Day 151: A low point

No time AND no inspiration

Day 150: My impression of the media's reaction to Schapelle Corby's return to Australia

Honestly, what did they think was going to happen.

Day 149: Feeling Lazy

Good night.

Eurovision 2017

Since 40 fucking Youtube videos is a lot to load, I'm sticking a "jump break" in this post. Click on the title to read more.

Day 148: Not getting any quicker

At this point, if I go any slower, I'll stop.

Day 147: Moving Slow

Dunno if it's the cooler weather or what, But I'm moving a lot slower than I was a couple of weeks ago.

Day 146: I should spend some time reading the manual for this paint App

I dunno what a "particle brush" is meant to be for, but I'm guessing not this.

Day 145: Cowboys v Dinosaurs

"Flesh" is another 2000AD strip that's been around since the very beginning; and just one of many that was conceived by the comic's founder, Pat Mills.

In the far distant future, Earth is suffering a food shortage; so the corporations who run things begin sending rough-necked contractors back in time to round up great herds of dinosaurs, which can then be processed by giant industrial abattoirs known as flesh-dozers. Yes, that's right, the real reason dinosaurs became extinct is that they were butchered by time-traveling cowboys from the future.

While the stories had a number of high and low points, I was always fascinated by the world of Flesh. Mills may not be the best writer out there, but he's certainly an imaginative bugger. Even more so than Dredd, this is one 2000AD property that I think would make a great TV series.

Not representative of what actually happens in the comic.

Fun fact: The plot of Jurassic Park was lifted from a different story in 2000AD. Seriously, it's way too close to have just been coincidence.

Day 144: Getting Judgey.

I was planning on celebrating the 40th anniversary and 2000th issue of 2000AD by going back and looking at some of my favourite stories; but to be honest, I haven't really found the time. This week, I was listening to the 2000AD podcast, and I heard the announcement that they have started work on a Judge Dredd TV show. By started work, I mean, just started. Like, they haven't even got a writing team yet. If it gets made, we're not going to see this thing for years.

I don't know how happy I am to hear this. Comic books don't always traslate well to the screen. I mean, the 2012 Dredd film was fantastic (hunt it down if you haven't seen it yet), but then there's the old Stalone flick, which … well, the less said about that the better. I know the Marvel movies are going gangbusters at the moment, but the few I've seen have struggled to reach mediocre. I hear the Daredevil Netflix series is decent though; as well as the Luke Cage and Jessica Jones series; but I can't comment, since I haven't seen them.

Being a weekly strip that's run for 40 years, there's a lot of Dredd stuff out there, and the material has changed a lot over the years. In the late seventies, it was very much a children's adventure strip; however, going into the eighties, the tone of 2000AD became much more adult, and the writers of Dredd started to inject a lot more political and social commentary into the mix.

For the uninitiated, Dredd is set in the futuristic metropolis of Mega City 1, which is surrounded by a radioactive wasteland referred to as The Cursed Earth. See, at some point, the United States elected a charismatic, populist buffoon as president and he started a nuclear war. Democracy was declared a failed experiment, and now, the only people who champion the concept are considered dangerous fringe lunatics. Instead, the city-state is run by the judges; a single bureaucracy which serves as government, military, police, and judiciary. The rule of the judges is brutal and authoritarian. All stimulants are banned, including sugar and caffeine; most film and literature from the 20th century is considered subversive; almost all crimes carry minimum gaol time. Judges are given the power to hand down sentences on the spot—no trials, and no appeals process.

With robots having taken over 97% of jobs, most of the population survive off government welfare. Crammed into tiny apartments within monstrous buildings, with nothing constructive to do and no hope of improving their station in life, most people spend their time jumping from one ridiculous fad to the next, before eventually giving in to madness or despair and killing themselves … and quite often others.

In the middle of all this craziness is Judge Joseph Dredd—pride of the Justice Department, grizzled veteran, and hard-nosed believer in the status-quo. And that's the magic of Dredd—you've got this protagonist who is unbelievably principled and would give his life in the line of duty without thinking twice, but that duty involves propping up a brutal, authoritarian, military dictatorship. In interviews, I've heard the writers talk about how much fun they had seeing how far they could push the character towards being an outright fascist without losing the audience. In a classic story, he unflinchingly obliterates a Russian city of a billion people with nuclear weapons (note, this story was published during the cold war).

One of the most unusual aspects of Dredd is that time in the comic progresses apace with time in the real world. Joe is now 40 years older than he was when the strip started, and there are prominent characters who we have watched grow up in real time. The world has also expanded considerably, and many of the best stories don't feature Dredd in them at all. In fact, the creator of the series, John Wagner, has openly stated that he wants to kill Joe off and let the other characters take over, but the publisher won't let him.

Unfortunately, as Dredd has aged, the character—and the tone of the comic in general—have softened considerably. Dredd isn't as hard and oppressive as he once was, and neither is the system he represents. In fact, while you do still get the odd great Dredd story, a lot of the material published in the last 20 years or so has dropped the fun angle of "how far can we push the audience" in favour of straight action/adventure stories. Which is a real shame. I do hope that if they make this show, they draw most of their inspiration from that golden period that happened in the eighties and nineties, and not too much from the shit that sits either side.

I can't make up my mind about Krita's sketch brush. It certainly gives an interesting effect, but does it look any good?

Day 143: So long, privacy—it was nice knowing you.

I like my privacy. So much so that I use cash wherever I can. I have no desire for anyone but me to have a record of all my financial transactions. Unfortunately, I can see that I'm probably going to lose that privilege within the next 20 years. First of all, I think we're going to see governments start to phase out cash somewhere in that time frame; and secondly, ubiquitous internet connectivity combined with facial-recognition technology is going to merge every security camera everywhere into a single data network that tracks everything you do outside of your home. And this isn't going to just be a tool of governments. Did you know that Google & Facebook already keep profiles on people who have never had Google or Facebook accounts? You see, Google and Facebook aren't really an internet-search-provider and a social-media-platform—those are just free services they provide in order to attract eyeballs and gather data. What they actually are is advertising companies. The biggest in the world. So big—in fact—that they're slowly but surely strangling the life out of everything else in the world that relies on advertising. Television, radio, newspapers and magazines. All of them are trying to survive by abandoning the sinking ship of legacy media and diving into the online space; only to drown in a vast empty sea with insufficient ad-revenue to keep them afloat. Google and Facebook control the eyeballs, they control the data, and thus—they control the advertisers.

How you get tracked online

The internet runs on advertising, so there is enormous pressure to gather as much data on users as possible. When you load a web-page, your browser transmits a bunch of data to the web server, including your operating system, screen-size and colour constraints, what your browser is capable of rendering, etc. This is known as a browser fingerprint. To get some idea of what your browser is telling websites, visit Panopticlick or Am I Unique or Browser-Print and run a test. They don't all check for exactly the same stuff, so visit all three and compare, if you're so inclined.

On top of that, more and more pages now track exactly what you do while you're on them. Every keystroke and mouse movement gets recorded. Did you hover over a link for 6 seconds but not actually click it. They know.

Also, when you visit a site through a Google search, Google tells the site what you searched for in order to get to that page. That's fuckin' creepy in its own right, if you ask me.

Which brings us to cookies. When you "log in" to a website, what's actually happening is that the site is handing your browser an ID card, and then, every time your browser asks the site for something, it flashes this card so that the site knows who you are. This ID card is called a cookie. It's not a bad system, except now, every time you load a web page, it hands you a cookie, whether you're logging into it or not. Not only that, but it also hands you a cookie for every one of its business partners and every advertiser it uses too. As you can imagine, you're browser is probably carrying around hundreds, or thousands of these little buggers, like a dog carries fleas. The interconnectedness of advertising networks makes it possible to track people across websites that seemingly have nothing to do with each other. And as you can imagine, it also gives Google and Facebook a power that borders on omniscience.

Oh, and before I forget, there's also your IP address. It's not really a great way to track people, since addresses can change relatively frequently, but don't think that means it doesn't get recorded along with everything else.

Who cares?

So, what are the implications of living in a world of "big data"? Well, first of all, let's not forget that the job of advertising companies is to sell you shit. And frankly, that's just fuckin' annoying. As far as I'm concerned, the less advertising I have to look at, the better. Apart from that though, here's a few rather disorganised thoughts that I have on the matter:

• Once this data is collected, it's not just going to be used for advertising. Any and every company that can make use of it will be bidding for access, and data brokering is already a multi-million dollar industry. After all, it's financially irresponsible not to milk a revenue stream for every penny you can get.
• Standardised pricing is going to disappear. I was listening to a podcast today in which the tech press were talking about Uber (you know, that company that pretends it's not a taxi service so they can avoid regulation and licensing fees). Apparently, they're going to start leveraging all the data they have on customers in order to start setting prices according to "what they think the individual can afford and would be willing to pay". This is not the first instance I've heard of this.
• Facebook and Google aren't just draining the news media of their revenue, they're actively replacing them. This is bad. You may have heard that recently, Facebook ran an experiment where they intentionally messed with regular punters' news feeds in order to see how it affected the subjects' behaviour. What you may not know, is that a few years ago, Google partnered with Al-Jazeera and the US and Qatari governments to develop a news app for mobile phones that filtered out positive stories about the Syrian govt and negative stories about the Syrian rebels. Neither of these are cases of creating "fake news", so much as they're about deciding what to show and what not to show—effectively lying through omission. 2017 was also the first US presidential election that featured political ads on Facebook which could be specifically tailored to an individual and shown to them at a point in time that they were judged to be most susceptible. Some people are claiming that this was instrumental in Trump's victory. Whatever the case, this is going to be a bigger threat to democracy that Rupert Murdoch … and that's saying something.
• Once this data exists, hackers are going to be doing everything they can to get a hold of it. It's also going to be very tempting for rogue employees to sell on the black market. This is going to be a bonanza for anyone engaged in identity theft or extortion.
• So long as people keep filming themselves naked and having sex, incidents like "The Fappening" are going to happen over and over again.
• I don't want prospective employers, clients, and competitors being able to fish through my entire personal history.
• People get convicted based on the weight of circumstantial evidence all the time. I don't want my GPS co-ordinates, or security camera footage of me being in a certain place on a certain date, or my credit-card history, or my browser history, getting me gaoled for something I didn't do.

What can you do?

Well, when it comes to the real world, sadly, not much. However, when it comes to the online world … sadly, not much. Not much that's practical, anyway. I could say "stop using Facebook and Google", but that can be a pretty big ask for a lot of people. I love Youtube, and hell, this blog is hosted by a subsidiary of Google. Maybe it's more realistic to say "use Facebook and Google as little as possible". For instance, use DuckDuckGo or StartPage for web searches, and get your news from actual news-sites, rather than through your Facebook feed.

You can delete your cookies periodically. If you go into your browser settings, you should be able to set your cookies to delete every time you close your browser. Also, you should be able to turn off "third party cookies". This still let's websites hand you cookies, but stops them from loading you up with cookies from every Tom, Dick, and Harry in their affiliates network. Actually, uBlockO, which I talked about yesterday, might do this by default.

You can use your browser's privacy mode. It has its own—separate—cookie stash, which it empties every time you switch out of it. Or you can go a step further and use a second browser. And if you're willing to go that far, I recommend looking into the Tor Browser, which does everything it can to hide your identity. Personally, I use both the Tor Browser and a stand-alone VPN service; however, I have noticed that a lot of sites now block Tor traffic, and more and more of them are blocking the VPN traffic as well.

Ultimately, if you want to attain any measure of privacy online, you're going to have to layer as many of these practises as you can. And even then, it's probably an exercise in pushing shit uphill. At the end of the day, there's just too much money and power at stake. … And on that cheery note, I think we'll leave it there. Let us know if you have any questions, and I'll see you tomorrow.

As far as metaphors go, I doubt this one even rises to the level of "ham-fisted". You get the idea though.

Day 142: Attack Vectors

The only way to keep your computer 100% safe is to not use it. With enough technical knowledge, however; you can achieve a safety level that's pretty decent … but that post belongs on a different blog with a different audience—and would preferably be written by an actual security expert. Today, we'll just be looking at some basic things you can do to at least get your security level out of the toilet.

Phishing

This is probably the most basic of attack methods. Some Indian cunt rings you up and tells you they've detected a virus coming from you computer, or some Nigerian dickhead sends you an email asking you to help them secure a small fortune, or some Ukrainian fuckwit sends you an email from "your bank" along with a dodgy link. I'm sure you've all seen this sort of thing before.

Be on guard when it comes to emails. Don't click on links to any site that you then have to log into. Also, don't do a Google search for your bank and then blindly click on the first link that comes up. Enter addresses directly into your browser's address bar, or use a bookmark.

The dodgy phone calls—I'm sure you're smart enough to handle on your own.

On a side note; I would like to encourage you not to leave too much personally identifiable information laying around the internet. Highly-skilled con-artists can use it to bluff their way into all sorts of things, including taking control of your phone-number (yes, people have taken over other people's phone-numbers by simply bullshitting a Telecom employee). This is ONE reason why phone based authentication (we'll text you a code) is a bad idea.

Trojans

A trojan is a nasty piece of software that hides in a host file, and then runs when you open said file. They often come in emails, attached to .doc and .pdf files.

Be wary of email attachments, even those that come from people you know. Your mates probably aren't trying to infect you, but you never know what they've been doing with their machines. Also, if you're using a stand-alone email client, have it set to display as plain-text rather than HTML, and make sure it doesn't open attachments automatically. And don't use Microsoft Outlook if you can help it.

Worms

These are probably the scariest of the lot, because the only thing you have to do to catch one is hook your computer up to the internet (or even an intranet). These buggers crawl networks under their own power, looking for vulnerable machines to infect. The only thing you can do is have defences sufficient enough to keep them out.

First of all, don't use Windows XP. Second, keep your operating system up to date. Every operating system vendor releases security patches. Install them.

Apart from that, it's hard to give reasonable advice that normal people will be able to follow. If your internet comes in through a desktop router, you need to keep that secure up to date as well (yes, worms also infect routers), but this isn't something that most folks know how to do on their own. A firewall is a good idea—but again—most folks don't know how to configure one properly.

One thing I would recommend is going to Steve Gibson's grc.com/shieldsup and running a scan to see how visible your network is from the internet. Unfortunately, most people aren't going to have the skills to act on this info, but it's handy to know anyway.

Browser Exploits

This is the big one. See, web browsers are becoming operating systems in their own right. You can already kind of see where this is going by looking at Google's Chrome-book laptops—which are basically the first step towards replacing the operating system with the browser entirely. Think about it: apart form rendering HTML, they also open picture, video and audio files; PDF files; increasingly, they have 3D rendering and real-time peer-to-peer networking capabilities; and of course, they run code. Some websites now, are more functional than applications running directly on the desktop. People even build virtual-machines to play old video games directly in the browser. In fact, almost every time you load a web page these days, your browser is downloading and rendering multimedia content and executing computer code and doing all sorts of rubbish behind the scenes that you wouldn't believe. What this means, is that it takes a LOT of software to make a decent web browser; and as we've already discussed, the more software you have, the more exploits you inevitably end up with.

Unfortunately, this also means that every single web page you visit is a possible source of infection. Some cyber-crims specifically target web-servers; the intention being that once they infect a web-site, they can then infect everybody who visits said web-site with a vulnerable browser. Others go after ad-networks; creating infected advertisements, that then get run on any website that uses said ad-network. And then—of course—there's the web-sites that are just run by scummy cunts who are out to get you. A lot of porn site fall into this category.

First of all don't use Internet Explorer. I dunno about Edge, but in any case, I'd stick with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari—for the Mac users. Second, keep your browser up to date. Every good browser vendor releases security patches. Install them.

Third, avoid websites that you think might be a bit dodgy. I know, it's hard to know if something looks dodgy until you've been there. Just use your common sense.

Content blocking. It's a touchy subject in the online world, but, well, fuck the online world—I'm more interested in keeping nasty shit of my computer. I have recommended in the past—and continue to recommend—uBlock Origin by Raymond Hill. By default, it functions more or less like a traditional ad-blocker, but it also has an advanced mode, which lets you block anything and everything you want to (as well as the stuff you probably don't). Personally, I think it's well worth playing with until you get the hang of it. That way, you can block everything by default, and then selectively enable only the stuff you want on the websites where you want it. uBlockO runs in Firefox and Chrome. For me, I do most of my browsing inside a virtual machine; but in my opinion, content blocking is the best and most reasonable course of action for a majority of the normies out there.

A brief word about anti-virus software

There isn't a single commercial anti-virus product on the market today that I would recommend to regular home users. If you're running an email server or something … maybe. You know how we've talked about all software having bugs? Well, guess what anti-virus software is made of. Yes, these days, people actually write computer viruses that target anti-virus software.

If you're using MS Windows, just use their Security-Essentials package; it's as good as anything else on the market.

Okay, I think that wraps it up. Questions down bellow, etc—I'm off to bed now. G'night.

There's a security metaphor in there somewhere.

Day 141: Now the rellies are gone, guess what I got to do with my Sunday?

Also, try guessing what you get if you do an image search for French maids …

Day 140: Cyber-Crime Made Simple

So, I finally got rid of the last of my rellies. Back to business, I guess.

Warning: This post eschews technical accuracy for simplicity and is intended ONLY to give non-techie people a basic understanding of things. Do not attempt to use as an authoritative source—severe embarrassment may result.

"All software has bugs in it". This is the mantra that you will hear any modern software developer chant when questioned over why their software has bugs in it; and—to a large extent—it's true. Theoretically, it's possible to write flawless software, but I can't think of anyone who actually does; not when you're writing anything of any size or complexity, and especially not when you're writing to a deadline. Normally, what happens with software is that it gets released, users use it, they find bugs and report them, and the author of the software releases updates to fix the bugs. This is why your operating system and your web-browser are always asking to be restarted. To give you an idea of how bug-riddled your average piece of software is, Windows XP was released in 2001; it is 16 years old; and people are still finding major bugs in it. A lot of bugs do really annoying things, like corrupting your data, or causing your applications to crash; but today, we're going to be talking about an especially nasty kind of bug; the kind that allows a malicious person to control your computer remotely, over the internet. We're going to call these bugs "exploits".

Over the years, the discovery of exploits has become an industry in its own right. Broadly speaking, there are three main groups who pay people to look for exploits: the makers of the software, who wish to fix the exploits; governments and law enforcement, who wish to access the computers of criminals and rival governments; and criminals, who wish to leverage the exploits to make money. Not only do these three groups employ people to look for exploits, they also buy exploits from third-parties, in what is basically an online marketplace. As you may imagine, the existence of such a marketplace has caused businesses to spring up which essentially specialise in "exploit brokering". Also, it's important to remember that all of these groups are made up of individuals who have their own interests, may move between the different camps, or may have their feet in two or more camps at any one time. So, for instance, a private researcher in Korea may discover an exploit in Windows; he might sell it to a broker in Brazil, who sells it to the CIA; and then someone at the CIA might (illegally) sell it to a Romanian crime syndicate. And of course, since all of these groups know that they all have exploits that the other doesn't, they are all perpetually trying to steal from each other as well.

Governments

Every government that has the ability to hack into the computers of a foreign government or a foreign corporation, does so. No exceptions. However, this is usually for the purpose of information gathering, and examples of governments provably "attacking" each other in this way are rare. Any time you hear a government (usually the USA) accusing another government of a "cyber-attack" (usually China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea) it's more likely that someone is scapegoating someone else for political reasons.

Criminals

Apart from identity/credit-card theft, there are two big money-earners for cyber-criminals; and both of them boil down to extortion.

Ransom-Ware

Ransom-ware involves a malicious piece of software getting onto your system, encrypting all of your files, and then demanding that you pay a ransom to have your files unencrypted. Ransom-ware has only been on the scene for a few years, but has quickly become a favourite revenue source for cyber-crims. Unfortunately, if it's written properly, there's no way of getting your files back, short of paying up. Now, more-so than ever, it's important to keep multiple backups of your important files. And don't leave your external hard-drives plugged in unless you're using them.

DDOSing BotNets

This one takes a little more explaining. Every time you do something on a web-page, your browser sends a message to the web-server where that web-page is hosted, and the web-server sends some information (usually a copy of the web-page) back. Web-servers, and the infrastructure that connects them to the internet, can only handle so-many requests per second. So, if millions of people request a web-page at exactly the same time, most of them aren't going to get a response. Big sites, like Facebook, get around these limitations by having copies of their data duplicated on hundreds of servers spread all over the world, but smaller sites simply can't afford to do that.

So, if you can flood a web-server with millions of requests, you can effectively take a web-site offline. Now, if you did this to a business that makes most of its money through its web-site, it would give you some pretty hefty leverage with which to extort money from said business. The question is, how do you produce enough requests to flood the server; after all, you can't do it from a single computer. Well, the best way to do it, is to write a computer virus, and get it to infect hundreds of thousands of computers all around the world. Then, you can get your network of infected computers (known as a bot-net) to start sending requests to the victim, each individual computer contributing so little to the attack that the owner will probably never realise that their machine is infected, much less that it's being used for nefarious criminal activities. This is known as a DDOS or "Distributed Denial of Service" attack.

Believe it or not, there are some people who actually rent out the use of their bot-nets. So, for instance, if I was running "Alex's Online Shoes" and suddenly I found myself in competition with "Squib's Online Shoes", I could pay a few thousand dollars to have somebody else knock this pesky newcomer off the interwebs for me. This is know as "DDOS as a Service".

The Internet of Turds

"Internet of Things" (IoT) is a marketing buzz-word that describes the recent trend of manufacturers shoving cheap, mass-produced, internet-connected computers into everything from televisions, to video-recorders, radios, air-conditioners, refrigerators, ovens, microwaves, automobiles, web-cams, security-cameras, baby-monitors, walkie-talkies, headphones, picture-frames, light-bulbs, door-bells, toilets (yes toilets), and—of course—desktop routers. As we discussed above, these gizmos—like everything else—come complete with exploits baked into the software. However, unlike your browser or operating system, most of these things never receive security updates; meaning that the internet is now OVERFLOWING with easily-exploitable computers. As you can imagine, what we are now seeing is bot-nets that are exponentially larger than anything we've ever seen before; potentially even big enough to knock a FaceBook or a Google off line. That brief outage we saw last year was a result of one such bot-net.

While there's not much you can do if you're targeted by a DDOS attack, my advice is to avoid buying anything that has the word "smart" in the description. For the most part, "smart" is usually just a synonym for "needlessly and insecurely connected to the internet".

I hope somebody found this informative. Feel free to ask any comments in the questions.

Day 139: Some serious thoughts on Sexbots

I've listened to a number of docos on the sex industry over the years, and one thing that's always stuck out to me is the number of sex workers who say that a good portion of what they do doesn't even involve sex—that heaps of blokes are just desperate for a cuddle or someone to talk to. A few years ago, I heard that this demographic had grown so large in Japan that there are now sex workers there who don't do sex at all (which, I guess, means they're no longer technically sex workers?). A few weeks ago, I was listening to an interview with a cam-girl (someone who does online sex shows from home) and she said the clients who often pay the most are just looking for a chat. Finally, just the other day, I was listening to a doco about a company that manufactures lifelike sex dolls, and the bloke they interviewed was saying that they're pouring heaps into developing artificial intelligence, because the one thing their customers are desperate for is dolls that can hold a conversation and express "love"*.

Now, we've all heard speculation that at some point, there'll be robots to take care of the elderly, right? Well, at some point, I'm going to be an old lady with nobody to take care of me, and it has crossed my mind that—depending on how the technology evolves—this is what I might end up with. I dunno why, but for some reason, for the first time ever, I'm thinking that maybe a robot companion doesn't sound so bad.

What do youse think?

Despite the picture, this isn't a joke. I'm actually thinking that having a robot with a basic personality, that can help with daily tasks, and call an ambulance if I have a fall, and won't beat me up and rob me, may not be so bad.

* Another thing they're programming the sex dolls with, is expressions of jealousy. Yes, apparently blokes want their sex dolls to act catty when talking about real women.

Day 138: A Big Chopper

Well, this one turned out a bit shit.

Day 137: Another Quick Doodle

Ooga-Booga.

Day 136: Getting there eventually

So, there's been a bit of a health emergency in the (extended) family, and I've had rellies hanging around my place for the last few days. However, things should be cleared up soon. No need to worry. Should be back to regular programming soon.

Day 135: Further Setbacks

Family stuff is ongoing. Here's a quick doodle of one of my cousins because I couldn't think of anything else to do.

Day 134: Setback

Some family stuff came up, so the big Eurovision post has been pushed back to tomorrow and the cyber security stuff to Tuesday. In the meantime, here's some animated pixel-art of Epic Sax Guy. Enjoy.

Now I'll need to do something else for tomorrow :(

Day 133: WWIII

The other day, Squib asked about my WWIII predictions—so—here we go:

North Korea

As a general rule of thumb, it's usually safe to assume that people in positions of power want to stay in power. So, unless Kimiii comes down with a serious case of depression, we probably don't have to worry about him going on the warpath, unprovoked. That doesn't mean there's nothing to worry about though. See, NK has short-range nuclear weapons that it could launch at South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, etc; but, over the years, they've also been working on long-range nuclear weapons that could hit USA, Europe, or anywhere else in the world; and, while they're not there yet, they have been making progress.

It's my understanding that a lot of the fellas who work at the Pentagon consider this a red line, and—more so than Trump himself—the danger is that some of these blokes are going to be in Trump's ear-hole, telling him that he needs to act NOW, and that Asia's East coast is an acceptable loss if it keeps America safe.

China, Russia, Iran

The United States is a country that imports nearly everything, exports fuck all, is about 20 trillion dollars in the hole, and gets about a half a trillion deeper every year. So, why doesn't the value of the US dollar collapse? Well, because everybody uses it … whether they want to or not. A lot of the world's commodities are traded in $US, most large international bodies deal in $US, and—bizarrely—the global financial system is set up so that a lot of transactions—including those that don't appear to involve $US AT ALL—actually get turned into $US during processing. The fact that everyone needs $US, means that $US always have value.

However, there is a movement afoot to get the world off the $US. Spearheaded by Russia & China, but also including Iran, India, Brazil, and a number of developing countries. This, more than any military arsenal, is the most serious threat the United States faces. This is why—I believe—you see so much rhetoric coming out of the US about how horrible Russia & China are (and yet, they stay remarkably quiet when it comes to countries like Saudi Arabia). And I think that if the $US was ever put in serious danger, the US wouldn't hesitate to use some sort of flimsy pretense to kick off a hot war.

As far as I can see, WWIII has already started, it's just that up until now, it's been largely contained to the financial realm.

Indonesia

The Muslim world appears to be going through a period of religious regression at the moment, and I'm seriously worried about some of the shit that's been coming out of our neighbour to the North. If the US does suffer an economic collapse, I think we're going to be in big trouble down here. Our defense force is a joke and we don't have any big bombs of our own.

***

Well, that's my view of things. What're your thoughts? Tomorrow it's the big Eurovision wrap-up, and Monday I'm planning to do a post on the recent rash of computer ransom-wear, and also answer Squib's question from six months ago about worldwide internet outages.

This coulda done with another ten minutes of work, but fuck it, Eurovision's on.

Day 132: Anonymous

I intend to do a post stating my thoughts on the likelihood of nuclear war between North Korea & USA, but first, I thought I'd do this little post about the "group" Anonymous. I'm hoping it might clear a few things up. But first, let's talk a little bit about public key encryption:

Public key encryption is a nifty little invention that allows you to generate a pair of keys (two files full of cryptographic data). One of these files, you put in a safe place and guard with your life (this one is known as the private key); the other one, you distribute to the public (known as the public key for obvious reasons).

A common use for public key encryption is the exchange of private messages. You see, anyone who has a copy of the public key can take some data and encrypt it in such a way that only the person who has the private key can decrypt it. However, that's not all public key encryption is good for. The person who holds the private key can also take some data and use it to generate a unique string of random characters, known as a cryptographic signature. Then, anyone who has a copy of the public key, can use this signature to verify that the data actually came from the person they thought it was coming from and has not been tampered with. In this way, public key cryptography allows someone who wishes to remain anonymous online, to establish an identity and transmit messages to the public that the public can verify as coming from that person and not one or more imposters. Cryptographic signatures are used by many, many individuals, groups, and businesses; particularly those that produce software.

Why is any of this important. Well, because Anonymous has never used public key encryption. Because Anonymous is not really a group. Anonymous was founded as an open identity that anyone is free to use. Anyone who wants to be Anonymous IS Anonymous. That's right, if you or I put up a Guy Fawkes avatar and start calling ourselves Anonymous, we are doing so just as legitimately as anyone else who puts up a Guy Fawkes avatar and starts calling themselves Anonymous. Therefore, what Anonymous actually is, is a bunch of disparate individuals, some of whom sometimes co-ordinate, and some of whom have nothing to do with each other. Some of them are elite hackers who actually know stuff, some of them are conspiratorial nutjobs, and some of them are outright trolls.

From what I can gather, the video Squib saw originally came from this Youtube account. If you want to, you can have a scroll through this person's catalogue of videos and decide how seriously you want to take them. It's a pity the news article you read couldn't have done this.

Gay Fawkes … but only if you buy her a drink.

Day 131: I'll Bee Back

Maybe tomorrow morning.

Day 130: Quick Sketch

I can't gin around tonight. I've gotta get to bed so I can get up at sparrow's fart tomorrow. Goodnight all.

Day 129: Lack of black makes yellow press see red

So, the Labor party apparently ran an ad that didn't have any coloured people in it. As a not-quite-white person myself, I'd just like to ask … who gives a shit?

Day 128: Le Penis Out!

There's life in the Union yet.

Day 127: Sicky

Well, it's as close as I've come for a while. I don't feel sick-sick, but I did spend the whole day in bed. And I'm going right back there now. See you tomorrow.

Day 126: Oops.

I forgot to watch the women's test between the Australian & Kiwi women. The nieces will not be impressed. Having women's sport on telly has been a big deal for them this year.

In any case, Eurovision is next week! … sans Sam and Julia though :-(

Day 125: Support Call

Can you find the close button?
It's got an "X" on it.
Either red or grey.
Square
It should be in the top right corner.
Are you looking at the right window?
A window is like a square box that holds an individual application.
Yeah, each window should have its own close button.
…
Look, I don't know what "that thing" means. I can't see your screen. You've got to describe it to me.
…
Nah, that doesn't sound right. Okay, let's start again from the beginning.

I spend so much time being called "aunty" these days that sometimes I forget that there's still a whole generation that thinks of me as "the niece who answers questions about computer stuff".

Day 124: Pencil Sketch

Plumbing new depths of laziness. If the pencil is too light for you to make it out, it's a shitty robot made out of a bar-fridge and an old telly. Which might just make it the most useful robot ever built.

Day 123: Jiggle Physics

Way back in the '90s (can you believe that 1990 was 27 years ago already?) I read an article in a computer mag (can you believe people used to read articles printed on paper!?) titled "something, something, jiggle physics", or something along those lines. It was about a game developer who had made a game with a female character whose breasts moved "realistically" (can you remember when computer mags were like lads' mags, but with a bit of computery stuff them?). Anyway, the article was basically taking the piss out of it because the "realistic" movement pretty much boiled down to these things flailing around like they were trying to leap of the character's chest. I remember laughing hysterically (I kinda miss those times, when publications didn't have to be so sensitive about this shit).

What's the point of bringing up a magazine article from a quarter of a century ago? Well, today I met a woman who suddenly brought it bouncing back into my mind. I don't know what was going on under her shirt, but every time she moved her body—even slightly—her boobs swang around in a manner that almost made them seem like they had a life of their own. Now, I'm not someone who spends a great deal of time staring at boobs, but even I found them utterly fascinating. There were times when I actually wanted to stop and ask her how she was doing it, as I imagine it'd be a nifty trick to be able to whip out in certain situations. Instead, I decided to act professionally and help her get her office computers up and running while she filled me in on her opinions of Donald Trump, nuclear war, Muslims, and the upcoming budget.

Sadly, I guess that means I'll go to my grave wondering—but at the very least satisfied in the knowledge that there are still mysteries out there that science may never explain.

There's a new minor version of Krita out, so I thought I'd give that a whirl. It's the first time I've used Krita since—um—sometime last year? As you can see, it's probably going to take some time to get back into the groove.

Day 122: Rushed Goat

Busy night. I had to doodle this quickly while I was on the phone.

Day 121: Do you ever feel like an extra in a drama flick?

Here's a little story from a week or so ago:

I was waiting in line at a Subway—because, let's face it—if you have to eat fast food, there's worse options out there. Anyway, the woman in front of me was in the process of giving her order when a voice cut through the insipid pop music that was playing at an irritating volume.

"Oh my God!"

The woman in front of me looked over at the woman who'd just walked through the door, and gasped, before running over and throwing her arms around her.

"I can't believe you're here!"

As they hugged and wept, I noticed there was enough of a similarity between the two women for them to have been related, but I couldn't say for sure.

Then they left without buying anything, leaving everyone in the shop to wonder what the fuck had just happened.

What does it say about the world we live in that my first thought was to look around for a camera, just in case someone was filming a reality TV show or something.