Archive for the 'Told You So' Category

The Conet Project: Like Something Out of a Spy Movie

Friday, November 16th, 2012

About 20 years ago, Akin Fernandez discovered mysterious sounds and voices being transmitted over shortwave radio stations called “Numbers Stations” that weren’t documented anywhere. With more research, Fernandez realized that these stations had been used during the Cold War to transmit secret messages from intelligence agencies to their spies … but they were still being actively used though the war was long over.

Such began The Conet Project, which was first popularized when Wilco used a portion of one of the recordings, a woman saying “yankee hotel foxtrot,” in their song Poor Places and as their album title and were later sued for copyright infringement.

Here, we asked Fernandez to write out a description of the project that carries such a mystery with it. Have a listen to a portion of the project in the above clip.

Where did you first get the idea for a project about shortwave numbers station recordings?

In the early 1990s I discovered that you can receive weather maps and satellite images by shortwave radio with a simple receiver and an inexpensive demodulator that attaches to your computer. I put it all together and started to decode weather satellite images from all over the world.

Whilst trying to tune into stations that were transmitting these satellite weather maps and photos, I kept coming across stations that were transmitting strange voices reading out strings of numbers and letters. In one of the frequency guides I owned, there were entries for some of these stations, listed simply as “Numbers Station,” with no other information.

In order to understand why this is odd, you need to understand how shortwave radio transmitters are licensed and how they behave when they are legally operated. Each licensed radio station on the air is given permission to operate by a government. If it is not, it is a pirate station operating illegally. Each station has call letters, an address, and when they transmit, they announce who owns the station, where it is on the globe and the schedule of transmission times and frequencies. If you write to them with a reception report, they will send a “QSL” card back to you to say thank you.

The only people who do not conform to these standards are pirates, or people using shortwave for their licensed private use, like ships at sea, and in those cases, you sometimes hear people having conversations with each other.

Numbers Stations had none of this. They did not identify themselves as a licensed station should. They were clearly not pirates, because there were too many of them, transmitting all over the dial in many different forms, and their signals were way too powerful for a man in his garage to be operating. They clearly were not two-way radio telephone calls. These were something different, and the scant information that you could find about them in the 1990s bore this out.

To my astonishment, there were no good sources of information about Numbers Stations. There were a few small books printed by enthusiasts (normally printed very cheaply and bound with staples) filled only with facts you could glean for yourself if you listened to a shortwave.

This was a real live mystery, taking place on a global basis, unreported, scantily documented and passing though the bodies of billions of people every day. Everyone I asked about Numbers Stations didn’t know anything about them. The British Library didn’t have any recordings of them in its collection. There were even some shortwave radio listeners who were huffy and defensive about them, describing them as “nonsense.”

It was about that time that I lost my mind and had to know everything about Numbers Stations that I could find. I couldn’t stand the idea that this was going on and no one knew about it.

Here was something that had been going on for decades, that had never been reported on in a newspaper, that was inexplicably missing from the plotlines of every James Bond and spy movie ever made, and that was going on unabated after the end of the Cold War. This is something that had never been documented in the National Sound Archive in the country that built Alan Turing’s ENIGMA breaking computer, or indeed that is mentioned anywhere by the people curating the espionage relics of war.

Surely, this could not be real, but it was, and it fell right into my lap.

It was at this point and with all this scant information and the red rag to a bull of Numbers Stations in my face and ears that I decided to stop decoding satellite weather photos and start recording and logging Numbers Stations.

Some might think that this is all a bit odd. For certain, people who take that position have not ever heard a Numbers Station. These are not just plain white noises or unedifying, characterless transmissions likethe UK’s “Speaking Clock.” These stations are very VERY weird; they are so weird that they sometimes exceed the emotional thrust of the inspired compositions of Avant-Garde music composers.

These stations, if you are interested in the sort of music that moves me, are a high form of musical expression, fueled by accident and chance, unique, unrepeatable, mysterious and deeply profound. Their lyrics are meaningful and meaningless. They are spoken by men, women, machine women and machine men. They are clearly designed by very creative, thoughtful, anonymous people. Add into this mix the distortions, reverberations and chance elements that the ionosphere superimposes on these “works” and the true nature of their purpose, and you get an art form, available worldwide, without precedent in human history.

This is why I released The Conet Project. It took me three years to compile it, and I destroyed my record label, and myself, to produce it.

Where does the name Conet Project come from?

It comes from the words spoken by one of the Numbers Stations which ended with the words “Konek.”

Some of the tracks actually sound like songs (i.e. “Gong Station Chimes”). Were you surprised by the musical nature of some of these?

Very. Not only is “The Gong Station” musical, but for example the Station XPH, which is not explicitly musical, has a mournful slow introduction, and its main body has a phrasing and tempo like a synthesized bagpipe piece. Many stations use music as identifiers, either recordings of pop songs or sets of tones repeating to notify the recipient. Or not. We do not know why these tones were used, because no one who was responsible for these stations has come forward to explain the reasoning behind the design of the transmissions.

Can you tell us a brief history of Irdial Recordings? How does a company gain a vision to put out a project like this?

Irdial-Discs started in 1987. I had some friends that were making wonderful music but who could not find a label to release their work, and I had some of my own work that I wanted to release that no one would release, so it became obvious that I should run my own label.

Irdial originally was designed to be a blend of Factory, Touch and New York Electro labels like Cutting as a starting point. I took all the things I loved about those labels, mixed them with the works of the people that I knew, and made something that was different to everything else out there in every way, from the sleeves to the sounds and the way we mastered recordings.

The most important thing for me is to not compromise. I hate compromise and accommodating the tastes and ideas of other people. And it has worked. It was clear to me that some of the people who were running record labels at the time that I launched Irdial were not really interested in what they were doing as an act of art. They were trying to balance breaking something new against the tastes of the audience, and they were frightened of taking risks.

Take for example, InSync’s 12-inch “Storm.” This track was mastered onto a cassette. It was rejected by several labels, simply because it was on a cassette. When I was offered it, I immediately mastered direct from the cassette and released it.

I tell this story because it demonstrates how people can’t think for themselves and can have something wonderful given to them on a plate but will reject it simply because they are not familiar with it, or because it comes in a format they mistakenly believe is “bad.”

Can you imagine what the answer would have been, had I turned up in a record label’s A&R department with the idea for a quadruple CD of Numbers Stations, with an 80-page booklet? The only way great things like this can come to light is if someone takes the risk and refuses to follow the herd. That is why I run Irdial-Discs.

You release your recordings under the Free Music Philosophy, but here you’ve gone the direct-to-fan route. Can you talk about your choices here in terms of getting the recordings out there to your audience?

Back in 1999, we had been on the Internet for two years. Irdial was one of the first record labels on the Internet. It was clear to me, after spending years in the BBS scene and watching the Internet grow, that it made sense to spread your music everywhere rather than keep it bottled up. This is why The Conet Project has now been downloaded over one million times and is on computers, iPods and devices all over the world.

It would have been very difficult to do this without the Internet, and of course today, it’s not unusual to see tens of millions of views of pieces of music on YouTube. Giving away music makes sense; superdistribution is the future. The question is, is there a place for record labels anymore, what is the nature of that role if there is one, and how can artists that make music make enough money to allow them to spend all their time honing their art?

I think an answer is coming soon, and certainly an aggregating platform like PledgeMusic is going to be at the center of this new activity, where the owners of it are curators, filtering in (rather than out) the highest art so that people can find who is making the interesting work.

Since the Internet is essentially an infinite space, everyone can coalesce into their own communities so that no sound maker is left out, and rejection from one curator does not mean death, like it used to before the independent label and the Internet.

People need music in the same way they need food. Music makers have been kept away from their public by the scarcity imposed by physical sound carriers. Now that this has changed, it’s a matter of organizing these forces of nature with software and new contracts to increase the availability of art and get the right sounds to the right people, whilst making sure the sound makers can eat.

It’s an exciting time to be working in music, no doubt about it.

Using the proliferation of cameras to identify provocateurs

Thursday, May 17th, 2012

From BLOGDIAL, “The answer comes before the question” January 13th, 2009

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1517

[…]

Imagine this scenario. Someone somewhere sets up a Web 2.0 site that features photos of bad police and other officials, or those mysterious agent provocateurs that have been plaguing the useless demonstrations around the world. Imagine that the software behind this site (which could be connected to iPhoto 09) identifies all the bad people and exposes them to the public, nullifying all acts of political infiltration over night. Anyone setting up any sort of anti-state gathering or demonstration or action could, with a gauntlet of workers armed with iphones, vet every demonstrator as they turned up to weed out all the infiltrators, collaborators and provocateurs.

I guarantee you that this will happen, and not only that, but that someone is going to put into a copy of iPhoto 09, a huge archive of photos from demonstrations and political meetings going back decades to pick out the bad guys.

This explosion and convergence of technologies is a double edged sword, and since there are more of us than there are of them, it will be the case that all this technology and the networks that join them together will result in something totally unexpected; the tools may turn around and bite the state in the ass in an unexpected way. The very nature of networks says that this will happen; the population by virtue of its vast networked numbers can overpower any government in a scenario where the network is the power.

We are not powerless like the slaves in the Soviet Union were. We have fantastic tools, all of them free, right in our hands. Those tools, by the act of using them, change the game entirely, and the more the state pushes against the mass, the more dense and impenetrable it becomes.

This is a war that they cannot ever win.

[…]

Now look at the attached video, uploaded to YouTube by noshockdoc on Nov 11, 2011. Read the rest of this entry »

Police Undercover Snatch Squads and Agents Provocateurs

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

The unintelligent, inexperienced and completely deluded students are out again in force, to be kettled, sheared, abused and used as fodder to provide the police with much needed overtime money.

What is interesting here is that we may be seeing the seed of the idea that all the video cameras that everyone has by default could be used for something useful, active and defensive, instead of just a child’s toy.

From BLOGDIAL, “The answer comes before the question” January 13th, 2009

Imagine this scenario. Someone somewhere sets up a Web 2.0 site that features photos of bad police and other officials, or those mysterious agent provocateurs that have been plaguing the useless demonstrations around the world. Imagine that the software behind this site (which could be connected to iPhoto 09) identifies all the bad people and exposes them to the public, nullifying all acts of political infiltration over night. Anyone setting up any sort of anti-state gathering or demonstration or action could, with a gauntlet of workers armed with iphones, vet every demonstrator as they turned up to weed out all the infiltrators, collaborators and provocateurs.

I guarantee you that this will happen, and not only that, but that someone is going to put into a copy of iPhoto 09, a huge archive of photos from demonstrations and political meetings going back decades to pick out the bad guys.

This explosion and convergence of technologies is a double edged sword, and since there are more of us than there are of them, it will be the case that all this technology and the networks that join them together will result in something totally unexpected; the tools may turn around and bite the state in the ass in an unexpected way. The very nature of networks says that this will happen; the population by virtue of its vast networked numbers can overpower any government in a scenario where the network is the power.

We are not powerless like the slaves in the Soviet Union were. We have fantastic tools, all of them free, right in our hands. Those tools, by the act of using them, change the game entirely, and the more the state pushes against the mass, the more dense and impenetrable it becomes.

This is a war that they cannot ever win.

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1517

[…]

Now look at this video, uploaded to YouTube by noshockdoc on Nov 11, 2011:

If these people had any sense, they would have already set up this web service as I described in 2009.

Using Augmented Reality ID:

They could check each ‘protestor’ against the online database of Agent Provocateurs and police officers to make sure that they had not been infiltrated.

Of course, anyone who is that smart is not interested in demonstrating in the first place, but we will leave that aside for now.

The point is, these young and very foolish people are behaving as if it is 1960 and not the end of 2011. As I have said before, again and again, the age of demonstrations is over. The shape of them, how they play out, move, surge and flow is well understood. There can be no surprises with them. Nothing comes of them, no matter how large they are, as we saw with the StopWar demonstrations before the destruction of Iraq.

The problem these people have is that if they were intelligent enough to know this, they would not be demonstrating, and would be well on the way to formulating a strategy that would actually give them what they want. Their problem, clearly, is a toxic mix of a lack of intelligence and experience.

They do not know exactly what they hope to achieve with these acts, they have no discrete goals or deliverables, they have no means of creating a new strategy because they lack the mental capacity to formulate one; in other words, they are a completely lost cause.

One thing that is coming out of this is interesting however.

Because everyone has a camera at these demonstrations, it might come to pass that the light bulb switches on over the head of some computer science student as she realises that it should be possible to create what I describe in the post above.

There are literally dozens of cameras in this clip; surely someone somewhere must be thinking that there is a use that can be put to the footage to help weed out the provocateurs. Who knows?

What we can say with a high level of certainty is that these students are going to achieve nothing by marching in the street. Everything they are planning, even if it is not known about in advance by surveillance is easily counter-able because marching and demonstrating is a ‘dead tactic’ that the State has a perfect understanding of.

All of this is a complete distraction of course; even this very post has distracted me from doing something else productive. Unless by chance it spurs the creation of the system I have been writing about.

Once again, demonstrations are ‘Yellow Ribbon Thinking’:

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1152

they divert energy from useful acts and thinking, and prevent or delay permanent solutions from emerging. You should not participate in them; instead, you should be working only on things that have discreet goals and that has metrics that you can measure directly so that you can know if you are being successful or not.

Crony Capitalists deploy glove puppet schizophrenic luddite

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

The crony capitalist copyright monopoly has rolled out its latest delusional computer illiterate schizophrenic luddite, Jeremy Hunt, to try and cripple the internets.

First things first.

Culture does not need a secretary. The idea that the State should have a position to ‘have a say’ in matters to do with culture is absurd on its face. Art galleries, artists, authors, music makers, sculptors and anyone involved in culture in any way do not need to be overseen, managed, given ‘guidance’ or ‘represented’ by a ministry. Only States like the USSR have traditionally had such corrosive, totalitarian and frankly, disgusting posts. Actually, France has a Minister of Rock & Roll, but France doesn’t count.

Even if you accept that the State should have a ‘Culture Secretary’ the internet is a technical brief, not a cultural one. No doubt there are moves afoot to create a new ‘Secretary for Digital’. The State should not be able to produce these new positions willy nilly, since they are public servants.

OK, Lets do this.

Google should join fight on piracy, says Jeremy Hunt

Culture secretary calls on advertisers and search engines to ‘make life more difficult’ for those that ignore copyright laws.

What a disgusting, irrational and ridiculous call; to ‘make life more difficult’ for people. The internet exists to make life easier. What Jeremy Hunt is calling for is to cripple the internet, to make service providers divert capital away from improving their services into something that no one but a tiny group of venal beasts want. This is not the call of a human being, this is a call from a monster that wants to destroy progress, inhibit the utility of the greatest invention since fire, and to harm millions of people all over the world. Absolutely repulsive.

Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, is to tell Google and other search engines that they should play a greater role in the fight against online piracy. Mr Hunt will ask them to “make life more difficult” for pirates.

And they are all going to tell him, politely, to go straight to hell. Jeremy Hunt is in good company; he is spouting the same garbage that Andy Burnham used to on this matter.

Copying music is not piracy. It is not theft. The BBC even said so, in a grovelling apology after they aired a scandalous, unforgivable, stupid, retarded and evil attack on Bittorrent and were taken to task for it:

First though, an apology. File sharing is not theft. It has never been theft. Anyone who says it is theft is wrong and has unthinkingly absorbed too many Recording Industry Association of America press releases. We know that script line was wrong. It was a mistake. We’re very, very sorry.

If copyright infringement was theft then I’d be in jail every time I accidentally used football pix on Newsnight without putting “Pictures from Sky Sport” in the top left corner of the screen. And I’m not. So it isn’t.

No where near enough of an apology, but as far as the BBC goes, this is grovelling, first class.

He is expected to tell the Royal Television Society’s Cambridge Convention that “reasonable steps” will make a significant difference, and also make the suggestion that if the industry does not help the Government it will legislate via the new Communication Bill. “We intend to take measures to make it more and more difficult to access sites that deliberately facilitate infringement, misleading consumers and depriving creators of a fair reward for their creativity,” Mr Hunt will say.

The world is changing. The number of people who know about crony capitalism, the abuses of the RIAA/MPAA and the rest is growing exponentially. Even the scumbag lying State shills at the BBC say that people like Hunt, “..(are) wrong and (have) unthinkingly absorbed too many Recording Industry Association of America press releases”.

Jeremy Hunt is on the wrong side of history, and he hasn’t got the brains to know it. If he does know that what he is saying is unfounded, illogical codswallop, then he is a coward for not stating the plain truth, which is that the internet has changed the way people consume media, these changes are benefits which will bring prosperity to everyone, and the old business models are dead as the Dodo.

The Government wants search engines to penalise website whose content is ruled unlawful. Less prominent results would have a direct effect on revenues from advertisers as well as sales.

If you removed all the links to any torrent site or site that provides links to other sites, what would happen is that someone would write an application that will absorb and re-distribute all those searches. It would spur the creation of a one stop place to find everything you need, and it could be designed in such a way that it can not be shut down. It would make the distribution of links more efficient, and this would mean more file sharing.

The internet sees Jeremy Hunt and his luddite ideas as damage and routes around him and them. Anything that is done to stop people communicating will cause more robust systems to be developed and deployed to bolster communication. We have seen this again and again. Napster was shut down and that caused gnutella to be developed. Then, the Bittorent protocol was developed as a direct answer to the problem of hosting files on central repositories. The same thing can be done with links. A distributed search engine, unstoppable, with no central point of attack will up the stakes and Jeremy Hunt would be the one that caused it to come into being. That is what is called an ‘own goal’ in the UK.

Mr Hunt will argue that online businesses deserve the same legal protection as physical ones. “We do not allow certain products to be sold in the shops on the high street, nor do we allow shops to be set up purely to sell counterfeited products. Neither should we tolerate it online,” he is set to say.

This is a fallacious, straw man argument. Physical goods are not the same as information and it comes right out of the MPAA script. When you copy a file or an idea, nothing is lost, and more to the point, Google does not facilitate copying, it merely points to resources that may or may not ‘infringe copyright’. There is no reason whatsoever to call upon business to take proactive measures against links that potentially point to items that are not even criminal in the first place.

He will add, however, “The government has no business protecting old models or helping industries that have failed to move with the times. But those new models will never be able to prosper if they have to compete with free alternatives based on the illegal distribution of copyrighted material.”

This is double talk. Government is protecting the old business models by insisting that there is such a thing as copyright. It is helping industries that have failed to move with the times, explicitly, the music and film industry. Secondly, Hunt says ‘free alternatives’ are bad; what if the new business model is the free model?. By saying that free is not acceptable, Hunt is picking winners, helping the dinosaur media and failing to move with the times. It is not the place of Jeremy Hunt or any public servant to determine which business models are and are not appropriate. Jeremy Hunt is talking nonsense on stilts.

Despite campaigns from internet freedom activists, the high court ruled in July, after a lengthy process, that the internet service provider BT should block a website that “flagrantly infringed” copyright, called Newzbin. Although the Internet Watch Foundation is able to use a sped-up legal process, it currently can only do so for sites relating to illegal online pornography. Google, however, claims that “takedown requests” from reliable copyright holders are dealt with in four hours. The government moving its pressure from ISPs to search engines marks a new approach to its multi-faceted attack on digital piracy.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8759414/Google-should-join-fight-on-piracy-says-Jeremy-Hunt.html

They will fail.

Since the advent of modems running at 14.4k people have been sharing files, and it has grown year on year without fail every year. The mainstream media and the copyright monopoly have lost both the war and the argument. The movie studios still pull in hundreds of millions for their blockbusters, and so the much reported death of their industry has not materialised, as it never does whenever they whine that a new technology is going to wipe them out.

It is nothing short of absurd that Jeremy Hunt and his cohorts want to turn Britain into a leader of all things internets, but in the same breath, they do everything they can to cripple the companies that work with it. You cant have it both ways; either you want your East End Fantasy to take root or you do not. If you do, get out of the way, and let business flourish. If you do not, carry on as you are, making these ridiculous paid promotions for the copyright monopolists and watch everyone write you off as a potential place to locate.

In the past, anyone thinking about writing an innovative service, like a CD Ripping service, would have run a mile from the UK. Only now, as the CD is dying as a format will it become legal for a company like this to set up… or will it? Who knows? What is for sure is that if you plan on starting an internet business in the UK, you are taking a huge risk that Jeremy Hunt & Co. are going to suddenly, at the behest of your competitors, put you out of business either by directly legislating against you, or scaring investors away by giving a speech.

One thing is for certain; the tide is turning against Jeremy Hunt and all the glove puppets who sound suspiciously similar. What do I mean by that? Hmmmm, Which one is Jeremy Hunt, and which one is Andy Burnham? can you tell?:

Hunt or Burnham?:
“We must ensure that copyright delivers maximum benefit to performers and musicians. That’s the test of any model as we go forward”

Hunt or Burnham?:
“Let me be absolutely clear so there are no misconceptions about where the Government is on this. We share a real support for artists and musicians.”

Hunt or Burnham?:
“Music has been hit hard over the last ten years, and if we don’t do something there is a real danger that parts of the music industry will be washed away.”

Hunt or Burnham?:
“Developments in communications have changed the music world and I think we are now at a time that calls for partnership between Government and the music business as a whole: one with rewards for both of us; one with rewards for society as a whole.”

Hunt or Burnham?:
“My job – Government’s job – is to preserve the value in the system.”

Hunt or Burnham?:
“What do we need to do to help our businesses grow and evolve between now and 2025? Where can regulation help and where is it a barrier? What can we do collectively to enhance the whole UK market?”

Hunt or Burnham?:
“We have an extraordinarily strong and diverse media landscape in this country, combined with a remarkable wealth of talent in our creative industries.”

They are indistinguishable are they not?

Honestly, I dont care about what these people think; the only thing that matters is that they have the guns. As long as they have the monopoly on violence, they will be able to distort, destroy, corrupt and damage. If they did not have the monopoly on violence, Jeremy Hunt might be a school teacher somewhere, harmless, quiet and of no concern to anyone.

Thankfully, the market, the internet, and the people on it are more powerful than Jeremy Hunt. No matter what he says, no matter what he asks for, and no matter who he can bully into obeying his luddite wet dreams, the internet and the market will route around him and his disease and the spice will flow!

You can smell their fear now

Monday, August 1st, 2011

The Grauniad has an astonishing report of a newsletter published by Belgravia police station, where people are advised to report anarchists to the police.

I’m not making this up:

Anarchists should be reported, advises Westminster anti-terror police
Islamist terrorists also mentioned in briefing, as anarchists complain of being criminalised for their beliefs

What should you do if you discover an anarchist living next door?

[…]

the answer, according to an official counter-terrorism notice circulated in London last week, is that you must report them to police immediately.

This was the surprising injunction from the Metropolitan Police issued to businesses and members of the public in Westminster last week. There was no warning about other political groups, but next to an image of the anarchist emblem, the City of Westminster police’s “counter terrorist focus desk” called for anti-anarchist whistleblowers stating: “Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police.”

What the HELL?!

The note was issued from Belgravia Police Station as part of Project Griffin which aims to “advise and familiarise managers, security officers and employees of large public and private sector organisations across the capital on security, counter-terrorism and crime prevention issues”.

Grauniad

Here is a page that has the actual report linked from it. The Grauniad didn’t think you should actually read the report for yourself:

http://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/07/31/met-counter-terrorism-office-report-anarchists-to-the-police/

The first thing that is interesting about that document is (apart from its appalling graphic design) that there is no named author.

What public servant was responsible for this gaffe, who told her to write this and why is she not accountable? You KNOW why.

Now lets think about this carefully.

Why has some uneducated person put this nonsense into that document?

From their point of view, the only exposure to ‘Anarchism’ they have had is the agent provocateurs who routinely smash up McDonalds and bank windows. They equate this criminal behaviour with Anarchism because the people who do that violence say that they are Anarchists.

In fact, the truth is those people are not Anarchists, but are in many instances members of the police, sent out to cause trouble. This is a well established fact.

Now, not all the police are aware that their own force is being used as a tool in this way, and I imagine that they would be shocked, SHOCKED to find out that this was so; nevertheless, these compartmentalised, unnamed people are playing right along in their roles, obeying orders without any care or concern for their duties or the truth.

And they wonder why the ideas of Libertarianism are spreading like wildfire. All anyone has to do is read this Grauniad article to be completely outraged, as all of the comments on that article demonstrate.

Grauniad readers are staunch anti-Libertarians to a man, but they are not not stupid, and can tell right from wrong where their own rights overlap with the rights of others when it comes to free speech. They know that this statement is only one step away from applying directly to them and their ideas.

Thinking once again, from the point of view of an uneducated, low IQ man, how can you spot an anarchist? More importantly, how can you spot who is not an anarchist?

There is one easy way to tell who is or who is not an anarchist; anarchists are:

1/ Non violent: Anarchists do not use violence to achieve their goal of a stateless society.

Thats pretty much it. Anyone who smashes a McDonalds window, or who engages in any violence of any kind is not an anarchist by definition. The people who do that are CRIMINALS, not anarchists.

And for the record, the goal of a stateless society is a completely logical, moral, realistic and just goal, and that police report is correct in this single aspect;

Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local Police.

Lets do this.

Anarchism is a political philosophy.

CORRECT.

which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful,

WRONG.

Anarchists can PROVE, through logic, ethics and history that the state is harmful, unnecessary and undesirable. This is not something that anarchists consider or is something that is mere opinion, any more than people ‘consider’ that the sky is blue; the state IS evil, is not needed and is toxic to humanity and that is a fact, not conjecture, a belief, an article of faith or any of those things.

Now, taking all of this into consideration, that the ‘anarchists’ who attend demonstrations and smash things to pieces are not anarchists at all either because they are not philosophically anarchists or because they are agent provocateurs and given the fact that anarchists are non violent, and have the right to publish and espouse anything they like in writing or by any other means, if someone was to report an anarchist to the police at Belgravia station…

What are they going to do?

Arrest someone for reading a book? Or publishing a pamphlet? Or writing a blog?

Whoever they did that to, would be in line for MILLIONS OF POUNDS in compensation, after a sensational, high profile trial, which would be taken on a contingency basis by a line of Britain’s top law firms, who would queue around the block for a chance of easy money. Academics from all over the world would submit amicus briefs on behalf of the defense.

They would have a snowballs chance in hell of getting away with it.

I simply cannot believe that the police in Belgravia have so much time on their hands that they can even be doing this sort of infantile nonsense. No one wants these ridiculous, meaningless scaremongering reports. They do not prevent crime, cannot prevent crime, waste time and money and bring the profession of policing further into disrepute.

Of course, Libertarians have an answer to this.

Libertarians understand that the State should not have a monopoly on security. Security is a service that should be produced by the market:

The market and private enterprise do exist, and so most people can readily envision a free market in most goods and services. Probably the most difficult single area to grasp, however, is the abolition of government operations in the service of protection: police, the courts, etc. — the area encompassing defense of person and property against attack or invasion. How could private enterprise and the free market possibly provide such service? How could police, legal systems, judicial services, law enforcement, prisons — how could these be provided in a free market? We have already seen how a great deal of police protection, at the least, could be supplied by the various owners of streets and land areas. But we now need to examine this entire area systematically.

In the first place, there is a common fallacy, held even by most advocates of laissez-faire, that the government must supply “police protection,” as if police protection were a single, absolute entity, a fixed quantity of something which the government supplies to all. But in actual fact there is no absolute commodity called “police protection” any more than there is an absolute single commodity called “food” or “shelter.” It is true that everyone pays taxes for a seemingly fixed quantity of protection, but this is a myth. In actual fact, there are almost infinite degrees of all sorts of protection. For any given person or business, the police can provide everything from a policeman on the beat who patrols once a night, to two policemen patrolling constantly on each block, to cruising patrol cars, to one or even several round-the-clock personal bodyguards. Furthermore, there are many other decisions the police must make, the complexity of which becomes evident as soon as we look beneath the veil of the myth of absolute “protection.” How shall the police allocate their funds which are, of course, always limited as are the funds of all other individuals, organizations, and agencies? How much shall the police invest in electronic equipment? fingerprinting equipment? detectives as against uniformed police? patrol cars as against foot police, etc.?

The point is that the government has no rational way to make these allocations. The government only knows that it has a limited budget. Its allocations of funds are then subject to the full play of politics, boondoggling, and bureaucratic inefficiency, with no indication at all as to whether the police department is serving the consumers in a way responsive to their desires or whether it is doing so efficiently. The situation would be different if police services were supplied on a free, competitive market. In that case, consumers would pay for whatever degree of protection they wish to purchase. The consumers who just want to see a policeman once in a while would pay less than those who want continuous patrolling, and far less than those who demand twenty-four-hour bodyguard service. On the free market, protection would be supplied in proportion and in whatever way that the consumers wish to pay for it. A drive for efficiency would be insured, as it always is on the market, by the compulsion to make profits and avoid losses, and thereby to keep costs low and to serve the highest demands of the consumers. Any police firm that suffers from gross inefficiency would soon go bankrupt and disappear.

One big problem a government police force must always face is: what laws really to enforce? Police departments are theoretically faced with the absolute injunction, “enforce all laws,” but in practice a limited budget forces them to allocate their personnel and equipment to the most urgent crimes. But the absolute dictum pursues them and works against a rational allocation of resources. On the free market, what would be enforced is whatever the customers are willing to pay for. Suppose, for example, that Mr. Jones has a precious gem he believes might soon be stolen. He can ask, and pay for, round-the-clock police protection at whatever strength he may wish to work out with the police company. He might, on the other hand, also have a private road on his estate he doesn’t want many people to travel on — but he might not care very much about trespassers on that road. In that case, he won’t devote any police resources to protecting the road. As on the market in general, it is up to the consumer — and since all of us are consumers this means each person individually decides how much and what kind of protection he wants and is willing to buy.

[…]

http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p215

I don’t know anyone who does not think that there are not enough police on the streets. If the police had any sense, they would understand that in a Libertarian system, there would be more of them, doing real police work for better money and conditions, and they would not be wasting their time writing silly pamphlets and enforcing laws that outlaw victimless crimes like the statues covering the current round of insane prohibition. Even the police are starting to wake up about that particular corner of the insane asylum.

While we are at it look at this:

Police to carry out on-the-spot fingerprinting in the street even for minor traffic offences

Police are now armed with a device that can scan fingerprints so they can correctly identify suspects who lie about their details.

In what sounds like something out of George Orwell’s dystopia 1984, suspects can now be finger printed in the street thanks to the new hand-held police gadget.

The mobile identification service scans a print, then checks it by trawling through a national database for the details.

[…]

Daily Mail

Sound familiar? It should; we told you about this many years ago.

There appear to be some people who are awake. Look at this top comment on the Daily Mail article:

If you have never been finger printed by the police, and the vast majority of the population have not, then how can this device tell a roadside copper if you are lying or not?

Which is exactly the point that we make in this article, and what we repeated over and over in different variations for a decade.

These devices exist not to protect you from criminals, but are there to make money for the vendors that manufacture them. Each one is connected to a Blackberry, and then there is the cost of the bespoke scanner attachment and the management of the database. This is nothing more than fleecing the population.

But I digress.

What these people are saying is that if you read a book and then agree with what is in it, you are a criminal, a ‘terrorist’. Its completely absurd of course, but it is an indication of a fundamental shift that is taking place.

These people are scared. They are scared of ideas. If these people are so terrified by ideas the whole edifice must be crumbling invisibly before our very eyes, and in fact, this is a very clear sign of that happening.

A society that is secure in its beliefs and values, in this case, the right of free speech and the right to believe whatever you want to believe, has no cause to turn against its own fundamental principles in order to ‘protect itself’. The fact that they are now (and have been for over ten years) turning against the core values of their ‘society’ is a clear sign that the system is slowly moving into panic mode. The problem for them is that they will not be able to stem the tide.

No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come. The reality is that all the violence is coming from them and the majority will do nothing while the edifice collapses. Then, one day, as it happened in East Germany, the State will simply cease to exist, only this time, there will be no ‘West Germany’ to take the place of the dead State. The world will not end, violence will not break out, there will not be chaos or a breakdown of order. There will only be a end to coercion by the State.

Depending on who you are and what you have come to know is the truth, this is either a very good thing or a very bad thing. You cannot un-know a truth; Libertarianism cannot now be un-seen or un-read or un-published. The ideas are out there, anyone who encounters them, because they are crystal clear in their truths, observations, analysis and logic, is converted to them. The economic collapse, predicted by the Austrians and the anarcho-capitalists is coming true like clockwork. They have the only correct explanation for it, and when you expose people to the fundamental principles of it, that are undeniably true, lo and behold, they understand and change their broken thinking.

This is inevitable, and will no doubt accelerate as a pound of butter goes to £5 in the supermarket.

Real anarchists do nothing except tell the truth day in and day out. As the State destroys itself with its Keynesian heroin, the State itself is going to abolish the State without any help. Real anarchists only document what is happening, and shake their heads in disbelief at the logical fallacies, the economic illiteracy and penchant for self immolation that Statists exhibit. Look at this for an example of how, even now, they want more insanity and not less.

The story of this newsletter is spreading virally across the internets as we speak. If the people who wrote this have any sense or decency left they will firstly identify who the author was and then apologise and revise their statements.

Or not.

It will not change the final outcome one iota.

19,785,621 seconds

Wednesday, July 27th, 2011

THe title of this blog post is the number of seconds it took for the hive mind of Anonymous to reach the next iteration that we wrote about in December 2010. Here is the tweet posted around the time of the light bulb moment:

If @LulzSec called for a #Paypal boycott it would make way more damage than any LOIC attack could ever do. Is that a felony? #AntiSecless than a minute ago via TweetDeck Favorite Retweet Reply

What is so exiting about this is that 229 days (or 329,760 minutes or 5496 hours) is not very long for an iteration, and if the time between iterations is getting shorter and shorter, it will not be long (since Anons are highly intelligent) before they come to the Final Boss of of this game: The idea of the State itself.

When they come to the conclusion that the State is not needed, is the source of all the evils they are railing against, that it is a new cancer and not at all inevitable, Murray Rothbard will spell everything out for them in a tome that is not TL;DR, and which will simply blow their minds.

PayPal’s ridiculous regulations are a product of the State. If if were not for the State, they would not be doing what they are doing, i.e. blocking access to accounts, closing accounts at the behest of the state, restricting the flow of your money etc etc.

If you look behind the curtain at everything that is going wrong, from the insane wars, to the restrictions on free speech, DRM, the ban on vitamins, the RIAA/MPAA, Domain seizures, your money becoming worthless, widespread poverty, the ‘War on Drugs’, the patent trolling, the endemic corruption, the bank bailouts… EVERYTHING – the State is the direct cause of it.

People who are clear thinking are not wedded to any particular idea out of habit. They hold their ideas because they are arrived at by reason, and if by reason they must abandon wrong ideas, they do so immediately.

The idea of the State is a habit, a bad one, like heroin, and anyone who refuses to accept the State as the Final Boss is a brainwashed, drug addled addict.

It looks like the tipping point has been reached. Anonymous and its legion are moving inexorably towards the locus of Libertarianism. They are quickly shedding all operations that are ineffective or that involve disrupting other people’s property (like LOIC). Closing your PayPal account and switching to another service is an incredibly powerful act. By moving to another service, you can ensure that the flow of information (money) is not interrupted. The question then becomes, which service to switch to?

If you switch to any service that is regulated by our enemy, the State, you will be moving from one frying pan into another. What is needed is a way to move information (money) that does not involve a third party. A middlemanless system that is controlled by the masses for the masses.

That means Bitcoin.

The next obvious iteration is to get millions of people to move to Bitcoin as the main way they transact with money on the internet. That means dumping credit cards, PayPal and any other payment system that is regulated by the State.

Even if the number of places where you can buy things with Bitcoin is small now, if millions of new challengers appear holding it and eager to spend it, I guarantee you that Bitcoin will be integrated into every e-commerce package out there in less than a month. This will dramatically bootstrap the Bitcoin economy, decimate PayPal and the credit cards and bring forward the date of the inevitable demise of the State.

Remember; the taint of the State is the root problem. Apply this simple test to anything that you can think of that chafes at your sense of decency and liberty.

“Is there a law or regulation that makes this bad thing happen?”

If the answer is yes, then the State is behind it.

Try it. You will be amazed at how everything bad you can think of can be traced back to and is a direct result of the existence of the State.

The inevitable next question is “what are we to do without a State to tell us what to do?”. Murray Rothbard and the Libertarians have the answer, and this answer is not based on theory alone; it is based only on provable facts.

A critical mass of non violent change is coming where the State will simply cease to exist, just like it did in East Germany. This time it will be different however. There will be no West Germany to fill the void. There will be nothing; nothing but the good will and power of collective non violent voluntarism and the unprecedented prosperity that will follow as day follows night.

One last thing.

Some people say, “this is how you do it, keep it legal and legit”. This is wrong, ‘in the matrix’ thinking.

If you restrict yourself only to what is legal, then you will most certainly fail.

If they outlaw Bitcoin, or any of the other 17 alternatives to PayPal, and remove your ability to change services and stay ‘legal and legit’ how will your boycott end? It will end in total failure.

Your strategy should not be based on doing what is or is not legal, because the State, the enemy, decides unilaterally what is or is not legal. Constraining yourself in this way is thinking inside the box created for you by the State. It will not work.

Your strategy must be based only on what is moral and what is effective. That means refraining from doing anything that is immoral and only doing things that are effective.

If they make payment systems other than PayPal illegal, that is an attack on your liberty that you can respond to without committing an immoral act; in the same way that smoking marijuana, despite it being illegal, is responding to an outrageous infringement of your liberty without committing an immoral act. You simply refuse to obey, en masse.

What has changed is that everyone is connected to everyone else, and withering, debilitating, concentrated, tsunami death blow boycotts can strike with incredible ferocity if the conditions are correct.

Just wait for the critical mass condition to arrive, when the penny drops and the State dies… I imagine that it will be like the change of weather on a day where it has been raining and all of a sudden, the rain stops and beautiful sunshine burst into the day.

The green rain of the State will be stopped!

French to roll out Biometric ID Card with central database

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

Oh dear me.

It looks like the French are facing the New Labour disease of super Orwellian ID Cards to supplant their existing ID Card system.

Did you know that you cannot buy a SIM card in France without presenting State ID? Appalling!

It seems to me that they need to have a little Stonor Saunders injected into their ‘debate’, and Google Translate is more than happy to oblige:

+++++++

Cela a été envoyé à moi.

Ceci a été écrit à l’origine par STONOR SAUNDERS Frances.

Frances Saunders est l’ancien rédacteur en chef des arts du New Statesman, auteur de La Guerre froide culturelle, Diabolical Anglais et Le Diable Courtier et a été attribué William la Royal Historical Society de Gladstone Prix?commémoratif. Elle vit à Londres. Il vaut bien lire et si vous souhaitez, s’il vous plaît le transmettre à autant de personnes que vous le pouvez.

«Vous avez entendu ce que la législation créant cartes d’identité obligatoires franchi une étape cruciale dans la Chambre des communes. Vous pouvez penser que ID cartes ne sont pas de quoi s’inquiéter, puisque nous avons déjà de photos d’identité pour nos passeports et permis de conduire et une carte d’identité ne sera pas différente de que. Qu’est-ce que vous n’avez pas été dit est la pleine portée de cette identité proposée Carte, et ce qu’il signifie pour vous personnellement.

La carte d’identité proposée sera différente de n’importe quelle carte que vous tenez. Il sera être connecté à une base de données appelée le RIN, (National Identity Register), où toutes vos données personnelles seront stockées. Il s’agira notamment de numéro unique qui sera émis pour vous, vos empreintes digitales, un scan de la arrière de votre œil, et votre photo. Votre nom, adresse et date de la naissance sera évidemment aussi y être stockées.

Il y aura des espaces sur cette base de données pour votre religion, le statut de résidence, et de nombreux autres faits privés et personnels à votre sujet. Il est illimité espace pour tous les autres détails de votre vie sur la base de données NIR, qui peut être étendu par le gouvernement avec ou sans d’autres actes de Parlement.

En soi, vous pourriez penser que ce registre est inoffensif, mais vous seriez tort de venir à cette conclusion. Cette nouvelle carte sera utilisée pour vérifier votre identité contre votre entrée dans le registre en temps réel, chaque fois que vous le présenter à «prouver qui vous êtes».

Tout lieu que vend de l’alcool ou des cigarettes, chaque bureau de poste, tous les pharmacie, et chaque banque aura un terminal de carte NIR, (tout comme les lecteurs Chip and Pin qui sont partout maintenant) dans lequel votre carte peut être “glissée” pour vérifier votre identité. Chaque fois que cela arrive, un record est faite à la PIR de l’heure et le lieu que la carte a été présentée. Cela signifie par exemple, qu’il y aura un dossier du gouvernement de chaque fois que vous retirez plus de £ 99 à votre succursale de NatWest, qui maintenant ID demande pour ces transactions. Chaque fois que vous avez à prouver que vous sont plus de 18 ans, votre carte sera glissée, et un enregistrement fait à la PIR. Restaurants et licences hors exigeront que votre carte est glissée de telle sorte que chaque reçu indique qu’ils vendaient de l’alcool à quelqu’un de plus de 18, et que cela a été prouvé par l’accès au NIR, les indemnisant à partir
poursuites.

Les entreprises privées vont avoir accès à la base de données NIR. Si vous voulez postuler pour un emploi, vous devrez présenter votre carte d’un coup. Si vous voulez demander une carte Oyster à Londres Underground, ou un la fidélité des supermarchés carte ou un permis de conduire, vous devrez présenter votre Carte d’identité pour un coup. Va de même pour obtenir une ligne téléphonique ou une téléphone mobile ou d’un compte Internet.

Oyster, DVLA, BT, et de Nectar (par exemple) fonctionnent tous de bases de données très détaillée de leurs propres. Ils seront autorisés à accéder au NIR, comme tous les autres entreprise sera. Cela signifie que chacune de ces entités seront en mesure de enregistrer votre numéro unique dans leur base de données, et placer tous vos déplacements, enregistrements téléphoniques, des activités de conduite et les habitudes d’achat détaillée sous votre numéro unique de NIR. Ces bases de données, qui peut facilement s’adapter sur un stockage appareil de la taille de votre main, seront vendus aux tiers légalement ou illégalement. Il sera alors possible pour une entité non-gouvernementales pour créer une dossier détaillé de toutes vos activités. Certes, le gouvernement aura l’accès à tous les clandestins d’entre eux, ce qui signifie qu’ils auront une complète record de tous vos mouvements, de combien et quand vous vous retirez de votre compte bancaire pour les médicaments que vous prenez, jusqu’au niveau de quelle sorte de pain que vous mangez – tous accessibles via un numéro unique dans une base de données centrale.

C’est tout à fait un bond significatif à partir d’une carte d’identité simple qui montre votre nom et le visage.

La plupart des gens ne savent pas que c’est le vrai caractère et la portée des proposé de carte d’identité. Chaque fois que les détails de comment il fonctionnera sont expliquées pour eux, ils changer rapidement d’être ambivalente envers elle.

Le gouvernement va vous obliger à entrer vos coordonnées dans le NIR et de réaliser cette carte. Si vous et vos enfants veulent obtenir ou renouveler votre passeport, vous serez obligé de prendre vos empreintes digitales et vos yeux scannés pour le RIN, et une carte d’identité sera émis pour vous si vous voulez un ou pas. Si vous refusez de prendre ses empreintes digitales et oculaires numérisées, vous ne serez pas en mesure d’obtenir un passeport. Votre carte d’identité sera, juste comme votre passeport, ne pas être votre propriété. Le ministre de l’Intérieur aura le droit de révoquer ou de suspendre votre identité à tout moment, ce qui signifie que vous ne pas être en mesure de retirer de l’argent sur votre compte bancaire, par exemple, ou faire tout ce qui vous oblige à présenter votre carte d’identité émise par le gouvernement.

Les arguments qui ont été mis transmise en faveur des cartes d’identité peuvent être facilement réfutée. Cartes d’identité NE SERA PAS arrêter les terroristes; chaque Espagnol a une carte d’identité obligatoire, de même que les Bombers de Madrid, et probablement la plupart des les criminels 9 / 11. Les cartes d’identité ne sera pas «d’éliminer la fraude aux prestations», qui en comparaison, est faible par rapport au coût astronomique de cette proposition, qui seront évalués en milliards selon l’Ecole LSE (Londres des Economics). Ce schéma existe uniquement pour exercer une surveillance totale et contrôle sur le citoyen britannique ordinaire libre, et ce sera remplir les poches des les entreprises qui créeront des systèmes informatiques au détriment de la votre liberté, d’intimité et de l’argent.

Si vous ne saviez pas toute la portée du système de carte d’identité proposée avant et vous sont instables comme je suis à ce que cela signifie vraiment pour vous, à cette pays et son mode de vie, je vous exhorte à l’email ou une photocopie cela et lui donner à vos amis et collègues et tout le monde pense que vous devez savoir et qui se soucie. Le projet de loi a procédé à ce stade en raison de l’absence de renseignements exacts et complets sur cette proposition soient rendues publiques. Ensemble et main dans la main, nous pouvons informer la nation toute entière, si tous ceux qui reçoit ce qu’elle transmet. ”

Ce message n’a rien à voir avec la politique – il est à faire avec notre liberté. Mais ce sont les politiciens qui dans l’ignorance vont voter pour la carte d’identité et donc nous rapprocher de l’Etat de police qui semble être le but de notre actuelle Gouvernement. S’il vous plaît transmettre ce message – et d’utiliser votre prochain vote Élection générale pour se débarrasser des gens qui veulent détruire notre chéri démocratie.

Envoyer le traducteur de cet article, un Bitcoin à cette adresse: 14ScQgQRi2U5o6cdAJNhgyzY6w5UtwmX16

UK Census 2011 to be leaked by LulzSec?

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

WE TOLD YOU!

RC: irc.lulzco.org (channel #LulzSec | port 6697 for SSL)
BitCoin donations: 176LRX4WRWD5LWDMbhr94ptb2MW9varCZP
Twitter: @LulzSec
Contact us: 614-LULZSEC

. /$$                 /$$            /$$$$$$
.| $$                | $$           /$$__  $$
.| $$       /$$   /$$| $$ /$$$$$$$$| $$  \__/  /$$$$$$   /$$$$$$$
.| $$      | $$  | $$| $$|____ /$$/|  $$$$$$  /$$__  $$ /$$_____/
.| $$      | $$  | $$| $$   /$$$$/  \____  $$| $$$$$$$$| $$
.| $$      | $$  | $$| $$  /$$__/   /$$  \ $$| $$_____/| $$
.| $$$$$$$$|  $$$$$$/| $$ /$$$$$$$$|  $$$$$$/|  $$$$$$$|  $$$$$$.$
.|________/ \______/ |__/|________/ \______/  \_______/ \_______/
                          //Laughing at your security since 2011!

.--    .-""-.
.   ) (     )
.  (   )   (
.     /     )
.    (_    _)                     0_,-.__
.      (_  )_                     |_.-._/
.       (    )                    |lulz..\
.        (__)                     |__--_/
.     |''   ``\                   |
.     | [Lulz] \                  |      /b/
.     |         \  ,,,---===?A`\  |  ,==y'
.   ___,,,,,---==""\        |M] \ | ;|\ |>
.           _   _   \   ___,|H,,---==""""bno,
.    o  O  (_) (_)   \ /          _     AWAW/
.                     /         _(+)_  dMM/
.      \@_,,,,,,---=="   \      \\|//  MW/
.--''''"                         ===  d/
.                                    //   SET SAIL FOR FAIL!
.                                    ,'_________________________
.   \    \    \     \               ,/~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
.                         _____    ,'  ~~~   .-""-.~~~~~~  .-""-.
.      .-""-.           ///==---   /`-._ ..-'      -.__..-'
.            `-.__..-' =====\\\\\\ V/  .---\.
.                     ~~~~~~~~~~~~, _',--/_.\  .-""-.
.                            .-""-.___` --  \|         -.__..-

Greetings Internets,

We have blissfully obtained records of every single citizen
who gave their records to the security-illiterate
UK government for the 2011 census

We're keeping them under lock and key though...
so don't worry about your privacy
(...until we finish re-formatting them for release)

Myself and the rest of my Lulz shipmates will then embark upon
a trip to ThePirateBay with our beautiful records
for your viewing pleasure!

Ahoy! Bwahahaha... >:]

Cap'n Pierre "Lulz" Dubois

LINKS:
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6467131/Bethesda_internal_data

BONUS ROUND! SENATE.GOV!
http://lulzsecurity.com/releases/senate.gov.txt

+++++++++++++++++++++

http://pastebin.com/K1nerhk0

This is not a substitution, or an extraploated future scenario of the type we have used in the past to illustrate the dangers of centralized databases of your personal, private and sensitive data.

THIS IS REAL! >> UPDATE: OR MAYBE NOT!

LulzSec:
Not sure we claimed to hack the UK census or where that rumour started, but we assume it’s because people are stupider than you and I.

Anyone in the world can copy and paste The Lulz Boat ASCII art and general lighthearted theme. Smarten up, check the feed first.

But hey, if someone out there hacked the UK government in the name of #AntiSec, well done sirs!

It seems that LulzSec may NOT have access to the UK Census Data! Or maybe someone else does, and wants to post it under their name…. who knows? If something turns up on The Pirate Bay, then we will know that its true. Even if a single entry from the Census DB is leaked, with the table structure and everything, that would mean that the data is O.U.T. OUT!

LulzSec should start PGP signing their statements so that no one can forge them…

Even if this time, the data has not escaped, this doesn’t invalidate what we and all the people who understand this problem have been saying.

There is nothing in the world that can stop a determined person from copying the data from any database, and there is no way that the UK Census Data is secure in any database where it is stored. That is an incontrovertible and indisputable fact. There is no way of knowing wether or not this data has not already been copied by someone. The statement relased by the UK Census people in response to this fake Lulzsec announcement said only that they are ‘looking into it’ not, “we have your data safe, and no one has copied it”. See what I mean?

We warned you again and again and again and again about this.

Did not fill out the 2011 Census? You are safe.

Yet again, BLOGDIAL is vindicated.

for the 100th time…

Don’t enrol.
Don’t register.
Don’t hand over your data.
Don’t fill out their forms.
Say ‘no’ everywhere you can.

A classic post on the origins and future of copyright

Friday, June 17th, 2011

I just came across this very wonderful post on copyright, excerpted here. Read the rest of it, its a classic, and do spread it.

A Crescendo of Copyright

Natural Finale and Reprise

Rejected by The Rethink Music Conference, April 2011, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University

Abstract

  • A prologue – mankind’s culture and copyright in perspective

Copyright’s 18th Century Overture

  • 1709 Queen Anne’s privilege of copyright
  • 1787 the philosophy of Paine and the (natural) rights of man
  • 1790 the prestidigitation in which a privilege is inveigled as a natural right

Copyright’s Confrontation with Cultural Liberty reaches a crescendo

  • C19-20 the printing industry’s exploitation of its privilege
  • 1990s the propertisation of published intellectual works as an entrenchment
  • 2000s the piracy of published intellectual works as a natural liberty
  • 2010s the persecution of the people for their piracy (cultural liberty)

Copyright’s finale, and the reprise of natural rights

  • 20?? the prospectus for mankind’s future

Prologue

The extent of mankind’s primordial cultural activity stretches back at least half a million years, but thanks to repeated erasure by glaciation we start the notable cultural events calendar at 50,000BC.

51,709 years later a nascent empire and its pampered press have the impudence to decide that mankind’s cultural commonwealth would be so much better if a law was created to prohibit people from copying each other.

There are a few words for the precursory, unbridled cultural intercourse that still remain in the English language, though they are almost obsolete: ‘folksong’, ‘folkmusic’, ‘folktales’, and ‘folklore’. These primeval springs are still known to a few among us and can be found seeping through the pre-renaissance foundations upon which our modern culture stands.

Today we have the luxury of looking back over the last three centuries of ‘protection’ to see how much richer our culture has become, being effectively manacled and enclosed by corporations such as Disney. Permitted the liberty only to create purely original works, albeit with some tolerance for cultural cross contamination (if not too flagrant), we enjoy a far more creative and diverse culture. Or rather, this is what Queen Anne’s Stationers’ Guild and its descendant publishing corporations would persuade us is the consequence of her wise enactment of law to ‘protect’ published works from the grubby hands and mouths of the great unwashed.

Nothing to do with the printers’ monopolies then…

Let us see the historical accident of copyright in perspective:

65,000,000BC Primates
2,000,000BC Homo Erectus
500,000BC Division into Neanderthal & Homo Sapiens
200,000BC Homo Sapiens’ ancestral basis
140,000BC Glacial retreat after 40,000 year long glacial period
50,000BC Dawn of mankind’s culture: language, music, drawing, etc.
32,000BC Cave paintings
30,000BC Neanderthals extinct
20,000BC Glacial retreat after 50,000 year long glacial period
17,000BC Lascaux Cave Paintings
10,000BC Holocene – modern epoch
9,000BC Jericho
8,000BC Stonehenge site’s significance
3,100BC Stonehenge construction begins
2,611BC First Egyptian Pyramid
753BC Foundation of Rome
300BC Library of Alexandria
48BC Library of Alexandria accidentally destroyed by Julius Caesar
300 Book format outnumbers scroll format
1282 Water powered paper mill
1403 Corporation of London forms Stationers’ Guild
1440 Development and use of printing press begins
1492 Europeans discover New World
1536 Erasmus dies – 750,000 copies of his works sold
1557 Stationers’ Guild granted control over all printing
1572 Fall of Inca Empire
1695 Stationers’ Guild loses control upon expiry of the Licensing of the Press Act 1662
1703 Daniel Defoe endorses commercial piracy of his work – if true copies
1709 Queen Anne Establishes the Privilege of Copyright
1787 US Constitution
1790 Madison re-enacts Statute of Anne (tweaked for the US)
1791 Thomas Paine deprecates privileges
1814 Steam powered printing press
1837 Babbage designs Analytical Engine
1937 Relay computers
1943 Valve/Tube computers
1953 Transistor computers
1969 Internet begins with two nodes
1971 Microprocessor computers
1991 World Wide Web begins
2000 The people obtain the means of mass reproduction and communication
2010 The successors to the Stationers’ Guild seek possession of the Internet via ACTA
2011 Copyright recognised to be ineffective vs the people’s cultural liberty/piracy
2015?? Copyright is reformed to exempt individuals in the digital domain
2020?? Copyright is reformed to exempt individuals
2025?? Copyright is reformed to exempt the digital domain
2030?? Copyright is repealed
2031?? The author’s exclusive right to their writings is properly secured at last – ethically

Seen in a proper perspective, copyright is a legislative misadventure borne of political expediency and commercial self-interest. It is a hiccup in mankind’s history and, in the face of the diffusive nature of information, is coming to an abrupt and natural end.

[…]

read the rest of this epic, classic, brilliant, informative and insightful post here:

http://culturalliberty.org/blog/index.php?id=276

No wonder it was rejected, it is so true it jumps off the screen and knocks you off your chair!

V is for Vindication part… SONY

Friday, June 3rd, 2011

As we have been saying for years, it is impossible to secure any database, and putting the entire population of a country on a database is completely insane. The only thing that is more insane than that is to create a database of all the children in a country, and then to make that database available to over 1,000,000 agents of the state.

We also told you that the information contained in the databases proposed by the State, if compromised, could fit into a device smaller than your hand.

Now you see that once again, we were right about everything.

Some people got into a SONY database, and using a well known exploit, managed to copy the sensitive private details of ONE MILLION PEOPLE. They then posted that information for anyone to download on The Pirate Bay.

. /$$                 /$$            /$$$$$$                     
.| $$                | $$           /$$__  $$                    
.| $$       /$$   /$$| $$ /$$$$$$$$| $$  \__/  /$$$$$$   /$$$$$$$
.| $$      | $$  | $$| $$|____ /$$/|  $$$$$$  /$$__  $$ /$$_____/
.| $$      | $$  | $$| $$   /$$$$/  \____  $$| $$$$$$$$| $$      
.| $$      | $$  | $$| $$  /$$__/   /$$  \ $$| $$_____/| $$      
.| $$$$$$$$|  $$$$$$/| $$ /$$$$$$$$|  $$$$$$/|  $$$$$$$|  $$$$$$.$
.|________/ \______/ |__/|________/ \______/  \_______/ \_______/ 
                          //Laughing at your security since 2011!

.--    .-""-.
.   ) (     )
.  (   )   (
.     /     )
.    (_    _)                     0_,-.__
.      (_  )_                     |_.-._/
.       (    )                    |lulz..\    
.        (__)                     |__--_/           
.     |''   ``\                   |
.     | [Lulz] \                  |      /b/
.     |         \  ,,,---===?A`\  |  ,==y'
.   ___,,,,,---==""\        |M] \ | ;|\ |>
.           _   _   \   ___,|H,,---==""""bno,
.    o  O  (_) (_)   \ /          _     AWAW/
.                     /         _(+)_  dMM/
.      \@_,,,,,,---=="   \      \\|//  MW/
.--''''"                         ===  d/
.                                    //   SET SAIL FOR FAIL!
.                                    ,'_________________________
.   \    \    \     \               ,/~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
.                         _____    ,'  ~~~   .-""-.~~~~~~  .-""-.
.      .-""-.           ///==---   /`-._ ..-'      -.__..-'
.            `-.__..-' =====\\\\\\ V/  .---\.
.                     ~~~~~~~~~~~~, _',--/_.\  .-""-.
.                            .-""-.___` --  \|         -.__..-


Greetings folks. We're LulzSec, and welcome to Sownage. Enclosed you will
find various collections of data stolen from internal Sony networks and websites,
all of which we accessed easily and without the need for outside support or money.

We recently broke into SonyPictures.com and compromised over 1,000,000 users' 
personal information, including passwords, email addresses, home addresses, 
dates of birth, and all Sony opt-in data associated with their accounts. 
Among other things, we also compromised all admin details of Sony Pictures 
(including passwords) along with 75,000 "music codes" and 3.5 million "music coupons".

Due to a lack of resource on our part (The Lulz Boat needs additional funding!) 
we were unable to fully copy all of this information, however we have samples 
for you in our files to prove its authenticity. In theory we could have taken
every last bit of information, but it would have taken several more weeks.

Our goal here is not to come across as master hackers, hence what we're about 
to reveal: SonyPictures.com was owned by a very simple SQL injection, one of 
the most primitive and common vulnerabilities, as we should all know by now. 
From a single injection, we accessed EVERYTHING. Why do you put such faith in 
a company that allows itself to become open to these simple attacks?

What's worse is that every bit of data we took wasn't encrypted. Sony stored
over 1,000,000 passwords of its customers in plaintext, which means it's just
a matter of taking it. This is disgraceful and insecure: they were asking for it.

This is an embarrassment to Sony; the SQLi link is provided in our file contents, 
and we invite anyone with the balls to check for themselves that what we say
is true. You may even want to plunder those 3.5 million coupons while you can.

Included in our collection are databases from Sony BMG Belgium & Netherlands.
These also contain varied assortments of Sony user and staffer information.


This means that:

  • the dates of birth
  • addresses
  • emails addresses
  • full names
  • passwords
  • user IDs
  • phone numbers

of SONY’s users are now out in the open FOREVER.

The Coalition is trying to shift the burden of securing the massive databases they are eager to construct on to the credit card vendors, but this will not work to make anything secure, as we have told you before.

You do not need to collect this sort of data to run a government. Governments ran quite efficiently without needing computer databases, and in fact, the very earliest instances where one was used, it was used for a bad purpose.

ID Cards are a bad thing. There is nothing good about them, they are not needed to run anything, they enslave the people who are forced to use them and all plans to implement them should be abandoned permanently.

Databases of people’s private details are always a risky proposition. If you do not need to hold a person’s personal data to do your business, you should delete that data, or give the customer the power to delete her data from your system. When you do store that data, you should expect that it will be copied, and plan from the beginning to hold as little as is necessary, and when you do hold something, make sure that it is stored using best practice methods.

What this breach demonstrates is that databases are very dangerous things. Every time something like this happens, the propositon of creating databases of people becomes less attractive… and that is a very good thing.

At long last, it has dawned on them

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

Thanks to Old Holborn, we just read this breathtakingly wonderful piece. It says many of the things we have been going on about for years:

  • Demonstrations do not work
  • The State has no right to control you
  • The State has no power to control you unless you consent
  • StopWar and the like just don’t get it
  • Doing nothing is better than marching
  • If everyone simply stops cooperating, the State dies
  • Only a small percentage of the population needs to quit the system for massive beneficial change to take place

You read BLOGDIAL, so you know what I am talking about.

This piece comes from TPUC. We really are heading for a significant tipping point, where a confluence of factors is going to unleash everyone. This will be a good thing, because Britain is full of locked up potential that if released, would transform the entire world.

Here it is, in full:

A direct challenge to the authority of the State

by bogbeagle » Mon May 30, 2011 8:54 am

Hi chaps. Haven’t posted here for some time, but I’d like to introduce to you a new “strategy” which has potential … well, I think so.

It’s a pretty long post, but I’d ask you to persevere and tell me whether you think the logic of my argument is sound. And, is my proposal sound?

Let me precis … I propose that we can demand, of government, the answer to an “impossible” question. That, if asked publicly, this question is sufficient to undermine the “assumed authority” of government.

A refutal of Government’ authority

I’ve always been told that I am “governed and taxed by consent”.

And, when you think about it, this must be true.

It stems, of course, from the Christian’ idea that we are each born free and of equal worth. Now, if two people are equals, it follows that one may not direct the other, nor impose his will upon that other, except with the consent of both parties. When no such consent is present, it must be the case that one ‘man’ is imposing his will by force, or the threat of force. In effect, that would mean that one ‘man’ has enslaved the other to his bidding.

So, to avoid that accusation, Western governments have invented the idea of “consensual governance” … wherein each of the governed agrees to abide by the rules, sanctions and taxes which are laid down by “Government”.

There is little doubt that this relationship serves many people adequately. It’s also true that few people ever question its validity; that’s why we are known as “sheeple”, I guess.

Logically, if I am “governed and taxed by my consent”, there absolutely must be a mechanism by which that consent may be withdrawn. If no such mechanism exists, then the concept of “consensual governance” is clearly untrue; I would be governed without my consent and thus be a slave to the will of other men. There are parallels with the slave-owning society of the C18th, if you’ll just ponder awhile.

A strategy

My strategy has two prongs:

1 … A concerted and public demand that the “Government” inform me of the mechanism by which I may withdraw my consent to its governance. If no such mechanism exists, then said “Government” should state that I am, in fact, its slave. I would, in effect, be challeinging the Government’s “lawful authority” to govern.

2 … An attempt to unify the disparate campaigning and lobbying groups, each of which is hindered by the same, fundamental, deficit. That is, each group is suffering a deficit in Liberty. If the members of the “stop-the-war” group can be shown that their cause is the SAME as that of the “I-want-to-smoke-weed” group, then the number of those who would live as Free people, will swell; and at some point, their mass will become critical.

OK, the first prong involves a direct challenge to government itself. Traditionally, those who would be Freemen, have sent off their affidavits and been thoroughly ignored … am I right? Well, that’s the treatment that I received, anyway.

This time, we must act in concert and very publicly. But, this will not involve travel or mass demonstrations, or confrontation. No, I suggest that we use the Royal Mail and the Internet (our best friend).

I propose that, en masse, we flood the PM and our MPs with demands (recorded delivery) that they tell us how we withdraw our consent to governance. Of course, they cannot truthfully reply, since their reply must either tell us that we are enslaved OR furnish us with the freedom to opt out of the State. I’ve thought about this for quite some time now, and I’m confident that any and all answers, which they might construct, ultimately lead to the same truths … we are enslaved. The thing is, we have to force them to admit it or else retire embarrassed and blustering. The facts of this strategy should motivate thousands more people to question their status within the community. Now, I do expect that 90% of the public could not give a toss, but if just one percent sit up and take notice … well, that’s 650,000 people.

Running in tandem with this mass “interrogation”, would be our internet campaign to promote the concept. This will be largely via the alternative media (we all know the value of the MSM, by now). I’m thinking of numerous campaigning websites, Zerohedge, Max Keiser, Adam vs the Man, Freedomain Radio, Alex Jones … you get the idea. We have to put the PM and our MPs in a position such that a refusal to comply with our demands is simply untenable … they will then be forced to bullshit. They’ve no other option, because they DARE NOT speak the truth of the matter. We, of course, anticipating the bullshit answers, will have raised and dismissed them, publicly, before the politicians have even uttered them.

As to the unification of campaigning groups. Let me give you an exemplar. I’m sure that it’s obvious to you that a Free man of good conscience would not support an unjust war. But, that’s exactly what we are forced to do, via taxation. And, “forced” is the right word to use.

It serves the ends of the peace campaigner to withdraw his consent to taxation, when the money is being used for evil ends.

So, too, with the campaigner who wants to smoke his weed (or whatever). As a Free man, it is clear that the State has no business in defining what substances he may ingest. And yet, the State assumes de facto ownership over his body by compelling him to ingest only that which the State deems acceptable.

Each of these two campaigners is suffering from a common deficit .. a Liberty deficit.

I don’t know whether it’s possible to make that case to them. I don’t know whether their other concerns will over-ride my arguments. It could be that the peace campaigner also wants to have the State extort money from other people and give it to him in the form of benefits. If that’s the case, then it’s a clear example of “having your cake and eating it”, since it is impossible to have your own Liberty whilst denying it to others … except by the use of force. Well, that’s a moral dilemma for them to ponder. I’d suggest that you’ve no business in labelling yourself “peace campaigner” whilst encouraging the State to extort money from others, on your behalf. But that’s just me!

In passing, I feel that it’s important to avoid confrontation with the executive arm of the State. Our campaign should be one of ideas. The State is well prepared to fight a campaign of riots and bottles, but woefully unable to challenge logic. How can it challenge the Truth?

Now, I don’t know where this might lead. It could be another dead-end. But, I think that the logic is unassailable. What is your opinion?

——-

My opinion is that you rock, you are 10000% correct, and if this takes off, you will have pushed the button.

ID Cards 2.0 – Assured Identity

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

In today’s Telegraph, we read, with not too much surprise, that The Coalition is quietly bringing in ID Cards for all, only this time, it will be ID Cards 2.0 and not Labour’s centralised NIR powered ID Cards 1.

All of the problems of the old ID Card remain however, and some new ones are introduced, which I will point out right now.

Coalition builds new national identity system

The Coalition has quietly begun work on a new national identity system, less than a year after it scrapped Labour’s derided ID cards.

Didn’t take long did it? And this latest attempt had to happen at some point, since HMG refused to rule out ID Cards for Foreigners, meaning that eventually everyone in the UK would have to be in the system because targeting only foreign looking people is racist and irrational, as we said before.

A prototype of the new system is due to be in place as soon as October this year. It will aim to reliably identify users of government websites, as part of plans to deliver more public services via the web.

This is a lie. The new system is a prototype of ID Cards for everyone. It is not just for accessing government ‘services’. ID Cards always lead to feature creep whenever they are widely deployed, for a variety of reasons; for example, so that people who sell alcohol, cigarettes, aspirin and scissors, can prove that they did a proper ID check before making the sale, the information being stored on their database, indemnifying them from prosecution. This is what it would look like:

the devil really is in the details:

This time, the receipt will not say NIR but will say ‘assured identity’. You will not be able to buy anything on the list of ‘verify before buy’ items without either showing your VISA or paying by VISA.

George Osborne believes the shift online will cut Whitehall administration costs and so help soften the blow of spending cuts over the next few years.

Several private companies that already hold personal data, including credit card providers, will be involved in the system.

There is the big difference, and the new moral problem. Previously the liars of New Labour claimed that ID Cards mandated by the state were OK because, “private companies already have much of this data”. This is a classic fallacious argument of course, and now the coalition is re-imagining it to justify ID Cards 2.0.

If you volunteer to interact with a company so that they can provide you with a service, that is one thing (and its a good thing) but when companies join with government where you will be compelled to use their services, that is fascism.

The government compels you to pay for and use it ‘services’; they are not voluntary. By partnering with VISA and other companies to identify you, and mandating that you use VISA to access their systems, they are forcing you to use the services of a company.

This is completely immoral and unjustifiable.

If government cannot deliver services on budget, then they should not be offering those services. Savings of money are not a sufficient excuse to introduce ID Cards.

Such firms have already verified their customers’ identities, so privacy campaigners hope government will not itself collect personal data, in contrast to the National Identity Register that was to be the basis of ID cards.

This is straight out of a PR pack I imagine. The laws of the universe, having not changed since the death of Labour’s ID Card, mean that when you identify yourself to the state in this new system, you will be issued a unique number by them, or by the issuer of the card.

That number will travel with you from the moment you sign up till the day you die. That number will act as a primary database key to track all of your purchases, interactions, money transfers and every time you show the card.

It is exactly the same problem that the old ID Card system had, except this time, the financial and technical burden of running the system is being outsourced to VISA, Nectar and the other crony capitalist, fascist companies that are selling their customer databases to the state.

You will have no opt out in this. Even if VISA require that you consent to having your card used to identify you at a government portal, and they are not compelling you to use a VISA ID Card 2.0 service, the fact of the matter is that you will be compelled to interact with them because the state will mandate, backed with violence, that you identify yourself using the new system.

Visa is known to be involved in the plans and is conducting trials that would allow its customers to log in to government websites using credit card details.

This is yet another step in the transition to a completely corporate state, where companies overtly are in charge of the government at every level.

“Currently customers have to enter multiple login details and passwords to access different public services, sometimes on the same website,” said Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister responsible for the cross-government plan.

“This involves significant duplication, is expensive to operate and is highly inconvenient for users.”

If that is the only problem, then switch to Open ID; one login for all your websites. Or stop using the web to deliver ‘services’. These justifications are paper thin transparent nonsense.

He also claimed the new scheme, dubbed “identity assurance”, would also make it more difficult for fraudsters to dupe the benefits and tax systems.

This is a lie. If it is not a lie, then he needs to say precisely why this is so. Credit card fraud is rampant, and using credit cards to interface with the state will allow everyone with a fraudulent or duplicated credit card to masquerade as someone else when identifying themselves to a government portal.

Look no further than the recent SONY breach where the credit card details, dates of birth, names and addresses of SEVENTY MILLION people were copied.

The population of Britain is 61,838,154 – 2009 That means that a number of people, larger than the population of Britain had their credit card details copied.

It means that if such a thing happened in the UK, every single person who identifies themselves to the state with their VISA could be impersonated with ease. This means more benefit fraud, GUARANTEED.

The government has informed privacy campaigners such as the pressure group NO2ID about the plans, in an attempt to avoid the civil liberties outcry that ultimately destroyed ID cards.

This preemptive strike will not work. The genie is out of the bottle about the dangers of ID Cards.

But Guy Herbert, NO2ID’s general secretary warned that “the devil will be in the details and especially the legal details” of the new scheme. He said the Cabinet Office had not yet offered details despite its tight schedule.

“It’s not a bad thing in itself to check that the person you are talking to is the person you want to talk to,” Mr Herbert said.

“But whatever the good intentions at the outset, the fear will always be that the bureaucratic imperative to collect and share more data about the public will take over.”

And that’s not the half of it. I’m sure that he said much more that was not quoted in this piece.

Identity assurance will be implemented from August next year as part of major government initiatives such as forthcoming radical reforms to the benefits system and improvements to online tax assessments.

They will use your credit card transaction history to ensure that you are not spending more than you should be according to your tax return. This is a part of the move to ‘real time taxation’ that was quietly mooted recently. It doesn’t get any more sinister than this.

It will then gradually be extended so users will be able to use the same login for all public services online.

Telegraph

Once again, there is no need to use credit cards to do this; Open ID will suffice if this is the real problem, which of course, it is not.

Personally, I think that most credit card holders, after having been educated about online fraud for years, and instilling in themselves a healthy paranoia about putting their card details into a form online, will understand exactly what it means to identify yourself with your VISA or MasterCard. They will understand immediately that this is a threat, because credit cards are money and people guard their money more jealously than they guard their privacy.

Of course, this has some other side effects.

What about the people who do not have credit cards? Either they will be excluded from receiving government services to which they are entitled (and they are the ones who use them the most), or VISA will be made to issue everyone with a VISA card hastening the death of cash, that other project hight on the agenda of the State.

It is a win-win deal for both VISA and the state:

  • The State gets an ID Card system they do not have to manage
  • The State eliminates cash which is untraceable and un-taxable
  • VISA gets to run the de-facto new electronic currency of Britain

In the mean time, it is only the productive, credit worthy tax payer who is going to be guinea pigged, fleeced, max-taxed and tracked as he dutifully interfaces with this new system… if he doesn’t have any brains.

This is the wrong time, societally, to introduce this. The biggest ever act of civil disobedience has just happened, people are fed up to the teeth with crony capitalism, inflationism, bailouts warmongering and corruption.

Go ahead. Keep pushing.

The Hargreaves report on intellectual property: full text

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

The Hargreaves report on intellectual property recommends setting up a ‘digital exchange’ for the clearance of copyright. Here is the full text of the report, broken into chapters served as PDFs. You are free to copy them and distribute them at will.

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Creation Under Competition
Chapter 3: How Competition Works
Chapter 4: Innovation Without Patents
Chapter 5: The Intellectual Monopoly Apologists
Chapter 6: The Evil of Intellectual Monopoly
Chapter 7: The Devil in Disney
Chapter 8: Does Intellectual Monopoly Increase Innovation?
Chapter 9: The Pharmaceutical Industry
Chapter 10: The Bad, the Good, and the Ugly

Its about time that the state has the power to violently prevent you from exercising your property rights removed from it.

In the UK, it is illegal to make a copy of a CD you own for your own use. That is completely immoral; if you own a CD it is your right to copy it, destroy it, lend it or do anything else you like with it.

If you concede that the state is legitimate in telling you that you cannot make a copy (rip a CD to MP3s) then you must also concede that you should be forbidden from destroying a CD, if the maker of that CD demands that you do not do that.

This is how absurd the copyright laws are.

There are companies in the USA that specialise in ripping your CD collection for you.

You send them your CDS, and in a matter of days, you get your CDs back along with a DVDR of MP3s containing rips of all your tracks. These companies, the service they provide and the benefits they produce cannot happen in the UK, thanks to its absurd statutes.

The Hargreaves Report will sweep all of this away in one motion. Its recommendations on patents will result in cheaper drugs and medical care for everyone, making the beloved NHS more cost effective; if you love the NHS, you should hate patents.

There is only one problem with all of this, naturally, and as soon as you read the Hargreaves Report linked above, you will instantly know what it is.

Finally, if you want to attract business to this ridiculous ‘Silicon Roundabout’ push, persuading businesses to locate to Britain, you must remove all the barriers to entry that people recoil from, like punitive non-dom regulations and other absurd anti business nonsense, of the kind that Google say would have prevented them from starting their business in the UK.

I guarantee you that there are companies, right now, that are starting up that shun Britain because it is anti business, and that there are companies in development here that once they start to fly, will fly away from Britain in order to avoid being bogged down by the entrenched anti business climate. Skype was based in Estonia for a reason.

Think about it.

SONY, the Census and insanity

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

SONY has proved once again, that everything we said about ContactPoint and the doomed ID Card project was true.

Millions of internet users hit by massive Sony PlayStation data theft
Sensitive personal details of tens of millions of internet users have been stolen by hackers in one of the biggest ever cases of data theft, it has emerged.

And there you have it.

Is there anyone out there who thinks that the Census data is more secure than this SONY Playstation data is? If there is, I have some beachfront property in Siberia to sell you.

Fraudsters have obtained data on millions of online video gamers – including three million Britons – after targeting Sony’s PlayStation Network.
The electronics giant is contacting around 70 million customers warning that details including their names, addresses, dates of birth, passwords and security questions have been stolen.

Sony also admitted that the hackers may have gained access to people’s credit card details.

[…]

Telegraph

And of course, this data can never be put back in the bottle. The credit card details can be changed, but not the names and DOBs. The same of course is true of a database containing your fingerprints. As a commenter at the Telegraph points out:

Gerry1
Today 03:35 AM
Recommended by
31 people
What legitimate business do Sony have in asking for one’s Date of Birth?

The world and his wife seems to ask always for DoB, together with Mother’s Maiden Name. That’s effectively sharing passwords, but the first Golden Rule of security is NEVER to share passwords!

Any organisation that asks for this data for ID purposes isn’t fit for purpose and should never be trusted.

unclepeter
Today 05:54 AM
Recommended by
7 people
DoB is one of the most accurate ways of identifying someone. Law enforcement doesn’t care you are or where your from. They want your DoB. One of my family is a retired police officer who explained this to me one day. He used my DoB and showed me how quickly they can narrow down who I am. It is really scary and it is one of the pieces of information I absolutely never pass on.

Indeed.

No organisation that asks for your date of birth should ever be trusted. They simply do not need that information to do business with you. That is true, and the reply to that comment is very revealing is it not? If SONY has had the DOBs of millions of people copied from their servers….

You get the picture, because you read BLOGDIAL.

From El Reg, the inside dope…

The stolen information may also include payment-card data, purchase history, billing addresses, and security answers used to change passwords, Sony said on Tuesday. The company plans to keep the hacked system offline for the time being, and to restore services gradually. The advisory also applies to users of Sony’s related Qriocity network.

Sony’s stunning admission came six days after the PlayStation Network was taken down following what the company described as an “external intrusion”.

[…]

Sony had already come under fire for a copyright lawsuit targeting customers who published instructions for unlocking the game console so it could run games and applications not officially sanctioned by the company. The criticism only grew after Sony lawyers sought detailed records belonging to hacker George Hotz, including the IP addresses of everyone who visited his jailbreaking website over a span of 26 months.

Hackers howled with displeasure saying they should have a right to modify the hardware they legally own. Sony recently settled that case, but Hotz, whose hacker moniker is GeoHot, has remained highly critical of the company. Many have also objected to the removal of the so-called OtherOS, which allowed PlayStation 3 consoles to run Linux.

Sony’s advisory on Tuesday means that the company was likely storing passwords, credit card numbers, expiration dates, and other sensitive information unhashed and unencrypted on its servers. Sony didn’t say if its website complied with data-security standards established by the Payment Card Industry.

Sony reminded users located in the US that they’re entitled to receive one credit report per year from each of the three major credit bureaus. The company didn’t offer to pay for any sort of credit monitoring service to help ensure the information it lost isn’t used in identity-theft ruses against its users.

[…]

Sony’s advisory on Tuesday means that the company was likely storing passwords, credit card numbers, expiration dates, and other sensitive information unhashed and unencrypted on its servers. Sony didn’t say if its website complied with data-security standards established by the Payment Card Industry.

[…]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/26/sony_playstation_network_security_breach/

And there you have it.

Even a giant company like SONY, with talented and highly skilled software developers can make mistakes that can lead to data being copied. Take a look at this video to see the following:

The type of people who are hacking the PlayStation
Their motivation
Their non criminal personalities
A small taste of their culture

Clearly these people are not evil. Its clear that these people are not the sort to copy the personal data of millions of people for profit.

Who knows what the motivations of the people who copied the SONY data were. Hopefully it was a benevolent person who just wants to hurt SONY in public for ruthlessly and pointlessly attacking GeoHot, and not an actual criminal who wants to help other criminals hurt people. Who knows?

What we do know is that all databases can be breached, and there is no such thing as a ‘secure database’. They can be breached either from the outside or from inside, and once its done its done forever, and cannot be undone.

Which brings us to the matter of the Census.

We were told a story of a family that received THREE census forms. This happened because they had moved house and had been on holiday during the time of Census. Since forms were sent to all three places that they had been staying, they collected THREE FORMS to fill out, and have been advised that they must fill them ALL out.

Astonishing and stupid in equal measure, but quite apart from that, who in their right mind would fill out a Census form, in the light of everything people must know not only about databases, but about the State and its inability to keep anything safe? Add to this, the insult of the nasty company who got the contract to run the data collection, and you have an undoable proposition.

I gives me great pleasure to see that in fact, seven million of them according to one person, have the right idea:

Only a complete, walking dead, pure sheeple imbecile fills out a census form, especially this particular one, which by all accounts will be the last one.

In spite of all of this, the missing DVDRs full of personal data, this SONY breach, and all the other data losses, we STILL have mentally retarded people calling for ‘Son of ContactPoint’ as a cure to some problem. It beggars belief.

Finally, back to the SONY breach.

If SONY and the other companies that made telephones and consoles respected the property rights of the people who buy their products, breaches like this would be less likely.

If you buy something, you own it. You have the right to destroy it, sell it or modify it. This is an absolute right that is not negotiable, and the people who jailbreak their iPhones and who modify their consoles are doing nothing immoral. The people who sell mod chips and who write jailbreaking software are exercising their own property rights, and no one has the right to stop them from sharing or selling their work.

The sooner these companies cease their ‘one rule for us and another for everyone else’ behaviour the better. Property rights exist for everyone, not just SONY and Apple. If their business models cannot work in the real world, then its the business model that has to change, and it is entirely wrong of them to try and change the world through the state and its violent coercion so that their business models can succeed.

Non-dom exodus costs London restaurant trade 1/4 billion

Friday, January 14th, 2011

As we explained in detail some time ago, Britain changing the rules for non doms is, to put it lightly, not cricket.

Now, thanks to a FOIA request, we have a number to juggle with:

UK sees non-dom ‘exodus’ as £30,000 levy hits home
The number of UK “non doms” has fallen by almost 16,000 after a £30,000 levy was imposed on offshore earnings, official figures show.

HM Revenue & Customs said the number of UK residents escaping tax on income or capital gains held in offshore bank accounts had declined from 139,000 to 123,000 in the year prior and after the launch of the £30,000 remittance basis charge in April 2008.

The 11.5pc decline was the first for five years and is likely to have been repeated in 2010 as more long-term non-dom residents become liable to the change, lawyers said.

McGrigors, the law firm which secured the figures under a Freedom of Information request, said the “collapse” in numbers of non-doms should be a warning to the Government not to tighten the rules on how offshore wealth is taxed.

The Coalition has pledged a review to assess whether non doms were making “a fair contribution to reducing the deficit” and a Treasury spokesman said last night that the review was “ongoing”. “A further announcement will be made at the appropriate time,” he said.

[…]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/8255860/UK-sees-non-dom-exodus-as-30000-levy-hits-home.html

These people leaving the UK is a rational, and predictable response to the threat of theft; take a look at the details that were published outlining the new, byzantine and insane rules that were being mooted. Even if all of them were not implemented, the threat of them would have been enough for people to get out while the getting was good. But I digress.

What does this 16,000 number mean? What impact will it have on the people who are left behind?

To take just one example, it means that the restaurant visits these people will make in London will now not be made.

If these non-doms eat at a restaurant twice a week, which is very likely, and each of these meals costs £150, which is a perfectly reasonable assumption given the bracket these people are in, we can multiply the number of non-doms by the cost of these meals by two, which is:

16000*2*150 = £4,800,000

Four million, eight hundred thousand pounds, per week, taken away from the London restaurant trade.

That is £249,600,000  taken out of the restaurant trade in a single year, just shy of a quarter of a billion pounds; and remember, the number of non doms escaping this insanity is increasing. Bear in mind also, that this is just the restaurant trade. Every day non doms are in the country, they are spending money just being alive, on a myriad of other goods and services. That money too, is now gone forever.

None of this factors in the connections, future connections, future investment and everything else non dom entrepreneurs and high grade workers bring would have brought to the UK that would have been the seeds of future growth, that will now be planted in more fertile ground.

This is exactly the opposite of what HMG should be doing if they want growth to accelerate in the UK.

But you know this!

British families, enjoy your Home Educating!

Friday, January 7th, 2011

This video about the true nature of bullying:

should make Home Educators in the UK feel warm inside; you are free to Home Educate as you choose, in a country that (for the moment) is not bothering you in anything like the repressive, unjustifiable, nasty, fascist ways the other ‘Democratic’, ‘fair’, ‘inclusive’ and ‘just’ countries do. Your children are not being subjected to the horrors that are described so eloquently above.

Enjoy!

The Manchester ID Card trials were a greater disaster than previously thought

Thursday, December 30th, 2010

After HRH Elizabeth the second officially killed the ID Cards bill (for the indigenous people of the UK only) we now read this story from the Manchester Evening News about what was actually going on at the time of the Manchester ID Card trials.

We can infer much from this, and also extrapolate to what is happening today:

Revealed: The full shambles of the ID card trial in Greater Manchester

Civil servants were urged to sign up their own families for ID cards as the controversial scheme flopped, it can be revealed today.

Confidential reports into trials of the controversial £30 cards, obtained by the M.E.N., expose for the first time the chaos that surrounded their introduction.

The £1bn scheme was launched in Greater Manchester in November last year but proved a hugely expensive failure, with only 13,200 people signing up.

It was scrapped by the coalition government days after it came to power.

Today the M.E.N. can reveal how:

  • Senior Whitehall officials were urged to email friends and relatives encouraging them to buy cards because of fears about the level of demand
  • UK and overseas border guards refused to recognise the cards – with one traveller chased through an Italian airport after trying to use one as ID
  • The Home Office discovered the cards could stop some credit cards from working properly

The cards – which contained fingerprint and other biometric details – were championed by the previous Labour government as a way of preventing terrorism and identity theft.

The documents highlight particular concern about low take-up by staff at Manchester Airport –

By April this year, only 15 per cent of airside workers had enrolled for a card.

Reports reveal how the airport took the unusual step of appointing a full-time ‘National Identity Card Administrator’ to drive up demand and considered a competition to promote the scheme.

The report also said: “One participant complained that the identity card interfered with other cards kept in the same wallet.”

The ID scheme – which cost £292m before it was axed – was initially championed by Labour minister as an anti-terror measure that would allow them to keep track of people in the UK.

But public pressure eventually forced them to concede that the cards should not be compulsory. Manchester was chosen to pilot the scheme but all 13,200 cards issued have now been cancelled.

Participants who forked out £30 for the documents have been told they will not get refunds.

The Home Office refused to comment on any of the problems cited in the reports

Damian Green, the home office minister, said: “The Identity Card Scheme was intrusive, bullying, ineffective and expensive.”

But Leigh Labour MP Andy Burnham, who previously oversaw the biometric cards while a Home Office minister, said: “The Tory-Lib Dem government are trying to make the cards a totem of what our government stood for– but I think they were a good idea and many people are still be in favour of them.”

http://menmedia.co.uk/manchestereveningnews/

And there you have it.

only 13,200 certifiably insane signed up for the ID Card; we knew that the uptake was very small, but what we did not know was that senior Whitehall officials were urged to email friends and relatives to encourage them to buy the cards because demand was so small.

We did not know that UK border guards did not recognize the cards. That is just completely ABSURD.

The staff at Manchester Airport, bless them, held fast and refused to knuckle under, with only 15% of them taking the card. This is highly significant, since the jobs of these people might have been on the line if they refused.

We did not know that they appointed an NIR Administrator to drive up demand.

The question here is (and you know the answer) why did we not know all of this at the time it was happening?

BBQ was there ‘reporting’ what was happening in Manchester, with its vox pops and biased articles; surely they must have known about the low uptake, the NIR Administrator and the ridiculous scene of a man not having his ID Card at the borders of ‘his own country’.

Its a 1000% guaranteed fact that the BBC was aware of all of this and did not report it. We at BLOGDIAL know for a fact that they were involved in setting up NO2ID for their vile propaganda pieces; its a very safe bet that they withheld these sensational and game changing stories because they knew that if they reported them, the ID Card fiasco’s collapse would be accelerated.

Readers of BLOGDIAL know what we think of Andy Burnham. That he is still saying in public that ‘ID Cards are a good idea’ at this stage, when the Queen has just destroyed his ‘good idea’, with the entire nation galvanized against them, is simply staggering.

That man is an unrepentant, unctuous, evil little socialist. Period.

Now for the comments on this article…

Comrade Burnham would think they were a good idea wouldn’t he…moron.
Anthony Cutt (30/12/2010 at 12:42)

I like it!

£292 million later & Andy Burnham still thinks they’re a good idea?
Let me tell you something Andy: I shall probably vote Labour come the next election but not if idiots like yourself are still around.
Ivor Rash, Oldham (30/12/2010 at 12:43)

Oldham, up North, where they vote Labour, hates Burnham.

“The Tory-Lib Dem government are trying to make the cards a totem of what our government stood for”

They were. Money p****d against the wall on unnecessary, unwanted & unworkable ideas by an incompetent & inefficient government.
Anthony Cutt (30/12/2010 at 12:50)

The image has cracked; these scumbags cannot lie anymore, thanks to the internets. People have a vocabulary to defend themselves with, thanks to the internet; its a vocabulary that you will not be able to collect from any Broadsheep newspaper, the BBC, Sky or any MSM news source.

I signed up for an ID card but it got stolen.

It’s hard to type when you’ve had to saw off your fingerprints & difficult to see when you’ve had to have a cornea transplant!
NoSignOfHealthToBeWellAdjustedToASickSociety, Tameside (30/12/2010 at 13:00)

I lol’d!

Yes a lot of people are in favour of them, Sun readers and other sub normal cretins mainly.
PeteB, Hyde (30/12/2010 at 13:35)

I can feel your anger! It makes you stronger, gives you focus!

Stretch out with your hate BOY!

I’d be willing to bet that far more Guardian readers are in favour of ID cards. Personally, I wouldn’t have got one even if it had been made compulsory. I already have a passport, a driving licence and my Army ID. If they’re not enough to prove my identity, tough.
John Evans (30/12/2010 at 13:04)

When the army goes against the State, then the State is in big trouble. I have no doubt that there are more secret documents that detail revolt from the Police and the Military. We already know that BALPA came out against them unanimously. They killed this because it was offensive to everyone once the truth of how it actually works was spread virally.

But still there a number of morons in Greater Manchester who would SERIOUSLY consider voting for Andy Burnham come the next election, even in light of his absolutely obserd remarks!

Says it all…… To think the likes of him and many others in the LIE BOUR camp who still support the I.D card system beggars belief!
Red Army (30/12/2010 at 13:09)

They are truly human garbage, the whole lot of them.

You may read the rest of the comments at your leisure.

BLOGDIAL is offering £10 cash bounty for UK ID Cards; if you have one, we want to buy it from you. I am going to set them in a frame as a trophy to our victory in bringing this disgusting, immoral and vile scheme down. Email us!

Now for the extrapolation.

As you know ID Cards have been abolished only for the British; they still exist for the ‘wogs’.

What do you think the BBC is not reporting about the uptake of these Apartheid style cards by the dirty foreign invaders?

I guarantee you that the uptake of these cards amongst foreigners is even less than the uptake in the Manchester trial, and once the news of the racist nature of these cards spreads virally to all the victims of this abominable crime, you can be sure that there will be a blanket refusal to interface with the system.

ID Cards for foreigners will collapse just like the ID Cards for Brits collapsed, because if no one carries them, even the UK ‘authorities’ will not recognize them; they will be literally useless.

These racist cards will never reach critical mass, and of course, there are all the problems of an Apartheid state where millions of ‘honorary whites’ are also living unsegregated who, by law, are not required to carry an ID Card or show it upon demand.

Its a recipe for disaster of course, but it seems like the painful and expensive process has to be gone through before ID Cards can be completely eradicated for good.

A commenter gets the gist of this:

So what’s happened to the “full-time ‘National Identity Card Administrator’” now that the scheme has been scrapped and he has nothing to administrate.

I doubt he has been sacked. More likely he’s been given a new job title, a pay rise and an assistant.
ebble, manchester (30/12/2010 at 13:37)

This is what it is all about; fleecing human beings as if they were cattle, creating an ID Card ecosystem where there are guaranteed jobs for decades administrating, examining, reporting, issuing, replacing, repairing, distributing and interfacing with these diabolical cards.

But you know this!