Megaupload seized. Fascists continue to leave Controlled Cloud Computing alone.

The FBI picked yesterday to raid and take down MegaUpload.

In what was, obviously, intended to say “Fuck you America, we don’t need SOPA to do this”, the jack booted thugs at the FBI, acting upon orders from their commanders at the MAFIAA (A catch all term that is commonly used to refer to RIAA/MPAA/BSA type cartel organizations), seized the MegaUpload domain, arrested the owners and administrators, and replaced it with the standard finger wagging “This domain has been seized” banner.

Anonymous responded by taking out the DoJ, FBI, and some cartel websites with a Distributed Denial of Service attack. (Windows malware-controlled PCs can do something productive I guess.)

Sure, MegaUpload probably had some files that were violating copyright. I know Twitter does. So does Facebook, Google Docs, Amazon “Cloud”,  the Ubuntu One skin for “Amazon Cloud”, and many others. Incidentally, they all oppose SOPA, not because it’s the moral and just position to be in (it is), but because it would cause them an undue burden to ceaselessly monitor their users. Under SOPA/PIPA, legitimate websites can be taken down by the government because one of their users posted a link to copyright-infringing material. SOPA/PIPA is clearly designed to discourage sites from allowing user-generated content. (I guess that means that if SOPA/PIPA get passed into law, you won’t be reading any more blogs.)

If you think about it, MegaUpload was in the same “cloud storage” business that companies like Amazon and Microsoft are in, it is my firm belief that the US government only picked on MegaUpload  because they made the government come back with a warrant when they wanted private user data, and Amazon and Microsoft are all too eager to comply with them with no court supervision required.

While I’m on the subject of major “cloud” storage sites, I’ve noticed a lot of “pirated software” on Microsoft Windows Skydrive, including materials to crack Microsoft software. Go figure.

The Federal Government has generally left certain “cloud” storage companies alone because they comply with warrantless sneak and peak searches, authorized not by the Constitution, but by anti-terrorism legislation rammed through in the aftermath of 9/11, when people were so frightened that they let the government pass anything and everything that claimed to “protect” them. The legislation hasn’t caught one terrorist in 11 years, it has not stopped a single terrorist attack anywhere in the world.

What it is doing, is enabling the US government agents on the MAFIAA payroll to take down sites without even bothering to give lip service to constitutional “protections” like freedom of speech, freedom against self-incrimination, the right to due process and equal protection of the laws, etc.

If anything is enabling “terrorism” on Americans, it is laws like the PATRIOT ACT, DMCA, proposed SOPA/PIPA,  companies like Apple and Microsoft, and products like iTunes.

Companies that write and push these laws are terrorist organizations. Wiktionary defines terrorism  as “A psychological strategy of war for gaining political or religious ends by deliberately creating a climate of fear among the population of a state.” The fear inspired by possible SOPA violations is designed to get the population of a state (the United States) to censor themselves. When the day comes that you can’t even talk about things they don’t like, you’re being censored, regardless of what SOPA proponents like MPAA scumbag Chris Dodd will tell you. (Now should we go after the MPAA/RIAA with cruise missiles, or should we take this opportunity to try out Prompt Global Strike? It would be the best use of my tax money in a long time either way.)

When you buy things from Microsoft, Apple, iTunes, RIAA labels, the MPAA, or various other censorship promoters, you’re not supporting American jobs, you’re supporting draconian laws like the PATRIOT ACT, DMCA, and the proposed SOPA. These things don’t just come out of nowhere, the promoters of them use a lot of money (some of it may even be from you) to grease the wheels. I don’t even believe it is just campaign contributions either. I think there’s plenty of cash under the table going to our elected officials from these outfits. Mexican President Felipe Calderon said at one point that part of the reason so many illegal drugs were getting across the border was because American politicians were taking cash money from drug cartels to make sure that certain smugglers got through without any issues at the border. Why would anyone have a hard time believing that American politics works differently elsewhere?

I haven’t bought any new RIAA-labeled music since the RIAA sued Napster. (I have bought some used CDs, mostly of stuff I listened to in the 80s and 90s. In compliance with the First Sale Doctrine.) I have not purchased any MPAA-labeled movies since they got on the lawsuit wagon. I specifically refuse to buy anything from Adobe, Apple, or Microsoft. As these companies started to openly work against my interests, I cut myself away from them. I could ignore them no longer. Will it stop them? No. It will never stop them as long as people think it is socially acceptable to spend money on cartel-promoted intangible items like MP3 files and ebooks and movies. The only thing I can do is apologize for my part of funding them and not do it again.

On so-called “Piracy”? I have no ethical problems with sharing information to help your friends. Unfortunately the MAFIAA has the finest government money can buy in the United States, and sharing information to help your friends can be illegal.

I’ve posted before what my thoughts are on “digital purchases”, they’re just a sneaky way to remove ownership from you and allow the MAFIAA to never let your “purchases” out of their sight. “Content” on “the cloud” is even worse because then you’re not even in possession of the file. It is the ultimate Digital Restrictions Management, cloaked as a kind of convenience.

“What about stores selling files? They got rid of DRM years ago!”

A common misconception exists around that. The only reason Apple doesn’t use DRM on their proprietary AAC files, and why many MP3 stores such as Amazon’s don’t do so either, is due to the obvious argument that the Red Book CD standard never had DRM. The argument can still be made, as long as CDs are still for sale, that the customer could theoretically buy and rip their own CDs. Thus there’s no reason to DRM-cripple the digital stuff until they cease making CDs. (Though it didn’t stop Apple from attempting this, they didn’t back off of it for years, and then they forced all their customers to buy the files all over again to get a clean copy) Then it will be back. Take my word, it’ll be back. Notice how there are precisely ZERO online movie stores with no DRM? Blu Ray has about half a dozen layers of DRM, and you have to crack them all before the disc plays on a non-”authorized” device. Since, barring violation of the DMCA, it’s impossible to make a clean copy of n HD movie, Apple and other stores don’t have to provide you with a clean copy of a movie that you have nominally “bought”. (They can take it away at any time thanks to their Foulplay DRM).

What companies are going for with SOPA and other “anti-piracy” laws is no less than the death of the free and open internet where all (regardless of government and corporate approval) are more or less free to voice their opinion and make their own websites and host their own material, and to turn it into something that more closely resembles America Online or the Microsoft Network from the 1990s. Full of nothing but tons of corporate-controlled push content and advertising, and the pack of pedophiles that lurk around that they’re really not interested in doing anything about. (They never have been interested in stopping pedophiles. Pedophiles don’t cost companies any money and provide a great excuse to raid sites they dislike.)

I don’t disagree with what Anonymous does. They are striking back at an oppressive, extralegal, and anti-constitutional cabal of government gone bad and out of control corporations. If anyone from them reads this, I’d like to put in a request. Next time, DDoS those parasites over at Apple, take down iTunes, do something that stings. Godspeed and good sailing!

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

Microsoft to auto-destroy many copies of Windows with IE “upgrade”

U INFECTED BRO?

Today on The Heise Online, they mention that Microsoft is set to automatically download and install the latest version of Internet Explorer that manages to run on the particular Windows version installed. Since XP is the oldest thing they support, those users will get the obsolete Internet Explorer 8 browser, and Windows 7 users will no doubt get IE 9, which is only barely an improvement over IE 8.

I have no idea how they plan on updating Windows Vista users, but that will no doubt be another surprise for anyone foolish enough to actually be using it. There is IE 9 support for Vista (Which is where they will cut off support), but to get it you need a humongous “platform update” full of select backported crap from Windows 7.

Regardless of what version of Windows the user has, an Internet Explorer update is always dangerous since Microsoft continues to claim it is a system component and not a web browser. It means that at best, you need to reboot your computer, and if the upgrade goes wrong it can mean anything from Internet Explorer not working to the Windows shell failing in inappropriate ways. Internet Explorer installations and upgrades have had a significant number of cases of destroying the operating system beyond being salvageable since at least Windows 95.

No decent operating system claims the web browser is an integrated component that can’t be removed. The Internet Explorer situation is a continuing monopoly abuse and Internet Explorer itself is a relic from the 1990s, when Microsoft tried killing Netscape by forcibly installing their own web browser into Windows.

While we’re on the topic, most other operating systems don’t need to reboot after the user updates their web browser, file manager, media player, email client…..

This “almost comical if so many Microsoft victims weren’t suffering through it” situation makes me wonder what kind of a contrived setup those Microsoft funded “studies” used to get “99.999% uptime”. As soon as you apply any patch or update for Windows, it needs rebooted before the new files are used. Even if the user doesn’t want to reboot. Windows will pester them until they do or better yet, start a countdown and reboot the computer without regard to any work the user has left open and unsaved.

This was one factor, out of many, that frustrated me enough to leave Windows. Another factor is that they routinely triage security patches and frequently leave critical flaws open until the next month, like they did with BEAST this month.

That graph is funny, isn’t it? It’s not that Windows has gotten safer, it’s simply that Microsoft is stretching to classify updates that once would have rated critical as “important” based on the factors of “security improvements” in Windows that are often ineffective. (ASLR not being as random as it could be. NX/DEP being off by default for 32-bit software, many applications don’t bother using stack smashing protection because it exposes their programming flaws and causes them to crash, etc.) In many cases the user is left less than protected by what passes as Windows “security improvements” which is why malware is still rampant.

How can any human being tolerate this?

Help yourself to a decent operating system or at least a decent web browser. Firefox Chrome Opera

Installing Privoxy 3.0.18 in Ubuntu Oneiric or derivatives

Since Adblock Plus sold out and can no longer be considered trustworthy, I have decided to explore other options.

Short story: Adblock Plus 2.0 development branch has added a new “feature” they call “acceptable advertising” and flipped it on by default without asking the user. The default whitelist is so far only including advertising from networks like Google with suspiciously deep pockets, leading me to believe that money has probably changed hands somewhere along the way. You can opt out of this through a rather unwieldy process, but most people won’t. I find “acceptable ads” to be unacceptable because even Google Adwords is well known for profiling the user even if they only use non-Google sites and they’ll let anyone with enough money take out an ad, even if it leads to phishing sites or Windows malware. Most definitely NOT acceptable. (But hey, it’s your computer and if you like XP AntiVirus Super Duper 2012 Edition, I think you’re beyond my help.

Privoxy is powerful but has a daunting (not terrible, but compared to Adblock Plus, rather involved) setup if you want it to work as best it can, so I have decided to document the entire process here that I used.

Step 1: Remove Adblock Plus from Firefox. The only reason we’re going to switch to Privoxy is because Adblock Plus is no longer trustworthy.

Open the add-ons menu. Either by clicking the Firefox button followed by Add-Ons, or if you use the classic menu, then Tools followed by Add-Ons.

Find Adblock Plus. Click “Remove”. Firefox will want to restart.

Step 2: Install Privoxy.

Ubuntu Oneiric comes with 3.0.17, which is now outdated and has some serious bugs that have been fixed in 3.0.18. The packages from the development branch of Ubuntu (codenamed Precise) work fine and provide version 3.0.18.

Go to this page: http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise/privoxy

Under Download Privoxy, choose the package for your architecture. Mine is AMD64, but you might be using the i386 version of Ubuntu. Choose whichever applies to your system.

Click on any mirror you want, it will offer you the DEB file. Once the DEB file has finished downloading, either double click on it in the Downloads or open your file manager and go to where you downloaded it and double click (single click for Kubuntu users) on it to launch the package installer. Install the package.

NOTE: Installing packages from other versions of Ubuntu is not always a great idea. Privoxy just happens to be really small with no dependencies that can’t be satisfied by Oneiric. DO NOT make a habit of doing this!

Step 3: Make sure the Privoxy daemon (service) is running. It probably is, but this can’t hurt.

Open a terminal.

sudo service privoxy start

Step 4: Configure your proxy settings to route through Privoxy (Privoxy operates as a local non-caching proxy server).

In GNOME or KDE or whatever you use, set HTTP and HTTPS to use 127.0.0.1 on port 8118 (where Privoxy listens). Do this again in Firefox’s Network preferences. It should pick up your global settings but it is Firefox and you know how things that should happen on Firefox for Linux sometimes don’t.

Firefox/Preferences/Preferences/ or Edit/Preferences followed by Advanced then the Network tab, click Configure How Firefox connects to the Internet, and use 127.0.0.1 and port 8118 for HTTP and HTTPS.

(Yo dawg, I heard you liked Preferences so I gave you Firefox so you can have Preferences with your Preferences!)

Step 5: Configuring Privoxy.

Privoxy is actually a pain in the ass to configure with text files by hand. It does have a web browser-based GUI setup for filtering operations, but it must be enabled in a configuration file. There is no need to restart Privoxy after modifying anything since the daemon (service) notices a few seconds later that the settings changed and applies them immediately.

Press Alt+F2, this brings up a run dialog under pretty much any desktop environment worth using. Remember this is for Ubuntu derivatives, others tend to use gksu and kdesu, but since Ubuntu does not set up the root user by default, it uses gksudo and kdesudo instead. Fedora KDE also seems to come with kwrite instead of kate, so Fedora KDE users would use kwrite. I use Nano but I am striving to make this as painless as possible for users accustomed to a GUI.

GNOME/UNITY: gksudo gedit /etc/privoxy/config

KDE: kdesudo kate /etc/privoxy/config

Now we can edit the main config file. Note. Make sure any lines I say to edit don’t have a hash symbol in front of them (one of these #) or Privoxy will interpret them as a comment and fail to parse the rule.

Go to section 4.5, titled enable-edit-actions. Scroll down. Find the line that says:

enable-edit-actions 0

change it to

enable-edit-actions 1

Go to section 4.8, titled buffer limit.

It defaults to 4096 with a line such as:

buffer-limit 4096

I find it runs better with a 16 MB buffer. I have lots of RAM. Yay RAM. I change it to:

buffer-limit 16384

Go to section 6.4, titled keep-alive-timeout.

It’s set to 5 I find it works best with 300.

So I change this:

keep-alive-timeout 5

to this:

keep-alive-timeout 300

Save the file and exit.

Step 6: Close Firefox if you still had it open, and restart it.

Step 7: Type this into the location bar and hit enter:

config.privoxy.org

(Privoxy intercepts this and redirects it to its own configuration page, if Privoxy is not running,  you get a page on Privoxy.org telling you it is not running, if this happens, try clearing your history and trying again.)

You should get something like this on the page that comes up:

This is Privoxy 3.0.18 on localhost (127.0.0.1), port 8118, enabled

Step 8: Configure the filtering rules. (We’re almost done)

On the config page, click the link “View & change current configuration”, then under “Actions Files” there should be “/etc/privoxy/match-all.action” as the first listing. Click the Edit button next to it.

Under “Actions” set to “Cautious”, it should provide a minimal template from which to work without stupid filters that don’t apply to Linux users. (At least, I don’t think many of us need a filter to block some common Internet Explorer 6 vulnerabilities)

Now, to the left of the Cautious button, click the Edit button. What follows is how to get the setup I use. Some filters look tempting but actually break some sites. If you want to experiment with them later, do it one at a time and turn them off if they break something you use.

fast-redirects, click green button to enable, check decode entire url.

filter refresh-tags, green to enable, check “Decode URL before checking”

filter img-reorder, green to enable

filter banners-by-size, green to enable

filter banners-by-link, green to enable

filter webbugs, green to enable

filter no-ping, green to enable

filter google, green to enable

hide-from-header, red to disable (No browser since the mid 90s that I know of sends out your email address to every page you visit. This one is stupid.)

hide-referrer, green to enable, check “Forge referrer if host has changed, but don’t touch in-site referrers.”

set-image-blocker, green to enable, check “Send a 1×1 transparent GIF” to reduce page clutter.

Click submit.

Step 9: Privoxy doesn’t handle pop-ups and unders that well since there’s a lot of sneaky ways to load them. We can deal with this problem from within Firefox itself. Note: Adblock Plus was only blocking most pop-ups because it had explicit rules for them which needed a lot of complicated filtering and still missed some.

In Firefox’s location bar, type this, and hit enter.

about:config

If necessary, click the do not show me this again thing that comes up and jokes about “voiding your warranty”.

In the filter box type popup and locate dom.popup_allowed_events and double click it. Remove everything. Sites now have no way of loading pop-ups. The “Firefox has blocked a pop-up” thing will appear when one tries and you can use that to load the pop-up anyway or whitelist that site for next time. (My bank uses them, sigh).

Step 10 (Optional): While in about:config, let’s toggle some other nonsense that Firefox has done by default.

In the filter bar, search general.autoscroll, double click it to change it to true. Mouse wheel scrolling on Linux instead of the stupid X11 clipboard ftw.

In the filter bar, search for trim, locate browser.urlbar.trimURLs and double click to change it to false. This will revert Firefox to the traditional behavior of telling you what protocol the loaded site is using in the address bar and fixes the problem (on Linux anyway) of occasionally copy pasting a URL without the http:// or https:// or ftp:// or whatever bits.

Congratulations. Privoxy should now be set up. It’s a shame that Adblock Plus decided to take on an anti-user stance in exchange for Google’s money and that we have to block ads in Firefox now with a local proxy server like it was 1999 all over again if we want to avoid the abuse I’m sure is coming from Wladimir Palant and “Rick752″ and friends.

Until next time, this is DaemonFC reminding you that the only “acceptable” ad is a dead ad.

VLC now has a Java dependency. I give up.

So I went to install VLC in Kubuntu and find it depends on libbluray, which wants to pull in Java.

I can almost hear you saying “VLC plays Blu Ray now? Cool! Finally those MAFIAA bastards will pay for their DRM crimes! Viva la libdvdcss!”, but before you get excited, it doesn’t play any DRM’d discs, which as far as I know includes all of them. . What’s worse than useless is useless and bringing in Java. I hate desktop Java.

This is in addition to the fact that Pulseaudio support (You know, Pulseaudio, unless you’ve been living under a rock) has been broken in VLC for a very long time.

I give up, you win, no longer will I use your software. UMPlayer is better anyway.

Ubuntu Natty: The Indicator Crapplet Strikes Back

I recently spent a day with Ubuntu Natty and Unity:

I was not expecting it to work well, and I got everything I expected. Unlike some reviewers, I’m aware that the thing is essentially a broken GNOME 2 fork and will treat it as such.

The thing that is most annoying is that Unity replaces a lot of standard desktop features with proprietary Canonical replacements that fall under the Canonical Contributor Agreement. This effectively is as good as making all of this stuff nonfree software, because Canonical could at some point re license all of it however they like. It’s not like any other distro (or desktop environment) is jumping at the chance to ship broken software like the Indicator API, precisely because it is broken and just a really dumbed down notification tray.

Which brings me to indicator applets:

Why? Why why why why WHY!? How can you replace standard notification applets that work, that the user can right click on, that every other desktop environment uses, and call them deprecated, and then replace them with something that doesn’t work right most of the time?

The GNOME 2 system tray is still there, but Canonical only allows “whitelisted” applications to use it. This is necessary because not everything works with Indicators and likely never will. Rather than simply blacklist the applications that have Indicators from using the system tray, Canonical has decided to break many applications, such as XChat and the HP printer toolkit (just to name a couple that I use. And the gain? My 1920 x 1080 display saves like 2″ of horizontal top bar space because Canonical wants to be Nazis and dictate how many icons I can have up there, and of what kind they can be.

A fix has been posted, but don’t count on it working for long, as Canonical’s Sebastian Bacher explains that the standard notification tray will be removed eventually and Canonical doesn’t care if their replacement doesn’t really work.

“…re-enforce the message to application writer that they will need to update their code if they want it to work correctly in Ubuntu in the next cycles“

I kind of take that to imply that upstream application writers should give a crap whether or not their application that uses standard notifications breaks in Canonical’s Indicator Crapplet. If you’re an application writer, you shouldn’t be bullied into breaking your application to work with the incorrect behavior of Indicators.

There’s a lot about Unity that doesn’t work right, why focus on Indicators?

Because they don’t work right, they never will, and it’s by design. Maybe someday a user will be able to use Unity without it freezing their computer every hour or so (like it currently does), because that’s not intentional, it’s just shoddy work. Indicators are one of those “solution looking for a problem” deals where I don’t believe that anyone from Canonical will ever admit that they are wrong and that it was a bad idea.

Not that I think GNOME 3 is better.

Unity and GNOME 3 are both “designed” (if you can call it that) around incompetent users who are confused with user-toggled settings. They both manifest bad design with the idea that the user is an idiot confused by features, they just go about it in different ways. GNOME 3 is worse in some ways than Unity (No Maximize/Minimize, very difficult to change your theme, they break notifications in their own way by hiding them unless you mouse over, etc.).

Bottom Line:

Use something else if you value your sanity. KDE has sane defaults, user-toggled settings abound, it doesn’t crash a lot, and the desktop is basically the same with or without a fancy video card/driver combo that give you eye candy. (Where you get a totally craptacular fallback mode in GNOME 3 and GNOME 2 with Indicator Crapplets with Ubuntu.)