprietary software, you absolutely cannot trust anything it says or does, so the choice is misleading anyway.)

As Dr. Richard Stallman has said, Windows is malicious software. Their privacy policies open up the user to all kinds of abuse for simply agreeing with the EULAs (which are mandatory if you wish to use Windows), and in the EULA you agree that Microsoft can slip in updates or change the EULA at any point in the future. So, if there is something malicious that Windows currently does not do, then it would be very easy for them to slip that into an update and push it out tomorrow.

They’ve done this sort of thing before, countless times. Anyone remember how “Windows Genuine Annoyance” wasn’t originally part of Windows XP?

Anyone remember when Windows XP and Vista would simply lock you out of your computer and forbid you access to anything even if the software was legally licensed and Microsoft just happened to screw up?

Idiot Exploiter being in Windows 98 without an uninstaller got Microsoft some DOJ attention, but it’s literally EVERYWHERE in Windows 8, and it’s more malicious than ever.

Here’s what you agree to send to Microsoft now to get a fully functional copy of Windows 8 if you take the default settings (Some of these have been a requirement of various Microsoft apps and Windows in the past, some are new. This is in addition to anything mandated by their EULA, so you can’t opt out of all of it even if you tried):

Every site you visit in Internet Explorer.

Everything you download with Internet Explorer.

Every URL you click on in an application from the Windows store, regardless what browser it opens in.

Every web resource that an application loads.

Every application you have installed on your computer, regardless of where it came from.

Your EXACT location. (Via IP geolocation or GPS coordinates.) when you use an app that uses this feature. Note: GPS coordinates are accurate to within a few inches.

Crash data for any application that has a problem, including a memory dump. (Those can include personal information like passwords, site login data, your bank account information, truly any information the app had in memory when it crashed.)

Which parts of Windows Help you have read, and what URLs you clicked on in that.

You agree that they can force application updates on you, silently, even to install malicious features,even if you didn’t want the update.

You agree that they can update Windows, including for the purpose of stuffing in more malicious features, even if you didn’t want the update.

Applications can use your name, account picture, location data, and various Windows Live features, as you.

Perhaps most disturbing at all, the Windows Store and many of the applications that come with Windows that can’t be removed, like their messenger program that censors its users and spies on what they say, require you to sign up with a Microsoft Account (which is, I guess what they’re calling Passport these days), and to fully utilize the software store, you have to link a major credit card/debit card to your account and agree to anything Microsoft or apps you use try to charge to it.

You agree in the EULA that Windows can update things like their Windows Media Digital Restrictions Malware and you won’t try to stop it.

The US DMCA makes it illegal to try to break their Digital Restrictions Malware, even if it’s because it fucked up and you’re just trying to use the content you “bought”. Or because Microsoft’s latest DRM’d music store flops and they take down their license renewal server. Happens.

If you use any of Microsoft’s “Cloud” features, you agree explicitly that they can share your information with advertisers or the federal, state, or local government units with or without a valid search warrant, and you also agree that you hold Microsoft harmless if they fuck up and delete your data. So don’t upload anything expecting to ever get it back out. But, these are problems with most cloud services, which is why you shouldn’t use them.

We live in an age where the government doesn’t even need warrants because people tell them everything they want to know, willingly. How many criminal cases has the government been able to make out of data that Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook have turned over? We might never know.

These reasons, and many more are why it’s time to consider making the move to Free and Open Source software. There’s no 20 page EULAs, no “activation”, no spyware, fewer headaches, and no bullshit.

Big companies have proven time and time again that they are not to be trusted with your information. Why do people agree to give them more and more of it all the time in light of this abuse?

If you need a starting point in learning about Free and Open Source software, what it is, and more reasons you should be replacing your proprietary software with it, here’s some places to read up about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open_source_software

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_and_open_source_software_packages

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

http://www.opensource.org/osd.html

In short, there’s probably a suitable free and open source replacement for almost everything you use, even for operating systems such as Ubuntu and Fedora, office suites such as LibreOffice and Caligra Suite, even replacements for Photoshop, like The Gimp. Of course that’s just naming a few.

Look Daddy, I’m feeding your credit card to the ponies! OM NOM NOM NOM!!!!

Switch now, and you will not only have the peace of mind that nobody is using your computer against you or effectively leasing your own computer out to you, or using your software to censor or spy on you, but also that they can’t rack up fraudulent credit card transactions from an app that is targeted to your children which sells them pretend apples and hay to feed imaginary animals with.

One Apple customer was recently in the news, horrified, that his seven year old daughter managed to rack up the equivalent of about $350 US dollars to his credit card, which Apple simply allowed to go through. If you think Microsoft will be treating customers any better, I would suggest that you’re in for a painful life lesson.

One more disturbing trend….

Each version of Windows comes in yet more “editions”. “Edition” is just a nice way of saying they cripple it a bit more and a bit more to segment the market and create price points. This is something else you never see in Free and Open Source Software, because it would be pointless. Nevertheless, Microsoft has decided that Windows 8 will not play a DVD or Blu Ray without the “Media Pack”, which will be an additional fee.

How much? They declined to say. For reference, adding DVD playback to Windows Media Player in Windows XP cost $25, and adding Blu Ray support to Windows has typically meant a MONTHLY RECURRING SUBSCRIPTION fee because it requires downloading the new content restriction keys every month, so if you stop paying, your discs stop playing. Isn’t that cute?

Benjamin Mako Hill wrote about this deliberate software crippling in an essay about Windows NT 4. He called the disabled features anti-features. The point he made, quite concisely, was that if you pay Microsoft for anything other than the most expensive version, you’re literally paying them to remove features from your software. He also made a list with more examples of products with antifeatures.

There’s much more detail I could go into, but this is yet another wake up call that you deserve Freedom, and Free Software gives you the Freedom you deserve. The Free Software Foundation defines “Free” (as in freedom!) Software as giving the user these four freedoms.

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

In short, you are free to study, modify, redistribute, and use the software, for any purpose, and you are never “under surveillance” by it or unable to help your friend by sharing the software with him or her.

Microsoft and Apple both have something in common; they try to make the user overlook all of the things they have to sacrifice just to use their software, by making it pretty on the surface. That pretty surface is only skin deep, and underneath it, the internals of the system are as bug-ridden and as DRM-encumbered as ever. Just because you paid for a license doesn’t mean they can’t come back later and terminate it, for any or for no reason, without a refund.

What’s most disturbing, above and beyond anything else I’ve talked about, is when the software is so tied to the hardware that the hardware is useless without their software (such as Windows on ARM or the iPad). What do you do if they throw you out? I guess you have a really expensive door stop. (Did someone say, Plasma Active? Yes, you should use Plasma Active.)

Windows 8 gives you a choice. You can keep surrendering more of your freedom to Microsoft and other malicious software companies every year, or you can get off their slippery slope right now.

Google is being sued by some idiot using Safari on a Mac. US Congress critters investigate.

I noticed this yesterday and decided to comment.

There’s a big stink going on right now. Someone found out that Google was setting “third party cookies” (for their advertising servers) in Apple’s Safari browser, which defaults to not loading third party cookies (which I’ll get to in a moment).

Now it appears that someone using Safari on a Mac that expected privacy somehow, is suing Google. (The PC World article on the first link has a more accurate technical description of what’s going on)

In short, someone found a bug in Safari, and now Google is being sued and is under investigation by Congress. We know how much Congress can be expected to know about the internet based on their hilarious to horrifying attempts to regulate it as many of them uttered things like “I don’t know how this here internet thing works, but they tell me….” or the late Senator Ted Steven’s infamous “series of tubes” comment. To say nothing of the fact that Congress flip flops between mandatory tracking for all and bullshit “consumer privacy concerns” such as this one. (For those concerned with the former, the bill is called HR 1981, but a more fitting name would be HR 1984)

If this was a bug in Firefox, it would be fixed. If it was a bug in Chrome, it would be fixed.

Somehow, Microsoft and Apple users seem to think they can use proprietary secret software when they’re not allowed to know how it works and have privacy at the same time. Software which has a history of many bugs,  with vendors that typically take weeks/months/years to patch them once they’re made public. These companies also slip back doors into the software for various government agencies.

Apple was recently caught with a back door that they put into iTunes, it remained there for 3 years, undetected, which facilitated man in the middle attacks. (A government could use this to run a counterfeit iTunes server and load malicious software onto the victim’s computer. The article calls it a flaw, but we know what was really going on, and that it was likely just moved.).

There’s no way you can trust Microsoft or Apple’s software to protect your privacy. Anyone who has actually read the EULA for Windows (especially XP, Vista, and 7) should know that there are at least several dozen Windows components that phone home to Microsoft with your personal information. Most do it over an encrypted connection so that the user has a very hard time telling what is actually being sent to them. Apple isn’t any better.

Let’s get back to cookie controls. They’re a red herring. They’re totally bogus. They don’t do anything for you. Every browser has them, even Internet Explorer 6. They don’t do anything to protect you because cookies are passe. Tracking and spyware sites have developed data mining techniques that work well even if the user clears every cookie they ever set.

One method is to associate IP addresses with log ins. Facebook, Google, and Microsoft all do that. Even after you log out, it’s possible for them to track you personally. There’s other methods. Browsers like Firefox and Chrome are just now starting to implement watered down privacy controls for Adobe’s Flash software (which is proprietary software and a frequent cause of cross platform/cross browser security problems).

Flash has “supercookies”, or what is more technically known as Local Storage Objects. Flash LSO’s can be up to 150 KB (which is 37.5 times larger than a cookie), a site can store as many as they want on your computer (just like a cookie), and (unlike cookies), most browsers do very little to nothing about them. Silverlight has something similar, users of Windows where Silverlight is sneaked over the fence by Windows Update should take notice of that.

The take home message here is that it was ludicrous for this guy to expect any kind of enhanced privacy just because Safari has some lame cookie controls which are a piss poor clone of something Mozilla introduced well over 10 years ago. I really doubt that will stop this frivolous lawsuit, and I fully expect the anti-Google interests called Microsoft and Apple to play this up for all the drama it’s worth.

Microsoft hired the scumbags over at  Waggener Edstrom a while back to launch a smear campaign against Google, and Microsoft is already jumping on this Safari problem like a dog in heat. (I won’t link since I can’t seem to find an article that is telling people the truth about where the anti-Google smear is coming from. Waggener Edstrom specializes in astroturfing and attack ads. They’ve worked for companies like BP and Walmart, and for many a corrupt politician. (When you see that disgusting outrageous pants-on-fire “GMail Man” attack ad, that’s who made it).

If you’d like to know more about these people, Techrights has occasionally blogged about what they’re up to and who they work for.

So now that we’ve covered the facts about Microsoft and Apple, IE and Safari’s lack of real privacy controls, and why cookie controls do nothing.

There’s a number of things you CAN do to really prevent or limit how sites track you. Here’s some suggestions.

Firefox users can use Adblock Plus (just remember to opt out of the “acceptable ads nonsense). Delete Easylist’s filter subscription, and add these instead.

Better yet, use Chrome/Chromium with Chrome Adblock, remove Easylist, and use these instead. (Chrome Adblock is better than Adblock Plus for Chrome, the two are unrelated)

Firefox or Chrome 17+ users can install HTTPS Everywhere (The Chrome version is an alpha for the time being, but it does work)

Opera users can use Opera’s content blocker to block advertising and stat/tracking sites. Pre-made lists here. Remember to manually update them now and then or skip the process and let Opera Adblock do the same thing for you if you have Opera 11 or later.

Firefox and Chrome can also block Flash applets from automatically loading, saving you bandwidth and making flash applets that track you or load malicious software less effective. Firefox has Flashblock, Chrome users can enable the Click to Load option in the advanced settings for plug-ins.

Weaker protection for users who insist on inferior browsers with government spyware built in.

Internet Explorer 9 supports “tracking protection lists”, which are a small/watered down subset of true content blocking. Pre-made TPLs for IE here.

Safari users can use Safari Adblock, it’s from the same guy that made Chrome adblock. I’ve never used that one, but if it comes with Easylist, rip it out and add these.

The bottom line is that the only way to protect yourself from tracking servers is to not connect to or run applets from them to begin with.

Maddox on SOPA. My response.

“Maddox” (George Ouzounian) has an interesting post on SOPA. Unfortunately, he tries to compare the Rodney King incident with SOPA and Occupy Wall Street. So I sent him an email correcting this flawed association. I decided to copy it here in case anyone finds the facts interesting.

—
Hi “Maddox”,

I’ve read your site over the years and usually agree with what you write, or at the very least I find myself amused.

The SOPA page is more or less factually correct. I’m not going to argue about most of the points you bring up on that page.

One thing that I did kind of find odd is that you compared the injustice of SOPA to the beating that the scumbag known as Rodney King brought down on himself in 1992.

The facts of the situation, often ignored by the far left and the media in order to stir the usual shit, involve:

A man that was already on probation for drug felonies.

He decided that since the police wanted to pull him over on a freeway, that they might violate his probation, so naturally he did something brilliant…

He led the police on a 115 mile an hour chase, endangering the lives of himself, the police following him, and everyone around him on the freeway.

When the police finally stopped him, it turns out that he was high on crack cocaine, and he proceeded to assault a police officer.

After the police used force to subdue him (maybe a bit too much, but not unprovoked), the minorities decided that the police were profiling him because he was black.

If your definition of “to profile” includes chasing people that run from the police, and/or tasing and whacking them with a baton after they finally get them stopped and after they lunge out to attack a police officer while fueled up on crack cocaine. The police profile a lot of people.

The minorities decided to use the Rodney King incident as an excuse to riot, loot, and torch businesses and homes belonging to people who had nothing to do with the incident at all. Along the way they even managed to shoot and kill each other and innocent bystanders.

Because of these assholes, the police, the National Guard, and active US Army and Marines units declared martial law and illegally curtailed the civil rights of people who hadn’t done anything wrong, to restore order and arrest the criminals.

Since the situation was bad enough for the US government to send in the military to act as civilian law enforcement, they got to set a precedent. Later on, they’d expand the role of the military as civilian law enforcement using the nebulous term “terrorism”, but that is outside the scope of this topic.

The lasting lesson of Rodney King is that any idiot can show up with a video camera halfway into a situation, provide no context, and the media will keep raping the public with clips from the footage.

For what it’s worth, if you thought Rodney King had redeemed himself in the past 20 years and become a productive member of society, you’d be wrong. Here’s what Wikipedia says about him (clarifications in brackets are mine):

“Since the [1992] arrest… King has been arrested at least a further eleven times on a variety of charges, including domestic abuse and hit-and-run.”

Still not following me? Maybe it’s because I’m “white” which means “racist” of course. Take what Chris Rock said instead. “When the police have to chase after you, they’re bringing an ass kicking with them.”

The fact that King was black and got an unscrupulous lawyer were the reasons he got $3.5 million from the tax payers of Los Angeles and the State of California, which he proceeded to lose almost immediately on squandering and lousy investments (including a record label that never produced anything notable)

I’m not sure that SOPA (which is an injustice and an anti-constitutional infringement of civil liberties) compares to the beating that one stupid crackhead brought down on himself or that groups of peaceful Occupy protestors should be compared to an unruly mob of (mostly) minorities who use the situation of the day as an excuse to smash things, steal, and kill innocent people.

You can quote me if you like. I’ve noticed that the people you tend to cite are like something from a mentally retarded 12 year old on AOL (and usually in all caps), it might be refreshing (if not entirely entertaining) to quote someone that is not intellectually inferior to you.

Thoughts on Linux and so-called Secure Boot.

DRM, fun for the whole Family License Pack

The uEFI Forum is largely a bunch of SOPA promoters hoping to turn your PC into a locked platform using DMCA anti-circumvention laws.

Unfortunately, the next generation boot firmware for the PC not only fails to completely replace the PC BIOS (which will continue to be used for power on self test and hardware initialization). Those in the know, beyond the corporate media spin doctoring, know that uEFI is just a layer of DRM and corporate lock-in that rides on top of the 30 year old legacy BIOS that starts the computer in real mode just like it did in the 1980s.

uEFI is not a next generation PC boot firmware, we’re being sold a bill of goods. The biggest particular problem is “Secure Boot”. Users are being mislead into believing it has something to do with securely booting a computer while its true purpose is to lock the user into running whatever corporate-sponsored OS that came with the computer, and turning them into a criminal by forcing them to commit a US federal felony by circumventing it to install free software as the computer’s operating system instead.

For the latest lies from the corporate-sponsored media, we go to The H Online which has declared that “Securely booting Linux [is] a “difficult” proposition”. The H is becoming less of a legitimate news source about free and open source software, and becoming more like just any other anti-free and open source rag that mindlessly recites anything that Microsoft pays for. The Register is another example of such an occurance. Over time, Microsoft starts writing their Linux news and you get libellous headlines instead of information. It’s not like the Red Hat employee that they cite is helping dispel this propaganda. (more in a moment)

uEFI “Secure Boot” (which should be called Restricted Boot since it is designed to lock you into an ISV’s operating system software), is is a complex specification. It relies on a nebula of assumptions about the state of the hardware and the bootloader that are not necessarily true and are easily forged. Even if that was not the case, it relies on an assumption that there are no firmware bugs which can be used to subvert and bypass it. It will not provide any meaningful level of additional security to users of any PC operating system, even if it agrees to boot the operating system that the user is trying to use at all. It is designed to turn anyone who cracks it into a criminal, by forcing them to violate Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and being liable to be sentenced to prison for trying to use their computer in freedom.

Cited in the contemptible malarkey is Matthew Garrett, a Red Hat employee. Red Hat is a member of the uEFI forum so that they can sign RHEL and won’t be stopped by Restricted Boot on any workstation or server that comes with their software. I’m pretty sure that this is why we won’t be seeing the GRUB 2 bootloader on RHEL any time soon. GRUB 2 is licensed under the GPL version 3, which  protects users from what the FSF refers to as “Tivoization”, which refers to the practice of using free software in a manner that locks the user out of their system with free software, by using DRM in that software.

If Red Hat shipped GRUB 2 and did not disclose their signing keys as teh GPL 3 requires(to protect the user from exploitative hardware/software vendors), they would be in violation of the GPL. The Free Software Foundation could revoke their rights to use the GRUB 2 software. Red Hat has a lot of resources and can probably maintain their fork of Grub 0.97 indefinitely so that they can cooperate with hardware makers to restrict the user. Red Hat benefits from user lock-in just as surely as Apple and Microsoft do if only their signing key is in the uEFI Secure Boot implementation on hardware that ships with their operating system, because there won’t be any of that pesky competition on any system that comes with RHEL.

So right off the bat, I don’t think Matthew Garrett can be a trusted source of information because he is obviously tainted by his employer, and has the same reasons to lie and mislead you as Stevan Sinofsky of Microsoft.

Canonical (Ubuntu) is also a member of the uEFI forum and can probably use Secure Boot on embedded ARM systems to trap people in Ubuntu. They can’t use GRUB 2, but there are bootloaders for ARM, some of them proprietary, which can be used instead. They can probably also sign Ubuntu LTS releases and get their signing key into workstations and servers that ship with Ubuntu, for much the same end result as the RHEL situation I described above. They could even use Grub Legacy in that situation. It didn’t just disappear, it’s still being carried by them if you look up “grub” in their software repository.

A better news flash would be that there never was, is, or will be a way to securely boot a PC, and that corporations are salivating at the prospect of using it to lock end users into their operating system software, to keep the user trapped with whatever their computer happened to come with. The headlines designed to smear Linux are just paid for by Microsoft. The “bootloader attacks” that Secure Boot is supposedly meant to deal with are mostly attacks on the Windows Activation system that rely on bootloader exploits to make Windows believe it is an OEM copy that came with the PC so that the user may use a copy of Windows without paying for it.

Microsoft isn’t interested in stopping the malware of the week from stealing your identity or subverting your system and using it to display (sometimes pornographic) advertisements, which are just two of the things that Windows is known well for. They are interested in stopping the user from being able to run their own software on their private property and from getting away with using a less crippled version of Windows than what came with their computer without forking over more money through the Anytime Upgrade scam.

I don’t believe the corporate ambitions of Red Hat or Canonical are any different.

This work by Ryan Farmer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.