Just for fun

Toilet humour can be pretty low, but this one tickles me (with a feather? :)

Toilet Cam

Stop the Internet Kill Switch!

Add your name to the petition at Access Now Stop The Switch

As online communication becomes an increasingly important part of all aspects of our lives, governments have sought to censor, filter, surveil, and now, shut off access to these vital tools. Just imagine if your government decided to switch your internet -- and you -- off.

In Egypt, using powers granted to Mubarak under emergency law, the government was able to shut off the internet with a couple of phone calls to each of the internet service providers (ISPs) operating in Egypt. Egyptians employed innovative work-arounds to avoid the shutdown like using international dial-up, but do we really want to resort to that? Lets draw a line in the sand as governments around the world race to acquire an "internet kill switch."

Governments habitually put their own survival above the wellbeing of their people. The only real deterrent to the internet kill switch is us -- a global movement for digital freedom; please join the international campaign to “Stop the Switch!”

From Australia to Zimbabwe, we see how vital access to the internet, both on computers and mobile phones, is for people to freely express themselves. An internet kill switch puts your ability to communicate with friends and family online in jeopardy by placing control over the internet firmly into the hands of your government, who may not necessarily have your interests and rights in mind when they flip the switch.

Add your name to the petition at Access Now Stop The Switch

Egypt used it last week, Austria’s already got it, the U.S. has a law drafted to establish it, while other governments across the globe are testing to see how easily they could plunge their country into an information blackout. And they can do it one of two ways: either by creating the legal authority that gives them the power to demand that the internet service providers (ISPs) operating in their country shut down, or by configuring a “switch” that controls their country’s entire internet infrastructure.

Breaking The Great Australian Silence

All Australians should watch Johy Pilger's address at the Sydney Peace Prize.

What terrifies the agents of power is the awakening of people: of public consciousness; the revelation of a seed beneath the snow.

During the first world war, the British prime minister David Lloyd George confided to the editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and they can’t know.”

What has changed? Quite a lot actually. As people have become more aware, propaganda has become more sophisticated.

Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this: “It’s important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East-Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause.”

There is no truth in this statement. It is the equivalent of his predecessor John Howard’s lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

One of the founders of modern propaganda was Edward Bernays, an American who believed that people in free societies could be lied to and regimented without them realising. He invented a euphemism for propaganda - “public relations”, or PR.

When Prime Minister Robert Menzies sent Australian soldiers to Vietnam in the 1960s, he described them as a ‘training team’, requested by a beleaguered government in Saigon. It was a lie. A senior official of the Department of External affairs wrote this secret truth: “Although we have stressed the fact publicly that our assistance was given in response to an invitation by the government of South Vietnam, our offer was in fact made following a request from the United States government.”

Two versions. One for us, one for them.

“It’s time we sang from the world’s rooftops,” said Kevin Rudd in opposition, “[that] despite Iraq, America is an overwhelming force for good in the world [and] I look forward to working with the great American democracy, the arsenal of freedom...”.

Since the second world war, the arsenal of freedom has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements. Millions of people all over the world have been driven out of their homes and subjected to crippling embargos. Bombing is as American as apple pie.

The Rudd government justifies its proposals to spend billions on weapons by referring to what the Pentagon calls an “arc of instability” that stretches across the world. Our enemies are apparently everywhere - from China to the Horn of Africa. In fact, an arc of instability does indeed stretch across the world and is maintained by the United States. The US Air Force calls this “full spectrum dominance”. More than 800 American bases are ready for war.

In an essay for The Monthly entitled Faith in Politics, Kevin Rudd wrote this about refugees: “The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst.... We should never forget that the reason we have a UN convention on the protection of refugees is in large part because of the horror of the Holocaust when the West (including Australia) turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe who sought asylum.”

Compare that with Rudd’s words the other day. “I make absolutely no apology whatsoever,” he said, “for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia... a tough line on asylum seekers.”

Are we not fed up with this kind of hypocrisy? The use of the term “illegal immigrants” is both false and cowardly. The few people struggling to reach our shores are not illegal. International law is clear – they are legal. And yet Rudd, like Howard, sends the navy against them and runs what is effectively a concentration camp on Christmas Island. How shaming. Imagine a shipload of white people fleeing a catastrophe being treated like this.

The people in those leaking boats demonstrate the kind of guts Australians are said to admire. But that’s not enough for the Good Samaritan in Canberra, as he plays to the same bigotry which, as he wrote in his essay, “turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe”.

In no other democratic country is public discussion of the brutal occupation of Palestine as limited as in Australia. Are we aware of the sheer scale of the crime against humanity in Gaza? Twenty-nine members of one family - babies, grannies - are gunned down, blown up, buried alive, their home bulldozed. Read the United Nations report, written by an eminent Jewish judge, Richard Goldstone.

Those who speak for the arsenal of freedom are working hard to bury the UN report. For only one nation, Israel, has a “right to exist” in the Middle East. Only one nation has a right to attack others. Only one nation has the impunity to run a racist apartheid regime with the approval of the western world, and with the prime minister and the deputy prime minister of Australia fawning over its leaders.

In Australia, any diversion from this unspoken rule, this impunity, attracts a campaign of craven personal abuse and intimidation usually associated with dictatorships. But we are not a dictatorship. We are a democracy.

Are we?
Or are we a murdochracy.

In Australia, our indifference is different. We have become highly competent at divide and rule: at promoting those black Australians who tell us what we want to hear. At professional conferences their keynote speeches are applauded, especially when they blame their own people and provide the excuses we need. We create boards and commissions on which sit nice, decent liberal people like the prime minister’s wife. And nothing changes.

In August this year, the United Nations once again distinguished Australia with the kind of shaming once associated with South Africa. We discriminate on the basis of race. That’s it in a nutshell. This time the UN blew a whistle on the so-called “intervention”, which began with the Howard government smearing Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory with allegations of sex slavery and paedophile rings in “unthinkable numbers”, according to the minister for indigenous affairs.

In May last year, official figures were released and barely reported.

Out of 7433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of four possible cases were identified. So much for the “unthinkable numbers”. Of course, child abuse does exist, in black Australia and white Australia. The difference is that no soldiers invaded the North Shore suburbs; no white parents were swept aside; no white welfare has been “quarantined”. What the doctors found they already knew: that Aboriginal children are at risk - from the effects of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world’s richest countries.

In the 1970s, Aboriginal communities were granted comprehensive land rights in the Northern Territory, and John Howard set about clawing back these rights with bribery and bullying. The Labour government is doing the same. You see, there are deals to be done. The Territory contains extraordinary mineral wealth, especially uranium. And Aboriginal land is wanted as a radioactive waste dump. This is very big business, and foreign companies want a piece of the action.

It is a continuation of the darkest side of our colonial history: a land grab.

Where are the influential voices raised against this? Where are the peak legal bodies? Where are those in the media who tell us endlessly how fair-minded we are?

Silence.

US Hypocrisy

I think this might be what Irony means ...

from the National Times

Lost in the global uproar over Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks horror, there was some good news from Washington. The US will host World Press Freedom Day in May, an exciting event with the catchy slogan "New Frontiers, New Barriers''.

"New media has [sic] empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals' right to freedom of expression.

"At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age."

Flat-earthers, it's time for a cold shower

President John Kennedy's inauguration promise in 1961 that the US would ''pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty'' turned out to be one of the great swindles of the past century.

Sydney's Catholic archbishop, George Pell, resort to theology. Pell has said that belief in man-made global warming is a pagan superstition.

from Sydney Morning Herald's site

Some handy info for Dell Streak users

Searching for answers regarding the Dell Streak and this error:

dell streak android.process.acore stopped unexpectedly

found some good info here:
http://www.ph2dot1.com/2011/01/more-dell-streak.html

Grabbing iView stuff for slow computers

As nice a feature as [ABC TV, Australia's] iView is it can be a fail for those with slow connections. Pausing of an iView show does not significantly allow buffering such that you can then unpause to watch without stuttering of the video, due to a slow internet connection.

Therefor using the iView plugin for Firefox one can DL to a file to then watch in one nice smooth sitting.

Firefox iView plugin https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/iviewfox/versions/

OS X Ethernet fix for 10.6.6 Software Update

So I unwittingly clicked 'OK' and allowed the Apple software update of my system to 10.6.6 (which some people think should be re-titled '10.6.6.6' because it's -evil-™™™™)

It killed my ethernet. Wireless was still ok, a saving grace, as it allowed me to check the forums and then download the Combo install for 10.6.6.

I booted into safe mode (hold shift key while starting up) and then installed MacOSXUpdCombo10.6.6 (.dmg) which I got, at the time, from here http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1349

Hope this helps someone.

D
.

OS X Temporary Files Flash videos

These files I used to find here

/private/var/tmp/folders.501/TemporaryItems/FlashTmp0
/private/var/tmp/folders.501/TemporaryItems/FlashTmp1

but this folder has ceased to exist .. o_O

OK, some tedious searching has found the temp file(s) at

/private/var/folders/2E/2EFZQa0NGbKgDAbyRFtrdk+++TI/TemporaryItems

My system is now on Snow Leopard which may contribute to this change but I was sure it was at the earlier location very recently.

I *did* do some apt-get installs yesterday ... [shrug]

Apple Script to Show All Files in Finder

I use two separate scripts, one for On and one for Off.

do shell script "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles True"
do shell script "killall Finder"

do shell script "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles False"
do shell script "killall Finder"