Social Media Tracking. How the U.S. Government is Spying on You.

We've probably all heard the stories. Don't say certain words on the phone when talking to someone, because the  Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) will show up at your door uninvited. Well its not likely those rumors are actually true, though not many would actually test such a thing. It's a little like standing in the mirror and saying "Bloody Mary" three times, everyone gets to the second one, but stops before the third. Why take a chance, you know? Well when it comes to FBI wiretapping, with a warrant, either issued as part of an open criminal investigation, or a FISA warrant requiring you meet certain guidelines of being involved in espionage, this kind of story seems silly. In Katz vs. United States, 1967, the United States Supreme Court ruled regardless of the location, a conversation is protected from unreasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment if it is made with a “reasonable expectation of privacy”. So unless you fall under the two categories I've already specified, you can expect your conversations on the telephone to be private.


But what about the Internet? It's been a long standing tradition that you DO NOT have any such expectation of privacy when connected to the Internet, after all your ISP sits in between you and the Internet, so you would expect that they could be spying anytime. We all accept that our ISPs are probably spying on us, though not like we think. They already have the most useful information about us, Name, Address, Phone Number, Credit Card, Bank Information, and Social Security Number. They already have enough information to find out anything about you, and you gave it to them willingly, a sacrifice for a connection to the Web. Though they probably log all sorts of information, its only likely tied to an IP address, which if needed can be later converted to a name.


Not many people expect the Government to be tracking them, after all according to statistics there are over 245,000,000 people using the Internet in the United States. That is a lot of people to watch, so most of us expect that the government only tracks people who are under criminal investigation. In January it was revealed that the FBI was looking for programmers who could write Facebook and Twitter monitoring software. People concerned with privacy immediately sounded alarms. However, this isn't the first time this has happened.

In February 2011, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that the agency planned to implement a program that would monitor media content, including social media data. The proposed initiatives would gather data from "online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards" and disseminate information to "federal, state, local, and foreign government and private sector partners." EPIC immediately filed a freedom of information act (FOIA) lawsuit against the DHS. The House Committee on Homeland Security's subcommittee on counterterrorism and intelligence recently held a hearing on the matter of what was revealed in this lawsuit. The program is called "Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative System of Records" and it collects information available on social media, shares it with other government agencies (including those in other countries) and private companies, and retains it for five years. 

It was revealed a company called General Dynamics was contracted by the government to spy on individuals, though they were not invited to the hearing themselves, Chief Privacy Officer Mary Ellen Callahan of the DHS was invited. Subcommittee Chairman Patrick Meehan grilled Callahan for sometime on the subject of the government spying methods. He wanted to know how the government was protecting the information being collected, and how he could be assured the government wasn't using the information to target individuals who believed they were part of a kind of quasi private community, often found on message boards and online forums. Callahan revealed, that the information was being used to identify public dissent of the government. Representative Meehan then asked "What can we do to assure that the activities of monitoring are not going to create some kind of chilling effect on individuals willingness and readiness not only to comment, but frankly, to make comments which may be critical of the government." To that, Callahan had no real answer. "To be very clear, it is the what, not the who that is being identified and that we are concerned with…we are just focusing on the event, the situation, and not worried about the individual." Of course looking at the agency's own documents, it appears that was a lie. The document which was submitted, says:

"Names of anchors, news casters, or on-scene reporters who are known or identified as reporters in their post or article who use traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed"

Callahan reveals that the use of keywords and software is being used to capture the information. She was then asked about the Chain of Command, of who is in charge? Callahan skirted the question by repeating the previous statement. The contempt on the part of the DHS was clear. She ended by saying she would get back to them with better answers for their questions.

So its pretty clear the government is using data-mining techniques to gain information about individuals through the use of keywords on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, but also on message boards and websites where you may have logged in as a security measure to protect privacy. Well consider this, its pretty clear the government has at their disposal methods that allow them the ability to spy on anything you type anywhere on the Internet, this by itself has a chilling effect on privacy. After all, you expect certain things to be private like email, even though they are truly not. The White House just proposed a bill that would help individuals secure their privacy online, which kind of gave me a chuckle since the DHS answers to the President of the United States. So its with full knowledge that at the same time President Obama talks about protecting people's privacy he is fully aware the government is violating it.

One thing that seemed pretty unbalanced is the line where the DHS states that the information is to be shared with government agencies as well as private companies. Hmm, who could that be? Well I don't think the government is spying on people so it can sell the information to companies to increase ad revenue. It's in my opinion pretty clear that this is a way for the government to give the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) the information they need to find pirates without needing warrants.

When was it that our government started the long con? Was it under George Bush? Bill Clinton? or maybe it was long ago, even before the Internet was created. I don't know, I don't think we will ever really know that answer. The truth is our government was founded on principles that simply do not exist today. Men of moral character who truly cared for their nation fought to secure it, and give to its inhabitants freedom from tyranny. Looking at our government today, its pretty clear that moral character plays no part in any of our representatives minds. The moral principles that may be a reason to get into public office, soon disappear when faced with the reality of opportunity. An opportunity of greed can corrupt even those who consider themselves of the highest moral character.

Each day we move ever so closer to being that Police state, except it won't be a typical police state, because this one will be run by a corporation. And just imagine that day when you need help and you call 911 only to be put on hold, listening to music and interrupted by a voice that tells you, "Your call is important to us, please stay on the line and a representative will be with you shortly."

"Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty." - Edward Gibbon

I wanted to include a list of the keywords that your government is using to red flag you online, but I thought if I just post every single keyword in my blog the FBI might show up at my door, so instead I created a little video that you should watch. Pay attention to some of the words they look for, it will amaze you and scare you at the same time. A little background about these keywords, the DHS breaks them into categories in their documents, so I had to type everything out in individual frames, all 350 keywords they look for. You will see them broken down by the categories they break them down into. I recommend you watch this in fullscreen mode so you can see the words as they might be small if you watch it in the box provided. You can do this by clicking the tiny box at the bottom of the video on the right-hand side. Hovering over it, you will see it say Full screen.

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Anonymous Hacker Group Announces Plan to Shut Down the Internet on March 31, but Can They?

You may have heard of a group of hackers who hit the seen back in 2003 calling themselves Anonymous. Although much of their time was spent in secret, in 2008 they starting creating a fuss by using distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks to take down major corporate websites. Since then, they have begun a campaign that targets major corporations in a fight against piracy and governments who align themselves with these corporations. On January 19, 2012, one day after the major internet blackout against SOPA, the Justice Department and FBI raided the offices of MegaUpload and shut them down. Anonymous retaliated by taking down the websites of the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Universal Music Group and Broadcast Music, Inc. Very quickly these sites were brought down with a relentless assault of packets, an attack that lasted days.


February 12th, 2012 someone representing themselves as a member of the Anonymous group posted some content on the pastebin website. In the message the hacker said some interesting things like:

To protest SOPA, Wallstreet, our irresponsible leaders and the beloved

bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs out of

sheer sadistic fun, On March 31, anonymous will shut the Internet down.

He continues on with plans of how the attack will take place, including a list of the 13 rootserver addresses, the internet uses to resolve names to ip addresses. The servers below are the 13 primary DNS root server addresses that propagate resolution requests to the authoritative servers. 

1. A       198.41.0.4
2. B       192.228.79.201
3. C       192.33.4.12
4. D       128.8.10.90
5. E       192.203.230.10
6. F       192.5.5.241
7. G       192.112.36.4
8. H       128.63.2.53
9. I       192.36.148.17
10. J       192.58.128.30
11. K       193.0.14.129
12. L       199.7.83.42
13. M       202.12.27.33

By cutting these off the Internet, nobody will be able to perform a domain name lookup, thus disabling the HTTP Internet, which is, after all, the most widely used function of the Web. Anybody entering "http://www.google.com" or ANY other url, will get an error page, thus, they will think the Internet is down, which is, close enough. Remember, this is a protest, we are not trying to 'kill' the Internet, we are only temporarily shutting it down where it hurts the most.

I won't copy everything that is in the document, but he goes onto explain in a little detail a type of attack referred to as packet spoofing or IP spoofing. The plan is to take down the rootservers with an incidental attack, not directed at the rootservers themselves but rather compromised nameservers. The nameservers will be given the task of sending queries to the rootservers except the packets sent will have a spoofed source ip that matches the rootserver causing the packet to die on itself. They will then flood all 13 servers taking down the Internet's resolution system, after all if users can't get to Facebook, the Internet must be dead.

There is only one problem with this. It won't work. Yes, there are technically 13 ip addresses, but way more than 13 servers. Through the use of a technology called anycasting, data can be sent to a single ip address, however the closest and quickest server attached to that address actually receives it. Those 13 ip addresses are actually attached to hundreds of servers. Thus any kind of attack that flooded one of these ip addresses with data would find it likely spread over many servers, reducing its effectiveness significantly. It is very unlikely that an attack could generate enough packets to take down one of these, let alone all 13.

So now that I've settled that, let's discuss how they could actually do some harm. Well if they really have a huge botnet, which they have used before to take out major websites, they could still attack the DNS system by choosing a more appropriate target. Look any attack against the rootservers, while unlikely to actual do anything, it will set off red flags and you can bet the top security guys will be on it in no time. However, an attack at say these five particular servers might yield a promising result:

204.74.66.132

204.74.67.132

66.220.151.20

69.171.245.32

66.220.145.65

You see these are the five nameservers that are used to resolve FACEBOOK.COM. Facebook has thousands of redundant servers all setup to prevent the site from failing but an attack at its name resolution might prove to be a very effective attack vector, since there are clearly less targets and although the servers will physically be available, without name resolution, to 99% of the Internet they will be down. You see you don't have to think big in order to be effective, taking down the entire Internet is ridiculous, its very design was to be redundant so that no one server could take it down. This isn't a set of Christmas lights, its a computer network with powerful hardware and huge backbones. It's unlikely that any one attacker or even a group of attackers would have much luck in taking down more than a few servers at a time.

I just want to be clear, I'm not suggesting anyone try to take down Facebook, I was merely using them as an example and one that Anonymous has previously stated as a target as part of a global attack initiative. Now I don't agree with their methods, using denial of service attacks against anyone is a very childish act that doesn't actually accomplish anything. It only helps to solidify the position of your enemy, because if you are that rattled you need to attack their website they will assume they are getting to you. I see these kinds of attacks as ones done mostly by radicals. You know them, the ones who strap bombs to their chests and blow themselves up taking as many people with them as they can. You see they only do this because they have no other effective means of attacking their enemies. It's what happens when two parts of human evolution collide. There was once a moment in human evolution when our brains experienced a new thought, a realization that a rock could be used to sharpen the end of a stick making a spear with which to hunt. But it was on the hunt of a great animal that another quirk of evolution emerged called the Fight-or-Flight response. Even today thousands of years later while the tools of the trade have changed, the instinct to attack or flee in a scary situation has not changed. So we are left with people who are backed into a corner and left with two choices, to fight or to run, often times choosing to fight. And like thousands of years ago we use what tools we have available to us and evolve a strategy around them. The members of Anonymous are no different, they consider themselves to be under assault and when backed into a corner they must make a choice.

"The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations." - David Friedman

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Why Windows 8 Will Fail, at Least In the Desktop Market...

Well many of you are probably windows users, in fact estimates are that around 90% of all computers are running Microsoft Windows. Of that, nearly 50% of users are still using Windows XP. That means 50% of users are using Windows Vista, Windows 7, and even older versions like Windows 2000 or maybe something even earlier. If average consumers are anything, its frugal. Most consumers take a "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude, especially when it comes to something that is so expensive. The Operating System (OS) can cost 30% or more of the purchase price of a computer. Early adoption of these OSes by consumers is nearly impossible, most consumers opt to stay with what they are comfortable with, even after support has long since expired. This is probably the reason why most users are still using Windows XP today over ten years after it was introduced to consumers, its easy to use, requires little training, its very stable, and runs almost any application you throw at it. It's also full of security issues, is a major target for attack by hackers and exposes you to the world with almost no protection built in. A firewall was included with it at release but hidden to the average person, and not even enabled by default until a later service pack release. Although still considered a security risk, a well hardened Windows XP machine is still considered one of the most stable platforms to run.


As consumers purchase newer hardware they are forced into using OSes that come bundled with their hardware. Hardware manufacturers do not want to support older OSes so they deliberately do not create drivers for the older OSes, preventing a more tech savvy user from simply wiping the new OS and putting an older one in its place. After Microsoft released Windows XP, they went on to release the colossal flop Windows Vista. Windows Vista had many problems. For one, it introduced users to a new idea, security.

Most users had been using an OS which was considerably lax in security, evident by the amount of malicious software infection vectors available for it. Viruses, Worms, Trojans, Rootkits and Spyware are all part of a class of software know in the security industry as malware. Most malware created today take advantage of users through a technique called social engineering. Social engineering as it relates to computers, is the art of manipulating people into performing tasks or divulging information without even needing to meet them. A common practice is to get users to click on a link in a web page by convincing the user that its in their best interest to do so. Often times the user sees an image that shows them they are infected by a virus and they must click the image to clean it. This image will often look exactly like a security pop-up, even marked with the words "Microsoft Windows", making the user believe it to be legitimate. Once the user has clicked the image, they are infected with malware. On older OSes, even visiting the page to begin with would often cause your computer to become infected, achieved mostly through an exploit in the browser being used to view the page.

When Windows Vista shipped, it included a new tool called the User Account Control (UAC) which was enabled by default. A user only had two options available to them, enabled or disabled. Leaving the UAC enabled caused the user to get prompted by a dialog box whenever a program attempted to access a part of the OS which was considered to be protected. Protected parts of the OS included the Windows folder, the Windows Registry and the User folder. A user who upgraded from Windows XP to Windows Vista would suddenly find out that everything you install touches the OS in a way that requires privileged access. Unlike its Unix and Linux counterparts, which were designed to give access to a privileged account called Root only as needed by an application, Microsoft Windows needs it for nearly everything. While a user of Mac OSX may get prompted only once per session to give something Root access, a user of Windows Vista may get prompted frequently, often many times for the same application. This annoyed average users and caused them to turn the UAC off, leaving them vulnerable to attacks by malicious code. Windows Vista was also one of the most resource heavy OSes ever made, an average machine could simply not run the OS without needing major upgrades. Worse still, a practice of computer manufacturers has always been to include the least amount of available ram in a machine that was needed to boot the machine and include not a stick more. The minimum specs for a Windows Vista machine were extremely under estimated and so manufacturers were including as little as 256MB of ram with newly purchased machines. Sure, this would allow the machine to boot into the OS, but make it usable, was another story. Windows Vista would run "OK" on a machine with a modern processor and 2GB of ram, but anything less would cause major problems. This practice of making consumers purchase additional ram just to make their OS usable hurt the industry and many consumers would not purchase a machine that was bundled with Windows Vista.

Well no one would contend that Windows Vista wasn't pretty, its inability to grab consumers to early adoption of the OS led Microsoft to speed up its release of its next generation of OS, Windows 7. Windows 7 while still a very pretty OS, was much easier to use. It gave users more options to control the UAC, by giving them a slider to determine the frequency of dialog boxes they would receive when installing and running certain applications. While the UAC in Windows 7 still pops up occasionally, its considerably less due to changes in the OS that allow certain types of applications access to certain protected parts while not to others. Windows 7 while still having the same minimum requirements of Windows Vista was easily installable on older machines that Windows Vista was not. This allowed consumers with older machines who wanted to adopt a newer OS, the ability to install the OS without having to make considerable upgrades. Although Windows 7 runs better on a machine with a modern processor and healthy amount of ram, it is quite adequate with less. This helped Microsoft to sell more copies of the Windows 7 OS than they had sold of Windows Vista.

Most modern machines are now running Windows 7, and I'd say 99% of their owners are very happy with the OS. Although Windows 7 does run on tablets, the interface was not specifically designed for it, as compared with something like iOS, available on Apple IPads. This led Microsoft to a new design plan for their new version of Microsoft Windows, called Windows 8.

Windows 8 will release either sometime late this year or early next year and I believe it will be a colossal flop just like Windows Vista was. For one, its ugly. While this may seem like a matter of opinion and it probably is, its an opinion that most people who see it, with the exception of Microsoft Executives, actually have. With the release of a developer preview and soon to be released, consumer preview users will get a real glimpse of the new OS and find a lot has changed. No longer are we using the desktop interface users have been used to since the beginning of Microsoft Windows 95, nearly 17 years ago, but a new style of interface called Metro. Metro is layout of familiar applications that are tiled together on the screen to allow a user easier access. Gone are the desktop and start button so many of us are familiar with. Sure you can still access them, but you must go through the Metro interface to actually use them, and once you are done, the Metro interface returns to the foreground covering the screen again.

While this interface will make using a tablet much easier as the Metro icons are very large and you can drag the metro interface from screen to screen with your finger, it makes using a mouse and keyboard much harder. Microsoft has designed an OS here for one purpose, tablet computing, disregarding the market that they built their entire business on. This will be a huge mistake, for one thing, your average consumer doesn't even own a tablet, most consumers find them too expensive, choosing to purchase a new computer which is a more useful tool for doing everything from creating documents, printing documents, playing games, browsing the web, installing applications, or playing music. A computer does everything better than a tablet does, with the exception of mobility. However, since most modern mobile phones are smart phones, being able to bring things like pictures, documents, music and the Internet with you is very easy. This leaves a small market of mostly tech savvy users available to Microsoft with which to adopt a new tablet. Unfortunately for Microsoft, this market is dominated by Apple with the IPad. Anyone who has used an Ipad would not trade it in for another tablet, for one its very expensive so buying one is an investment most users are not willing to simply set aside for something new, especially since it means investing more money into something they have never used before. Had Microsoft been earlier to the game, they might have had a chance to get in on the ground floor giving users a choice and creating a market that is more diverse. But simply put, the IPad is very usable, its very pretty, and its from a company that has dominated the hardware market since it began releasing the first Ipods in 2001.

While owning Apple hardware was once considered to be a part of the market reserved for elitists and the very non-technical people, through innovation and an ability to convince consumers of a need they didn't know they had, Steve Jobs took a once failing company and turned it into an empire. Apple hardware is now found everywhere. Everyone, from the very young to the very old, own something made by Apple, whether it be a mac, Iphone, Ipod, IPad or Apple TV. Since the early days of the Apple II, Apple has always been ahead of everyone else in innovating and adopting new technology. This has allowed them to create a market for things where none had been before. This gives them both the advantage of grabbing a huge market share, but also holding on to it as newer technologies are released to compete. Because Apple has always been ahead of the game, other competitors are always playing catch up, and consumers don't really like that game. Consumers tend to stick with the technologies they are used to and companies that give them the most innovations.

In such a market Microsoft will have a huge disadvantage, one they have always had in trying to take over something they didn't dominate first with. Examples of this are the Zune, their attempt at competing with the Ipod and to a lessser extent Bing, their attempt at competing with Google. They also made this mistake when they tried to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows. Although newer versions of Internet Explorer are way better than earlier versions, they are always behind the technology curve releasing a browser that is outdated  the day it is released.

While I applaud the attempt by Microsoft to try and bring consumers more competition and a more diverse market, they should stick to the technologies they dominate the most. After all, this is their bread and butter. They dominate in OSes with Microsoft Windows as well as productivity software with Microsoft Office. Both of these are examples of Microsoft taking something they are good at and sticking to that formula. Microsoft Windows though its gone through many iterations, has maintained a look and feel to it that has made many consumers comfortable with it since its inception. Microsoft Office has similarly changed very little since its inception, only making minor changes with each release, making its most significant change to the interface with the release of Microsoft Office 2010, introducing users to the ribbon. But even with the introduction of the ribbon, the core of the software hasn't changed and that's important.

We shall see if my predictions come true by next year and I believe they will. And when they do come true Microsoft will be left in a very tough position. For the first time they will have alienated their users beyond a simple change, like moving icons from one place to another, or taking a familiar application out of the OS. This time users will lose confidence in a company they have been buying products from since the mid 1980's and I believe it will harm Microsoft. Although they may recover by quickly releasing a new OS that returns users to the interface they most love and are most used to using, the damage will be done. Users will wonder when Microsoft will try and change their interface again.

If Microsoft should learn anything from this, it will be that consumers do not like change, they didn't like it in Windows Vista and they won't like it in Windows 8.

The Metro Interface

Metro Apps from the Microsoft App Store

A Video I created of me using Windows 8.

UPDATE: After the release of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, I created another blog post The Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Just a Tad Shinier Than The Previous Turd. Please check it out. 

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Why I Think Women Make Better Song Writers

I find myself listening to a lot of music and very often my musical taste seems to lean more toward the female singer-songwriters. It had never really occurred to me why, so I started to really think about it for a while.

Music is designed to connect to us on an emotional level, it tends to make us feel things we rarely experience or maybe experience too much. It invokes in us emotions we often don't feel or choose to ignore. Music becomes very personal to each one of us, a song meaning one thing to one person and something different to another. And naturally this is the domain of women, not to say that men are emotionless, far from it.

We all share the same emotions, but social norms accept an emotional female while a male showing emotion is considered contemptuous. Men and Women accept that women are emotional creatures, sometimes crying on a whim at the sight of a new born baby, newlywed bride, or the death of a fictional character in a movie. Women are comfortable with themselves and with their emotions, something most men are not.


Women have always made better poets because of this, and because they experience senses we as men cannot and never will. The experience of pregnancy and childbirth is something which gives women a perspective that no man will ever truly have. To feel life itself growing from nothing to something within yourself, to bring into the world a new child. It is in this domain that men are completely senseless. Nothing we can imagine could ever truly contend with the truth.

Through childbirth women truly learn to be selfless, not only through the act of carrying the child to its birth, but rearing it as well. This sacrifice allows her to know true love, the love only a mother can feel for her child. This is a bond that will never be broken. The cries of her child illicit not sympathy, but empathy, truly different from what a man might feel in the same situation.

But what of women who don't have children or have never experienced childbirth? We take on the roles we are programmed for. If history has shown us anything, men have generally been the ones to go out and start wars while women stayed home with the children. Now that's not to say that women are incapable of performing tasks as well as any man, in fact it says something even better, that women are capable of performing tasks men cannot. In this way women are truly superior to men, the argument being that while men and women can both destroy a life, only women can create one.

It is this biological programming that makes women natural caregivers. The idea that DNA has something to do with how we treat others may seem reaching but consider the idea that in our simplest form we are all just chemicals and energy commingling. So doesn't it make sense that such things might be programmed? Obviously humans are quite different in the world in terms of brain power, as compared to something like a insect or a rodent, but we are all made up of the same things and from insects and birds to fish and cats and and beyond, females are generally the caregivers.

Of course there are exceptions in nature to the rule, where evolution has determined this, leading even more toward it being programming since it can be clearly programmatically changed as needed. If you don't believe it, ask yourself who you are more likely to let watch your children, a man or a woman? Who are you more likely to get in a fight with? Who are you more likely to get a hug from? I'm not making these gender roles up, we just all seem to accept the roles we are given and seem to fit into.

Poetry is defined as literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm. It seems to me since women are better at expressing their emotions it makes sense that it makes them better poets and what is music than poetry set to a melody.

When I listen to music, it invokes in me all those emotions that are socially repressed, the music touches my soul, metaphorically speaking of course. As a man I feel lots, but rarely do I express it. Though being a woman must truly be a difficult task, it must also be very rewarding. Women live as examples of what we all should be, how we should act and how we should feel, and truly how we express ourselves and how we treat each other.

Below I've included just a list of some of the female singer-songwriters that I like to listen to:

Adele
Sheryl Crow
Linda Perry
Jewel
Alanis Morissette
Avril Lavigne
Sarah McLachlan
Amy Lee
Tori Amos
Edie Brickell
Stevie Nicks
Fiona Apple
Beth Nielsen Chapman
Debbie Harry
Norah Jones
Lisa Loeb
Dolly Parton
Diane Warren
Poe
Tiffany

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Everything is a Remix

Everything is a Remix is a documentary by filmmaker Kirby Ferguson.

In part one of the series he examines bands like Led Zeppelin and hip-hop artists of the 80's who made millions of dollars by sampling or remixing other peoples creative works.

In part two he delves deep into the film industry and shows that most films today are derivative works of the past, copied sometimes scene by scene. He dedicates most of the second part to examining the film Star Wars, which gets most of its material from the old Flash Gordon serials of the 1930's and Akira Kurosawa films. He also talks at some length about modern Hollywood films sticking to the idea of genres.

In part three he talks about how many of our modern inventions are copies of previous works. He spends a lot of time talking about Apple's extensive copying of the works of a company called Xerox to create it's own personal computer and modern graphical user interface.


It's in the conclusion to this four part series that we are introduced to Copyright and Patent laws. He attempts to explain the idea that copying is a part of nature. The evolution of genes is a product of a three part process of Copying, Transformation and Combination. He goes on to explain that culture evolves in a similar fashion, only with memes using ideas, behaviors and skills, a kind of social evolution. He continues by explaining that we evolved by copying the ideas of old to develop new ideas, but a new form of meme emerged called Intellectual Property. Intellectual Property is the perceived ownership of an idea, and it came about because of an unusual psychological idiosyncrasy called loss aversion. Loss aversion basically refers to people's tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains, which translates to the idea that copying is okay if you are the one copying, but distressing if its your work being copied. Disney is mentioned as a company who built their reputation and fortune on using the works of others through the public domain, however when it came time for Disney to give up Mickey Mouse to the public domain, they lobbied congress for an extension on copyright. Steve Jobs doesn't get by without a mention as someone who basically built an empire on the work of Xerox but criticized Google for copying the idea of the iphone and iOS to make its android phones.

He continues with examples from the music industry where artists extensively copy the music of other artists explicitly. Artists like George Harrison and Ray Charles are shown to have borrowed the melody of songs without permission to use in their own music.

He continues on with an explanation of patent laws, ip litigation, and secret international treaties.

He ends with some choice words that sum up everything quite well:

We live in an age with daunting problems. We need the best ideas possible, we need them now, we need them to spread fast. The common good is a meme that was overwhelmed by intellectual property. It needs to spread again. If the meme prospers, our laws, our norms, our society, they all transform.

That’s social evolution and it’s not up to governments or corporations or lawyers… it’s up to us.

The documentary is only about 34 minutes long if you watch all four parts. Part four peeked my particular interest and I watched it first as it deals with the subject of copyright and intellectual property, subjects I am strongly against. After watching part four I went back and watched them all together. I even took the time to plug the four of them into Adobe Premiere , and create a nice single documentary, which I promptly torrented of course.

The filmmaker's website http://www.everythingisaremix.info has a lot of good info as well as some links to donate for upcoming projects. Although I started to watch the parts from his site, I found it quite difficult and was unable to do so. I couldn't tell if it was the site or a bad combination of Firefox and a beta version of the adobe flash player, which crashes quite frequently.

 

Everything is a Remix Part 1

 

Everything is a Remix Part 2

 Everything is a Remix Part 3

Everything is a Remix Part 4

Magnet Link to download torrent

Downloading this way may be much slower until the file has been properly seeded. However, right now it may be the only way to get the entire documentary as a single file. 
The movie was ripped into a 275MB XVID avi with MP3 audio.

This is a fantastic documentary and I highly recommend everyone check it out. And if you have a chance to donate to the filmmaker I highly suggest it to keep him making high quality work like Everything is a Remix.

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Ulcers, Ulcers, Ulcers, I Hate Them.

As some of you know I have Crohn's disease. If you're interested in knowing what it is just click on that link. But rather than complain about everything that sucks about that disease, I just want to complain about the one thing that is pissing me off right now. Well actually I have many things happening that are pissing me off right now to be fair, but one in particular that really annoys the shit out of me.

One of the many problems with the disease is it causes ulcerations to the tissue anywhere along the digestive tract, the means from your mouth to your anus. It also can cause them on your skin. Right now I have probably a dozen of them in my mouth and it really is causing me a lot of grief. It's very difficult to eat, drink, or even swallow without causing pain. I have at least one deep in my mouth under my tongue that is really driving me crazy.  I tried to take some pictures of them to show you but its hard for me to get a good shot of them so I'm including some examples of what they look like at the bottom of the page.


Not only have they been attacking my mouth but my fingers again. The corners of some of my fingers are pitted with them. I've included pictures of my fingers to show you what they look like. I have a hole in the top corner of my left thumb I had to fill with that liquid bandage stuff just so I could type because its too painful.

Now while I'm sure I have ulcers in my stomach though I cannot physically see them I can feel them, every time I eat or drink something, or just lay down. I know I have them in my anus as well. Let me tell you, that really really sucks if you couldn't have guessed. It makes going to the bathroom, which anyone with Crohn's disease does frequently very painful, and also causes quite a lot of blood loss at times. I also have them in my intestines, again through feeling the pain as it flares from time to time. Oh I just thought of another thing that annoys the shit out of me and its along the same lines as the ulcers in my mouth so it counts as the same thing. I get these, bumps on my tongue. It's really hard to describe unless it happens to you. Basically your tongue is covered in tastebuds and normally the only thing you can feel about them is if you take your tongue and scrape it against your upper teeth, it feels slightly rough. Well at least once a month maybe more, these tastebuds become enlarged and very sensitive. It lasts for weeks. So touching one of them is like stabbing your tongue with a fork. It absolutely drives me bonkers. I've even gone so far as to break out a pair of scissors to take one of these off. I don't recommend doing this. It is painful and it bleeds quite a bit, but I will say about a day after aside from the pain of the cut, it won't annoy you anymore. Some people might be squeamish about putting a large pair of scissors in their mouth and cutting a piece of tongue off, but seriously that's how fucking annoying this is. In one of the pictures at the bottom you can see on the tongue exactly what I'm talking about.

I've had people ask me about how I feel about dying, am I pissed off?
Existence is such an amazing thing to me. All of us we live in two states of being simultaneously. We are both living and dying at the same time. If you think about it, the moment we are born we begin dying. Such things scare some people, make them run to religion for answers. Not me, I enjoy the idea that each of us exists only for so long, dying so others may exist later. Everything, the smallest cell to the largest star, everything is here for only so long. Everyone and Everything around you exists today because a star died. Every atom that makes up your body, your car, your house, the money in your pocket, the clothes on your back, the mountains, the oceans, everything once existed in the center of a star. It died so you could live, and when you die, the energy in you will be used to make new life. It's a kind of Universal Poetry. I'm as unhappy to die as anyone else is I guess. I could do without the pain, that kind of sucks, but remember we're all dying, some of us more painful than others.

 

 

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