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Big Brother Is Watching

17 Sunday Nov 2013

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So is the NSA spying on you? Probably not. Is your Internet Service Provider (ISP) spying on you? Yes they are. And there’s no doubt about it. This article in PC World quotes Dan Auerbach, a Staff Technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as saying that if your ISP chooses to they can “see what pages you looked at on that Web site you visited, and what you wrote in that e-mail”. Even if your ISP isn’t watching your browsing activity in real-time, they are certainly logging it because by law they have to in order to comply with any court ordered subpoena that could at anytime be served on them by any Federal, State or local law enforcement agency and yes even the NSA. Not only is your ISP tracking and logging your every move on the Web and storing your email in their servers, they are also collecting all of your meta-data so they can sell it to marketeers. All ISP’s have been doing this for years.

So who besides your ISP is spying on you? Google is storing mountains of
information about everything you do online even if you’re not logged into your Google account. Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Apple are spying on you and so are dozens of Internet snoops like StatCounter, Woopra and Google Analytics. And like Google, all of these companies are sharing with governments worldwide but most particularly the U.S. government. According to information released last week by Google the U.S. government made 10,918 requests for 21,683 user accounts during the first six months of 2013.

Plus there’s this. Every time you visit any website it’s like you’re sharing your identity with that website’s administers and anyone else who has access to the files on the servers on which that site is hosted.

If all that’s not enough to make you a bit paranoid, here’s something else to think about. There are literally thousands of highly skilled people employed by
hundreds of companies who are working every day to create the type of software that will bring your online identity into sharper and sharper focus. And they’re not just looking at you, they’re tracking your kids too. So, is there anything you can do about it? Yes there is. You could choose to become invisible on the Internet.

The best way, by far, to become invisible on the Internet is to start using Tor rather than IE, Safari, Firefox or Chrome to browse the Web. The Tor Web browser was born as a U.S. Navy research project in 2002. The Tor browser makes it impossible for anyone or any machine to determine your IP address as you surf the Web and therefore you are totally anonymous.

Here’s how Tor works. The Tor browser runs on a network of routing points that randomize your path through the internet, making it next to impossible to track what sites and services you use. Web sites can’t track you because they can’t see you. Even your Internet Service Provider is unable to track your movements once you’re on the Tor browser. The only thing your ISP can determine is that you are on the Internet and using software that is very likely to be the Tor browser. And as Tor says on their home page: “You are now free to browse the Internet anonymously”.

To download and start using Tor go here and read the literature and follow the instructions.

I’m @Scoroncocolo on Twitter.

 

Silk Road the Bizarre Bazaar

10 Sunday Nov 2013

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silk-road-tor

On October 2, 2013 the FBI shutdown the Website Silk Road and arrested its alleged webmaster Ross William Ulbricht charging him with murder for hire and
narcotics trafficking. Even though Ulbricht, whose sobriquet was “The Dread Pirate Roberts”, is still presumed to be incarcerated a far more secure version of his Silk Road Website went back online November 6, 2013 and is still up today. And I know it’s still up because I have it open in another window as I’m writing this.

I’m sure you know that Silk Road is an online marketplace where some people buy and sell illegal drugs. Although I suppose if you live in Colorado or Washington it would be legal to both buy and sell marijuana using Silk Road but I wouldn’t ever advise it. But window shopping is not the same as buying and there is absolutely nothing illicit or dangerous about visiting the Silk Road Website.

Another reason not to shy away from visiting Silk Road is that they sell a whole lot of other things besides illegal drugs and at some great prices too. For instance, you can buy a Burberry London Winter Down Jacket on eBay for $1,139.00. Nordstrom sells the same jacket for $1,795.00. Or you could buy one on Silk Road for a hundred and twenty-five bucks. Caveat Emptor, of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a Burberry London Winter Down Jacket knock-off from a firm called FoxyGirl didn’t turn out to be almost indistinguishable from “the real thing”.

The only way you can buy anything on Silk Road is with Bitcoins. Bitcoins are easy to deal with if you use a site like CoinBase and here is a handy Bitcoin to US dollar, euro, Assie dollar, British pound and Swedish krona converter because Bitcoins fluctuate sometimes wildly in value.

But back to the bargains on Silk Road. A decent pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses are going to cost you at least a hundred and fifty bucks. But you can buy Ray-Bans on Silk Road for thirty dollars. Of course The Dread Pirate Roberts sells pirated software too. You can buy MS Office 2011 from various Microsoft licensed dealers for about a hundred dollars or you could buy a full-blown licensed copy of Office 2011 on Silk Road for 20 bucks. The Ray-Bans? I say, go for it, but don’t buy pirated software. That’s stealing even if it is stealing from the evil empire. But there are tons of legal things to buy on Silk Road making it a very worthwhile visit.

But how do you get to the Silk Road? That’s not as easy as you might think. Try Googling it. You wont find it because you can’t get there from here. The Silk Road is not on the surface Web, it’s in the Deep Web. In order to access the Deep Web where the Silk Road lies you’ll need to download and install the Tor Web browser. The Tor browser is very much like any other Web browser like Microsoft’s Windows Explorer or Google’s Chrome browser or Apple’s Safari Web browser. But Tor is an “onion” browser that routes your Internet connection through a worldwide, volunteer network consisting of more than four thousand relays to conceal not only your IP address but all of your activity on the Web. When you go into incognito mode on Chrome, IE or Firefox, you are by no means immune from detection. Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) is still logging every site you visit and monitoring everything you upload or download. But on the Tor Browser you are 100% invisible. With all the news about the intrusiveness of the NSA lately many people are beginning to do all of their Internet browsing with the Tor browser. Tor was, after all, created by the U.S. government to keep their online communications secure. But that’s for a different post.

Downloading and installing Tor is so easy that I’m not going to insult your intelligence by walking you through it. You just download it and run it like you
would any other software. You can download Tor from https://www.torproject.org/download/download and you don’t need to pay much attention to the precautionary material on the page if don’t intend to do anything illegal or provided you don’t live in a country that has laws forbidding access to Websites you might get in trouble for trying to visit on Tor. For instance, if you live in China or Iran you might want to run Tor inside a VPN or a Virtual Private Network. For those of us in Europe and the Americas who aren’t planning on breaking any laws, running Tor alone is all we need to do.

You’ll notice that it takes 60 seconds or more for Tor to load so be patient. Once you’ve got Tor running, you’ll notice that it behaves just like any other
browser except that it is really slow. It’s slow because it is bouncing packets around the massive Tor network. Inside the Tor browser the URL for Silk Road
is http://silkroad6ownowfk.onion and once you’re connected you’ll be asked to create a user name and password. Just follow the Dread Pirate Roberts’
instructions and you’ll be good to go. So have fun exploring the Bizarre Bazaar that is the Silk Road.

Addendum to the above posted 11/12/13

Tor has very recently updated. Make sure you’re running the latest version of Tor. If you’ve recently updated Tor and are now receiving the error message: “Firefox is configured to use a proxy server that is refusing connections.” This issue is easy to resolve. The old version of Tor and the updated version should not be placed in the same directory. The simple fix is to create a new folder and drag only Tor-browser2.3.25-14en-US.exe into it and then run that file in the new folder and then the browser will behave perfectly. Of course you can and will probably want to delete all Tor related files outside this new directory.

As you know if you are a Tor user, Tor runs on the back of an old build of Firefox and Firefox by default as do all major browsers run JavaScript. If you’ve got a good firewall and Anti-virus running on Windows, Mac or Lynx JavaScript is pretty safe to leave on with Chrome, FF, and IE but for reasons unknown the official Tor blog is urgently suggesting that users disable JavaScript on Tor until further notice. So once Tor loads and before you start browsing around, click the little “S” to the right of the onion on the right-hand side of the browser bar and then click on “forbid scripts globally”.

Some sites won’t behave as you’d expect them to with Scripts not enabled but that’s a small price to pay in exchange for total anonymity.

I’m @Scoroncocolo on Twitter.

Tracking Chips Embedded in Kids?

07 Thursday Nov 2013

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I’ve been following this conversation in the Times and elsewhere about the ethical implications of surgically implanting tiny devices like rfid chips in children? That, to me, is just so unimaginably unwarranted. I can see someone wanting to embed a computer chip under the skin of a pet dog or cat… but a child? The ridiculousness of it reminds me of that beautiful old Jackson Brown song called “Crow on the Cradle” that satirizes the group-think/herd mentality when there was a time that it was assumed that all we needed to do in America to keep our children safe was to arm ourselves and as the song says: “Put a bomber above her where ever she goes” http://bit.ly/1fnkEAZ

The Exorcist Is Forty Years Old Today

31 Thursday Oct 2013

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Today, Halloween Day, is the fortieth anniversary of William Friedkin’s Oscar award winning movie The Exorcist that scared the bejesus out of us baby boomers when it first hit theaters in 1973 and has been scaring the bejesus out of our kids and grandkids ever since. I vividly remember going to the Abilene, Texas premier of The Exorcist with a friend of mine named Ron at a theater that was so crowded when the movie began that there were people sitting in the aisles and was almost deserted well before the movie ended. This theater was initially packed because there had been a tremendous amount of interest in this film. People had been talking about it. The local paper had been writing about it and God knows the local preachers had been preaching about The Exorcist for weeks in advance of its arrival in our little God-fearing city.

I went to the Abilene, Texas premier of The Exorcist at some movie theater I forget the name of forty years ago today and I still recall the experience vividly. I went with four friends only one of whom was able to sit through the whole movie with me. O.K., truth is, I thought a time or two about chill’n at the concession stand myself. In fact, far more than half of the folks who had paid good hard worked for money to watch The Exorcist on Halloween night in Abilene, Texas forty years ago to this very day decided to leave well before the movie was half way over. It was an extremely intense experience, no question about it.

Finally, when the credits were rolling with that eerie soundtrack Tubular Bells still sending chills down my spine and goose bumps infecting my entire body, I looked around and saw that Ron and I were two of a few small group of people who were still in the theater. Ron and I sat in our seats until the overhead lights came on. I can’t remember if it was me or if it was Ron who said “O.K. I could use a drink.”

The Exorcist is one of the greatest movies ever made. It is also one of the most frightening movies you’ll ever see. Do yourself a favor and watch it. Tonight would be a good night. It’s HALLOWEEN! Boooowaaaaa!!!

This Yank’s a Bit Odd

29 Tuesday Oct 2013

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A great many of us noted with sadness the passing away of Lou Reed on October 27, 2013. One of my favorite photos of Lou Reed was one taken in 1973 in the Cafe Royal in the ritzy Piccadilly section of London. The photograph shows Lou Reed having drinks with David Bowie and Mick Jagger. The reason I like this picture so much is that I love the expression on Jagger’s face as he watches Lou Reed reach across the table toward David Bowie. Mick seems to be thinking to himself “This Yank’s a bit odd.”

Mick was right because as much as I and millions of other people around the world admired Lou Reed and appreciated his great talent, he was indeed a Yank who was a bit odd. But oddness is not exactly a scarcity among us Yanks. And so in keeping with Mick Jagger’s assessment regarding the much loved and admired Lou Reed’s oddness here are some more Yanks who many feel are a bit odd.

Sarah-Palin_crazy-lookThis Yanks’s a bit odd.

ted_cruz6This Yank’s a bit odd.

MicheleBachmannThis Yank’s a bit odd.

RobertsonThis Yank’s a bit odd.

TedNugentOffMyMedsAgainThis Yank’s a bit odd.

Got ideas for other peeps who could fall under the category of This Yank’s a Bit Odd? Put ’em in the comments.

BSA Comes Out Against Stupidy

21 Monday Oct 2013

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Random Acts of Stupidity

The Boy Scouts of America recently stopped discriminating against gay kids. That’s good. Now they’re banishing stupid adults. That’s even better.

By now you’ve seen or at least heard about the three adult jackasses who took some kids to Utah’s Goblin Valley State Park and distroyed a rock formation that had been in place for many millions of years. A man named David Hall shot a video of Glenn Taylor pushing on the rock formation while playfully singing the pop song “Wiggle It, Just a Little Bit”. The video shows that after the rock formation had been destroyed Glenn Taylor encourages his son to share a laugh and a high-five with him. This despicable desecration would no doubt been filed away as an unsolved random act of unlawful stupidity if it hadn’t been for the fact that Mr. Hall was so proud of his video that he decided to post it on Facebook.

Glenn Taylor, David Hall and another man seen on the video were all three Boy Scout troop leaders. After this video went viral a few days ago on YouTube all three men were kicked out of the Boy Scouts of America. Good riddance. The Boy Scouts issued a statement saying that the former leaders violated the Scouts’ principle of “Leave no trace,” which it said “teaches the value of natural areas and the methods we can use to help protect and conserve these areas for future generations.”

Also, the National Park Service and the United States Department of the Interior are said to be working with the Department of Justice to file federal charges against these idiots.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANMbxF1jx3E

 

Creating and Maintaining Webpages

15 Tuesday Oct 2013

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ScoroncocoloScreenShot

Today I logged onto Register.com, the company that hosts my Website www.scoroncocolo.com, and added some code into my index.html file.

<div>
<p><span style=”background-color:#000; color:#fff; width:30%; padding:1em; position:absolute; left:2em; top:33em; opacity:0.80; -moz-opacity:0.80; -khtml-
opacity:0.80; filter:alpha(opacity=80);z-index:3;”><a href=”https://scoroncocolo.co/”><span style=”color:#fff;”>New Scoroncocolo Site</span></a></span></p>
</div>

This code placed the link to this new site you’re on right now on my older www.scoroncocolo.com home page. You can see the link in the photo above. And of course, if you go there and click that link it will bring you right back here.

Sunday Night Movies

13 Sunday Oct 2013

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Here’s SNL’s spoof of the Government shutdown.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mghH7AbwSqI

Here’s the trailer for Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity” starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. This video was posted on YouTube only a few days ago and already it has almost five million views.

While it’s not exactly imax 3d, if you click to watch it full-screen it’s almost jaw-dropping.

Sure things in the news today seem really bad. There’s a hurricane in India and the U.S. government is shut down. But as the Barenaked Ladies say, “Odds Are” we’re gonna be all right. Ah, despite the fact that there is a 79% chance of Dinosaurs.