1. MESBASE: 102/a

    24 December 2011

    DATE/TIME: 00:00:01 / 12-24-2011

    AUTHOR: >>STRUCTURE ERROR 0208<<

    ROUTING: >>ROUTING ERROR B092<<

    SUBJECT: <unknown>

    MESSAGE:

    Good morning, world.  Welcome back.  Play nice.

    -Saeletra

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  2. Potential side effects of SOPA.

    23 December 2011

    Note: Updated January 4 2012 in response to a comment by Jamie Zawinski, proprietor of the DNA Lounge.

    I haven't been writing about SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) or PIPA (the PROTECT IP Act) because, frankly, I've been too busy trying to fight them. To keep abreast of them following the #SOPA hashtag on Twitter is really the best way to go about it because things are changing so rapidly. Between the people watching the live stream of the markup hearings and people who are actually attending the hearings and livetweeting (I'm looking at you, @EFFlive) things are changing …

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  3. The times in which we live.

    14 December 2011

    Can you remember ever having lived in a time of peace?

    Seriously. Give it a little thought.

    This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, and I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that I can't think of a single period of time beyond a week or two in all the years I've been alive that I've known anything like peace in the geopolitical sense. I was born in the late 1970's with the horrors of the Vietnam War fading slowly in popular memory. Even though I was too young to really record any memories the Vietnam War was …

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  4. Mesh networks, censorship resistence, and free ponies.

    01 December 2011

    A couple of weeks ago the crowd over at Reddit started putting together a project that's been referred to online as /r/darknetplan, an effort to build a completely decentralized, encrypted wireless mesh network that is censorship-resistent and anonymized. They kick around a lot of ideas in their discussion threads (mostly links to other articles, with discussion of each on-site) and the project's IRC server is packed with interested people. Now, I'm not one to slam anyone who wants to give such a project a shot but they came under some scrutiny from a blogger whose opinion is that it's …

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  5. The holiday season, burnout, and sundry other matters.

    29 November 2011

    Well, the holiday season is upon us once again. Not that you could fail to notice unless you've been living in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and your only link to the outside world is a 300bps modem connection over shortwave radio. As it's wont to be down here, the weather in the DC metroplex is a little erratic, swerving drunkenly from shirtsleeves comfortable to bone-chillingly cold to damp and rainy almost on a daily basis. Lyssa and I took a few days off last week to drive back to Pennsylvania and visit our respective families for Thanksgiving and …

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  6. LRAD information archive.

    17 November 2011

    For the past couple of years sonic weapons called LRADs (Long Range Accoustic Devices) have been increasingly deployed against protestors in the United States (here is footage from Pittsburgh shot in 2009 (warning: remove your earphones!)). A step up from mere marketing tricks that make you suspect that you're going mad, these sonic weapons pump out enough sound pressure to cause permanant hearing damage at a distance of a couple of hundred feet. Earplugs don't work because the sound is loud enough to be conducted into one's inner ears through the bones of the skull. Getting behind hard cover probably …

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  7. The Occupy Movement is the largest sousveillance effort in recorded history.

    17 November 2011

    I'm not going to recap the Occupy Movement because there is, quite simply, too much to it to pack into even a one paragraph summary. Suffice it to say that the political system has, if I may be blunt, failed too many people one too many times, and the reaction of the people has been to gather and camp out anywhere and everywhere. Town squares and city parks are occupied. Colleges are occupied. Big cities (like New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, DC) are occupied. Little cities (I really don't know what constitutes 'little' in the United States, so …

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