The domain in question is mooo.com, which belongs to the DNS provider FreeDNS. It is the most popular shared domain at afraid.org and as a result of the authorities’ actions a massive 84,000 subdomains were wrongfully seized as well. All sites were redirected to…

“Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution,” …

http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-shuts-down-84000-websites-by-mistake-110216/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Torrentfreak+(Torrentfreak)

Managing 10,000+ endpoints on broadband over the past 5 years, you start to notice some trends.   One of those trends is how incompatible GeoIP is with the adoption of mobile networks.

We have over 4,000 mobile broadband devices across the US and there are some very interesting things that have come up because of that:

• Most IP addresses for mobile phones/cards come from a pool of IP’s assigned to a POP for that carrier.  Those POPs tend to be aggregated in the mid-west/central areas, for instance AT&T has centers based out of Texas, Illinois and Utah.   Those POPs are responsible for issuing IP address for -all- mobile devices on the network, thus the IPs are registered for that locality.
• With IP addresses coming from centralized locations on the network, GeoIP enabled applications basically fail horribly at detecting where your load is coming from.  That includes CDN services like Akamai & Limelight.
• Applications that try and be smart like Google Maps, home brew or web based apps will eventually fall down for not properly identifying the users locality.

There is only one solution, really, and that is to integrate another layer of LBS (location based services) that depends on triangulation of the signal or Lat/Long coordinates from the devices GPS.   Some mobile providers are starting to implement LBS for their mobile devices but they are focused on the enterprise customers locating their devices instead of allowing the site/application to get that data.

Eventually it comes with a security trade-off which most customers will probably decline.   The only lasting solution is for all of the mobile providers (in concert with landline & wireless providers) to agree on a single location specification which will identify users down to a specific X mile radius, zip code or Lat/Long of the closest city.    This should give companies who care the ability to track their users and provide them with contextually relevant information/advertisements while keeping customers actual locations private.

I am very interested in how this will play out and what other software chicanery will show up trying to fix this natural problem of the globalization of wireless based connectivity.    MiFi/Mobile Hotspots are just the beginning.  With LTE/WiMax rubber hitting the road all over the place – wired internet access will end up being the bastion of always-on stationary computers/media devices and datacenters.   Even my office is considering a wireless backup circuit for connectivity – go figure.

Ever since a fateful bandwidth spike caused by the 2007 time change, I have considered moving the whole datacenter to UTC time.   Unfortunately for me, things like reporting, Java and custom applications all don’t like standardized time after being on localized time.    While my change appears to be laborious and long to implement, I encourage others who might read this to look at standardization to UTC right away to prevent future nastiness – especially if you do buisness with/in Arizona:

http://phoenix.about.com/cs/weather/qt/timezone.htm

Shove all of the empirical evidence about herd immunity, natural selection, biological immuno-response and disease propagation in their faces with 50 years of raw statistics as an added bonus and they still make the same “creationist” decision that they decry makes no sense when the shoe is on the other foot.

Their tired rhetoric of “everyone deserves health care” stops when the decision that is best for the _community_ isn’t convenient for them.

Why should everyone have access to the same healthcare that they reject?  What level of hypocrisy allows them to spend my money on health care for the unemployed while they endanger the elderly and the infants because of their stance on vaccination?

So far over 1,000 cases of Whooping Cough have been recorded in Marin County and 7 children have died – from a disease that had all but disappeared.   Statistics show that the children that have died are ones who are not yet eligible for their vaccinations – and thanks to their loving communities around them, they lost whatever herd immunity was there years ago.   So while they continue to endanger the too-young and the too-old in our communities because of their “personal beliefs”, they trample my “personal belief” that I am entitled to the fruits of my labor without it forcibly being taken from me?

If they want universal health care – fine, I will pay for that … as long as they agree to vaccinate on time, on schedule and urge others to do the same with the same level of ferocity that they used to complain about access to health care.    If they don’t care to give their children the shots the rest of the community so desperately needs them to have, why don’t I just shove that down their throat like they are shoving UHC down mine?

Fair trade?   Somehow I think the shoe doesn’t look as nice on the other foot.   Neo Liberals are just as bad as Fanatical Zealots – just on the other side of the spectrum.   One side easily argues away logic with their God, and the other does the same injustice by using logical fallacy.   What a sad dichotomy we live in.

Jim Carey and Jenny Mcarthy can service a flaccid donkey as far as I care.  Their irresponsible behavior has enabled a generation of middle/upper-class idiots to take control of our lives and kill our citizens through pure unadulterated selfishness.

http://www.baycitizen.org/blogs/pulse-of-the-bay/whooping-cough-claims-another-child/print/

It appears to me that gone are the days of Mr. Wizard.    I am aware that they have brought back the Electric Company and it’s new form embraces new musical styles such as hip hop – but there is sometime extremely lacking in the science content of today’s options.

Frustratingly enough, it appears that either the shows have been lost to the ether of time, or no one has thought to digitize them.  I would certainly buy a full DVD release of all episodes of 3-2-1 contact or Commander Mark.

After all of the time I took to get my MPKI out of various companies into Veritas’ single solution, now I have to pull them all out and go to someone else.

Why is Symantec the devil?  Consider this – their bloatware has single handedly changed what used to be a very streamlined market into a CPU/Memory upgrade fest for consumers.  Symantec anti-virus, worse than any other, takes more CPU and Memory cycles than most consumer applications.   They seem to have very little concern for consumers, as evidenced by both my anecdotal personal IT experiences over the past 20 years as well as numerous consumer complaints.  Their “SARC”, while once great, is a pile of steaming horse dung compared to the nimble and concise operations of E-Set, Kaperskey and F-Secure.

I swore 10 years ago never to give Symantec another dime if I could avoid it (and I can’t entirely because BackupExec is still the best on the market).   Now that they have the most trusted name in SSL in their pocket I have to ask myself :  Do I really want a company who has it’s hands in everyones data security already, to be the author of my SSL certificates?

The google-hating side of me says NO to that question, though the google-appreciator inside of me says it may help innovate and drive prices down.  Then again, the apple-hater in me says that too much consolidation and is a bad thing, products should be diversified among different carriers to prevent monopolistic tendencies.  The apple-lover in me says perhaps they will make things better – but the symantec-hater in me says that historically the company has always failed at that.

No, it is time for consumerism to make a stand with dollars – the only real feedback a company recognizes.   I have dropped my MPKI on the floor, including the credits that went with it and will be allowing my VCCE to expire as well.   I called my, awesome, sales guy Michael and let him know that while he was great – I couldn’t support the company who had just taken the reigns.       I am taking a stand against Symantec and all that is unholy about them and their ways.     I can’t believe that many of the huge names that have trusted Verisign for SSL certificates will move over quietly, including the many Governments who make use of them.

Citizen arrested for taking a picture of a police officer in his own home after unlawful entry:

http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/06/21/28235.htm

Apparently an officer no longer needs a radar gun to guess your speed – his eyes are enough:

http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2010/06/police_officers_visual_estimat.html

The growing unrest over citizens with cameras filming “peace officers”

http://gizmodo.com/5553765/are-cameras-the-new-guns

62 year old woman falsely arrested for asking “Why” when told to move:

http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/woman-61-arrested-for-309285.html?cxtype=rss_news_128746

4 year old boy told to remove his leg braces by TSA officer:

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/84368492.html

Biker arrested after the fact for video taping plain clothes officer

http://carlosmiller.com/2010/04/16/maryland-motorcyclist-spends-26-hours-in-jail-on-wiretapping-charge-for-filming-cop-with-gun/

You could probably approximate it by first establishing the maximum required land for a family of four with enough room to be fully self-sustaining (livestock, grain, produce & living area) year-round. Take that number and then duplicate it over 60% of all temperate climates where year-round living with that design is possible. Out of the remaining 40% you could leave 20% for permanent buffer space and the take the remaining 20% and use it for land to offset familes whose farms exist outside of a year round climate (produce additional grains & staples for winters or dry summers). The rest of the world could be populated as dictated by quality of life with the most extreme being left as natural wonders. That should give you some good number to start with.

Obviously there are too many permutations and minutea to make it a simple conversation – but even that preliminary number could be an interesting insight into the current issues of population. This would mean living going from an industrial to an agrarian base system – but if we had done that anyway we may have hit the natural limit long ago. It also would mean, more than likely, living in a constant state of a dictatorship of the proletariat, but in a self-sustaining environment there isn’t much redistribution going around anyway (or their shouldn’t be) – preventing a true migration into socialism or a reversion into capitalism.

An example could be taking some of the USDA facts and _really_ fudging the numbers:

• Total Farmland area:  922,095,840 acres   * 60% (from above guestimation) = 553,257,504 acres
• If every family was given 50 acres = 11,065,150 farms
• If every farm had a family of 4  = 44,260,600 total population of a fully self sustaining USA.

Obviously that is crazy, because of a couple glaring issues and a bunch of others – mainly

1. It doesn’t count all non-farmland that is usable
2. Obviously some industry must support the farming habits (equipment, seed, feed)
3. The other 20% out of the remaining 40% must be manned as well

The whole purpose of the exercise isn’t to create a utopian society – it is just to try and establish how far off the mark we really are as far as over population for a fully sustainable world.   So lets just run with the above number – just for laughs.   So we have an estimated 44,000,000 people who should be living in the USA.   The offset from real life would then be a little over 14% (based on the current estimated population of about 307,006,550).   Lets say that estimate is too conservative so lets bump it up to 20% or say that the total population should be 61,000,000 people to be fed year round on their own sweat and hard work – not taking from the mouth of anyone else.   What a stark contrast that idea is, even if it IS completely malformed and wrong.   Even if it was doubled – 120,000,000 people by cutting down the acre per family to 25  - what a sobering thought.

Now take the entire globe full of temperate regions like the USA and apply the same math with an estimated 6bn people.   How far have we overshot the mark?

This is just a random musing by someone who looks at data all day, but dayum.

Things like this are where the rubber meets the road with Quantum Mechanics.

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100317/full/news.2010.130.html

awk -F’.’ -v OFS=’.’ ‘{print $(NF-2),$(NF-1)}’ file

Or you can pipe it through grep sans the file

Flash forward a couple of days and here is my finding:

Boxee is by -FAR- superior.

File Management

The WDTV Live gives you three ways to display your content: Thumbnail, List and Preview.   The Preview mode is nice, but you have no option of starting the video it auto-previews.  This is a problem because of what type of content you might have.  Funny or questionable clips mixed in with Kids videos are a no-no.  Additionally there are no sorting options in any of the modes and the scroll function is seriously lacking.

There is an option in the player to only select certain sources for your files, but no matter how many times I went through the UI to select specific folders to search, it ended up cataloging the entire system anyway.  That means that on the USB drive I connected I ended up getting 16,000 pictures of my kids and 1,500 movies – of which I only wanted a small subset.

GUI

The UI is actually fairly pleasant and reminds me of the Moxie client that I had seen a year or so ago with the Charter cable service DVR package.  The display reaches the entire 1920×1080 of the TV and the color depth is impressive.   Unfortunately for the GUI, the options that it presents to the user are far from appealing.  They should have included an advanced mode to allow more granular control of the system.

Video/Audio

The video output for USB connected devices is actually fairly presentable.  The FFW/RWD buttons don’t do much and movies that include chapter markers usually don’t work properly.  The USB device rarely stuttered and on the 2-pass high bitrate H264 encoded videos it was almost as good as the real deal.     The audio on the movies was decent, but there was no additional volume control added to the system.  Boxee allows you to actually control additional gain to the movies audio to give it a bit of a -boost- if your PC audio card just can’t handle the truth.   For those of us that don’t use an amp, this feature is key for movies that were encoded without AGC.

Streaming

The WDTV Live streams audio natively from Pandora and Live365.  Since I don’t have a Live365 account, I loaded up my Pandora profile and was pleased with both the interface and the response time.  Album art and song information was immediately presented in a nice format and my listing was presented in a fairly simple manner.   Streaming from a network device, however, was a different matter.

Since the WDTV has no support for wireless networking, it seems to be a no-brainer that all of the latency and connection issues with streaming over 802.11 goes away when you are hard wired ….. hah!   I experienced nothing but stutter and sync issues with streaming from my NAS device, while Boxee had no problems at all (or other media players like the PS3 for that matter).

Hacking

Fortunately for the WDTV Live, there is an active hacking community which adds features to official firmware releases.  The WDLXTV package that I picked up was amazingly simple to install (load to a thumb drive and plug it in), didn’t change the core functionality of the WDTV firmware at all and provided a nice toolbox of options to keep on the unit.  With the hacked firmware you get things like:

• HTTP server, SSH client, FTP
• NTFS-3G support
• USB-Wifi card support
• Bittorrent client (deluge!)
• External DVD drive support\
• And a TON more.

Overall

Even with the hacked firmware, the unit has significant limitations for sorting your media selectively so that you can present folders of folders.  For instance, I might want to have videos of my kids listed, however I don’t want to either have to browse the file tree or scroll through 10000 videos to find Kung Fu Panda.   There should be better ways to organize your files.   While Boxee has limitations around this as well, there are more granular controls around what get searched and how.   Boxee is also smart enough to try and pull cover art for the videos instead of giving me screen captures or generic thumbnail images.

In the end, the lack of inclusion of other HD feeds like Hulu, CBS/Fox…etc is a serious detracting factor for the WDTV Live.   Perhaps later when the firmware becomes more advanced or the hacking community becomes more brazen with their updates this might be a viable box.   Until then, it is a non-flash supporting mini box with some cool potential.

I will stick with my Boxee and wait for the BoxeeBox.

http://www.wdtvlive.com/

http://www.wdtvc.com/

http://www.boxee.tv

I finally realized that a certain file on my external scratch disk (where I was rendering to) was being recreated over and over again.   Come to finally find out that compressor delegates it work to the Qmaster service.   Apparently I had a ton of jobs in the queue from messing with it before, even though I had deleted them from Compressor.  That means that everytime I rebooted, Qmaster would start back up again and try and pickup the queue.    I had to search for about an hour until I found the below link, but basically you need to do the following:

Open a terminal window and sudo to root:

sudo su –   (then put in your admin password)

cd /var/spool/qmaster/

go INSIDE the randomly numbered subdirectory and remove all files

rm -rf *

Then go inside compressor and choose “Reset Background Processing” and then choose to reset processing and cancel the queue.  After a few seconds your jobs should clear out of the queue and never return and Compressor should be back to normal!

http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/20/857850

http://knol.google.com/k/why-are-europeans-white-e1#

The story is fairly predictable (with the occasional interesting twist) but of more interest to me was reading another bout of classical Dan Brown logical fallacy.   The man has a terrific way of convincing you that enough of what he is saying is true or fairly plausibly true and then the rest just coasts along.   By stating at the beginning of the book that X, Y and Z are all true and really exist – he creates the illusion of the extension of truth by continuing to imply that anything to do with X, Y or Z is also true.

This is the great logical fallacy of Dan Brown and his work.   Most importantly for someone like me, the fallacy of the facts that he presents for Freemasonry and the Craft in general is astounding.   Not only are his facts about the fraternity patently wrong and most likely derived from the internet (I realize he did interview people at several D.C. lodges and Grand Lodge of D.C.) but he uses miniscule bits of true facts to entice the reader to believe everything except the characters themselves are real.

Now, weaving fact and fiction in a story is one thing… but coming out at the beginning of the book and making an assertation that broad topics that you are about to discuss are factual (that is the implication at least) is just misleading and damaging.   Of course, because of Masonry’s long-standing tradition of not commenting at all – Brown’s book will stand on its own as a terrific fictional expose.    Who knows, in some dark conspirator circles I am sure they are talking about how he is marked for death now.

Counter-intuitively it seems that membership is growing within the ranks of Masonry, including here in California, but the truth will out in the end as we find out how many of these men were “Dan Brown” masons versus ones where Masonry actually sticks for life.

At least I have one comfort in all of his ramblings:  The true secret of Freemasonry remains hidden, untarnished and – for now – incommunicable.

http://www.danbrown.com/#/theLostSymbol