See this man?

Some guy riding a motherfucking ostrich

Do you see this man? LOOK AT HIM. This man is riding a motherfucking ostrich. He may well be the pinnacle of awesome, he's riding a fucking ostrich for fucks sake. This man is happy and confident, no matter what happens to him he will always have been 'that guy that got to ride an ostrich'. Doesn't get much better than that. It's a motherfucking ostrich, I cannot stress that enough.

Feeling a little low? Feel like sometimes life just isn't going your way? Then remember this, at some point in your life you've probably had a similar experience to our ostrich riding, moustachioed master of awesome here. You've done something that was amazing, or someone did something for you that was amazing. Something that made you think "Fuck yeah, I'm as cool as a dude that rides motherfucking ostriches!", think back to that moment and isolate it. Keep it in a fucking box in your mind. A box that you can open and re-live whenever things get you down and there aren't any fucking ostriches around to ride.

Me? I went quad biking around the base of an erupting volcano, I've taken a helicopter ride to the top of a glacier and looked down upon its vast icy expanse, I've spun fire in my hands and played chess on a board where the pieces were bigger than I was.

But I've never ridden a motherfucking ostrich. It's ok though cos of all the other awesome things I've done in the past and will one day do again. And even if I never ride that motherfucking ostrich, I've done other things just as cool and chances are, so have you. So buck up and find your ostrich, it's out there waiting for you.

Anon vs Phelps

Anonymous, during a live interview, has defaced the WBC site. Nicely done /b/rothers. WBC also claimed that Anon was also responsible for taking many of their sites offline however Anon has attributed this to the hacktivist known as j3t3r (sp?) who also disagrees with WBC's message of hate. It's pretty clear from the interview that Shirley Phelps-Roper is completely batshit crazy (as is befitting for an indoctrinated cult member) whilst the hivemind segment from Anon that came to talk seemed very reasonable.

All in all I'd say lulz have been had and I'd be surprised if Anon bothered with trolling the WBC any more. They're not exactly worth the time of the collective, who has publically stated that they have bigger fish to fry. I, for one, welcome our hiveminded hacktivist overlords.

Phelps vs Phelps

The WBC (Westboro Baptist Church) have come up with an inventive way to garner attention for themselves by trying to lure Anonymous into launching an attack. For anyone that's never heard of the WBC, allow me to enlighten you. They are a hateful little cult of extremist Christian fundamentalists that like to picket the funerals of LGBT people, US soldiers and they even tried to picket the funeral of a 9 year old girl in order to spread their message of hate and depravity. They are viciously anti-LGBT and their interpretation of Christianity is one of the most vile and capricious I've ever heard of. They do this partially because they're hateful scumbags and partially because they use it as a means of making money by pissing people off to such an extent that they lose it and turn violent with the group, who then sue for damages. Read this for a more detailed view into the lives of the WBC.

But back to the matter at hand, a 'press release' (although I use the term loosely) appeared on AnonNews.org the other day claiming that Anon had decided to target the WBC and shut them down because of their hateful politics. It was then followed up with a taunting 'response' from WBC in order to attempt to make things look legit. However this mades no sense, however delicious an all out troll war between Anon and WBC might be (and in all fairness serious lulz could be had) it would be hypocritical of Anon to claim to be a bastion of free speech whilst actively working to prevent a group, no matter how hateful, from being able to express themselves. The release was rambling and not particularly well written, its manner and style inconsistent with previous Anonymous statements which have, on the whole, been rather eloquent. Bear in mind that Anonymous statements are usually co-written by up to 20+ people and as such are proof read and tweaked to the nth degree. This 'press release' had no such finesse, no real style to its vitriol and didn't even mention lulz or provide a justifiable rationale for such crusading moral faggotry. Something was up and Anon knew it. A later (much better written) release then came out denying that Anon had any intention of playing with the WBC and pointing out that obvious troll was obvious. Well done guys, I can think of no better way to troll Phelps into apoplexy than by demonstrating just how insignificant he is.

/b/rothers, I salute you.

Is Steve Jobs dying?

Curiously a lot of news/speculation has appeared in the last day or so about the fate of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Rumour has it that his pancreatic cancer has recurred and this time it's terminal.

Sources at the time of writing:

Now considering the sources I'd say that more than just a pinch of salt should be kept on stand-by. These are almost all gutter tabloids, generally known for pushing sensationalism when the truth isn't 'interesting' (read scandalous) enough. I've not been able to find anything about this from any of the more credible news sites/broadsheets but if I do I will write a follow up post to either confirm or deny the speculation.

I honestly hope it's not true. I don't like Steve Jobs and I don't like Apple but this is a fate I'd never wish on anyone. I've lost one member of my family to cancer recently and it's a horrible experience. To have to stand by whilst someone dies and be totally helpless is one of the most soul destroying things a person can go through. That's why I hope this isn't true and my thoughts are with mr Jobs and his family.

I suppose all that can be done now is to wait and see if the rumours are corroborated by more trustworthy sources.

Good luck Steve, you're going to need it.

Ah, Microsoft...

I like this, the MS head of 'Trustworthy Computing' (o rly? srsly? lol), is trying to shift the responsibility for security onto the users and in part he has a point but there's more to this than meets the eye.

Firstly let's cover that little bit of common ground that we can agree on:

"A system is only as secure as its administrator makes it."

Possibly one of the oldest adages in basic computer security and it's very true. If you knowingly connect an unpatched machine to the internet with lots of bloatware/crapware running pointless services, your ports open and remote logins enabled with your admin password set to 'password' then you're an idiot and you deserve everything you get. However one would sincerely hope that a reasonable OS vendor wouldn't ship a vanilla system with lousy security defaults (we're looking at you MS). Obviously it's the admin (most usually the primary user for a desktop) that has to keep a system patched and bear the lions share of responsibility for the basic security of the system but the vendor also has a responsibility not to ship bad code and to deliver their systems with security as a primary focus.

This is where MS falls down. Microsoft products have been notoriously insecure for as long as anyone can remember and although they have improved somewhat with the arrival of Windows 7 (so I'm told, I've yet to even try it.), we still see serious zero day exploits coming out on a regular basis. Further to that MS doesn't provide immediate patches in a timely fashion unlike Linux vendors who can, and do, patch issues within hours of the exploit being found, for example the MIT Kerberos bug in Ubuntu that was patched before the world even knew about it. Microsoft's patch tuesday is a joke. Users can end up waiting weeks for serious security issues to be patched whilst all around them systems are compromised and their TCO rises faster than a fat mans blood pressure at a strip club.

That isn't to say that Linux is invincible. It isn't but unlike Windows it is built with security in mind from the ground up whereas MS has a long history of compromising security for convenience and subsequently delivering the most insecure OS on the market. Linux vendors also have the advantage in that the vast majority of software that runs on a linux machine is open source and can patched and packaged by the vendor, due to this little convenience they can even patch 3rd party software packages to prevent bugs in them from becoming potential attack vectors. In the closed source propietary world of Microsoft this is simply not possible and thus leads to MS systems being vulnerable to attacks via angles that they cannot control.

Our MS 'Trustworthy Computing' czar even goes on to suggest a scenario in which, in order to use an online banking service, a bank should be allowed to scan the users machine. Excuse me? How exactly do you intend to engender trust whilst proposing measures that require a potential massive invasion of privacy to your users? What about those of us who don't use MS products and who do administrate our systems in a secure and sensible fashion. There's so much wrong to this that it's cringeworthy.

To conclude: although users must share the burden of security with vendors it is perhaps a tad insipid of MS to suggest that it's all the users fault. Perhaps if they didn't ship such a crappy system we wouldn't have this problem.

DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE

Clinton is a fucking idiot. All this glaring self-serving hypocrisy is burning my eyes and inducing a moral outrage aneurysm. I think I'm going to have to go lie down for a bit.

Ah life..

alterego: So, anyone got any Valentines plans?
spb : play cricket
evilerik: go on a kill-crazy rampage?
slackthumbz: D&D tonight

And I'm back!

Back once again, I've just finished moving and pics will be posted soon.

Be good.

Religulous

If you haven't seen this already then you should.

Spreading the good word (of science vs fraudsters)

Heard of a scumbag fraudster called Peter Goodgold? I hadn't until today and now that I've finished learning a bit about what he's up to I can honestly say I'm appalled. Basically Goodgold (or 'twat-badger' as he shall be referred to from now on) is selling a device that can't even work in the way that he describes it to (because it would violate the laws of physics) and if made to work would result in his customers drinking what amounts to diluted bleach.

To clarify, this man claims that, amongst other things, water is a "Liquid crystal superconductor of sound and light" and that there is only one disease in the world. Something that he calls 'acidosis' (srsly?). He goes on to claim that by drinking 'ionised' water you can cure everything that ails you. To which the only rational response can be

the O RLY baby

What he means by 'ionised' water is water that has been put through the process of electrolysis. Yet he also claims that this should be done with pure water, i.e water that is free of all impurities. Now there's a problem with that. Pure water doesn't conduct electricity. For a more detailed explanation and an example of how twat-badger deals with his critics we look to 'Answers in books'.

The Science:

The inevitable threat of legal action from a fraudster and a quack that can't substantiate his claims in the face of reason and knowledge:

Answersinbooks youtube channel is here, please go and show some support for this guy. He's standing up for evidence based truth and deserves some serious props for it.

If either of the above videos is taken down you can download .mp4 versions of them directly from me. Here is the exposé on twat-badger and his fraud and here is the video of Answersinbooks response to being threatened legally. To save a video right click on the link and select 'Save link as...'

Homeopathy (or as I like to call it homeoquackery)

As anyone who has even a vague understanding and respect for the scientific method knows, homeopathy is a load of fucktarded nonscience. And just to poke even more fun at the moronic quacks and their hideous placebo medicine here is a Mitchell and Webb sketch.