Archive for the ‘not ninja-worthy’ Category

Monkey Steals Peach

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ninja training

Just keepin’ your skills up.AA Otherwise, what would we be good for?

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Posted: October 29th, 2007
at 11:09am by Black Ock


Categories: too good to be true,not ninja-worthy,weaponry,9th dan

Comments: 2 comments


Quote of the Day

1_62_101507_baby_boomer.jpg

"I think I’m just lucky to be at the top of the boom. I’m just one of many many millions and am blessed to have been in this generation and really blessed and to take my Social Security now," Casey-Kirschling said during a ceremony held at the National Press Club featuring Social Security Commissioner Michael J. Astrue. [via]

Our first baby boomer has filed for social security. Um… why are they holdin’ ceremonies honoring our future brokeness?

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Posted: October 24th, 2007
at 12:50am by Black Ock


Categories: not ninja-worthy,mnp is for the children,politricks,real life news,quote of the day

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TV-LINKS.CO.UK shut down (yet again)

Seasoned fans may know that this site has been shutdown before… but it just got shutdown again, and its owner raided and arrested:

Probably the most popular video streaming site around has been busted by UK authorities.

It’s a sad day for streaming video fans everywhere as news has been reported that TVLinks has been shut down and the owner, a 26yo man from Chelteham in the UK, was arrested.

Though not hosting an actual content himself, and rather merely providing links to where particular titles can be found, he was nonetheless apparently charged for the "facilitation" of copyright infringement.

"Sites such as TV Links contribute to and profit from copyright infringement by identifying, posting, organizing, and indexing links to infringing content found on the internet that users can then view on demand by visiting these illegal sites," said a spokesman for Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) today.

What makes the charges so odd is that he was again, only providing LINKS to pirated content, and never actually hosted anything. Can linking really be considered "facilitation?" If I link to TVLinks am I then a co-conspirator?

Here’s the TVLinks disclaimer:

TV Links is not responsible for any content linked to or referred to from these pages.

TV Links does not host any content on our Servers

All video links point to content hosted on third party webites. Users who upload to these websites agree not to upload illegal content when creating their user accounts. TV Links does not accept responsibility for content hosted on third party websites.

The notion of making linking a crime is ridiculous and completely out of line. How would anybody be able to discuss controversial sites or content if they first had to ensure the legality of the destination? Would we have to make it so that links were simply spelled out and not HTML capable(www.tvlinks.co.uk vs TVLinks)? Maybe this is the answer because I think then it could fall under the category of speech. Furthermore, it really shows that Google is getting away with bloody murder via sites like YouTube and Google Video.

FACT goes on to revisit the same old diatribe about how piracy is stealing food from form the tables of people who work in the film industry, but with guys like Brad Pitt reportedly getting $20million bucks to make trash like "Babel" who’s really robbing who? Couldn’t Pitt be paid a little less, say $15 million, and leave that other 5 for the "starving" film crew? I guess not

"The theft and distribution of films harms the livelihoods of those working in the UK film industry and in ancillary industries, as well as damaging the economy," said FACT’s director general Kieron Sharp.

What’s even more surprising is that the move was part of an overall strategy to crack down on piracy, though all it does is target a middleman who tells you where to go. More importantly, will its demise really compel people to find content legally or to suddenly run down to their local cinema? I think not, and all it means, as is usually the case with piracy, is that people will just go elsewhere.

Either way R.I.P. TVLinks, it was nice while it lasted. Maybe once again we have a case where Sweden’s the only answer. [via]

Here’s what some of the intelligent bloggers have to say:

This is just stupid. Earlier said, paying $30 just to get in the freakina€™ door is ridiculous - so is paying $20 dollars for a DVD. I have a Netflix account, and thata€™s great for old movies and some new ones, but I must say it is easier and far more practical to view it online for free.

The foundation of the US is freedom - well, ita€™s bullshit like DCMA and the MPAA that are contributing to the fall of democracy as we know it - Comcast, a very popular ISP in the US was found a€favoringa€™ upload and download speeds for certain websites.

The Internet is nothing but numbers and wiring, and was developed for the fast and efficient sharing of files (P2P anyone?) among professors. It has now grown to one of the leading industries of our day, and Ia€™m damn proud to be in on it. But every time I set up a new site, for example a Halo based browser game - Microsoft just beefed up their copyright rules, and I have to post a whole paragraph in every footer, and as a designer makes me want to stop designing period. Ia€™m only 15, and yet they have loopholes to send me to federal prison for not following copyright law.

And thata€™s my 2 Cents worth.

annnnd…. the not so intelligent:

man this sucks, godamn right wing conservative butt pirates first they decide to make our beloved magic mushrooms illegal now they want to shut down a harmless site like tv links, our freedom is at stake!!! [both via]

it’s all the same though, right? Show some solidarity my ninjas and start your own tv-links!

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Posted: October 22nd, 2007
at 2:38am by Black Ock


Categories: computers,crime,not ninja-worthy,real life news

Comments: 9 comments


Black people ‘less intelligent’ scientist claims

One of the worlda€™s most respected scientists is embroiled in an extraordinary row after claiming that black people are less intelligent than white people.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in discovering the structure of DNA, has provoked outrage with his comments, made ahead of his arrival in Britain today.

More fierce criticism of the eminent scientist is expected as he embarks on a number of engagements to promote a new book a€Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Sciencea€™. Among his first commitments is a speech to a London audience at the Science Museum on Friday. The event is sold out.

Dr Watson, who runs one of Americaa€™s leading scientific research institutions, made the controversial remarks in an interview in The Sunday Times.

The 79-year-old geneticist said he was a€oeinherently gloomy about the prospect of Africaa€A because a€oeall our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really.". He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that a€oepeople who have to deal with black employees find this not truea€A.

He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because a€oethere are many people of colour who are very talented, but dona€™t promote them when they havena€™t succeeded at the lower levela€A. He writes that a€oethere is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it soa€A.

He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

The newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission is studying Dr Watsona€™s remarks a€oein fulla€A.

Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said today: a€oeIt is sad to see a scientist of such achievement making such baseless, unscientific and extremely offensive comments.

a€oeI am sure the scientific community will roundly reject what appear to be Dr Watsona€™s personal prejudices. These comments serve as a reminder of the attitudes which can still exist at the highest professional levels.a€A

Dr Watson was hailed as achieving one of the greatest single scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century when he worked at the University of Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s, forming part of the team which discovered the structure of DNA.

He shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for medicine with his British colleague Francis Crick and New Zealand-born Maurice Wilkins.

read the rest of this heresy here

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Posted: October 18th, 2007
at 9:43am by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: not ninja-worthy,science

Comments: No comments


MetaPlace

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Posted: October 15th, 2007
at 7:58am by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: web,not ninja-worthy,design

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squirell robber (ninja?)

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Posted: October 1st, 2007
at 7:15am by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: hood status,myninjaplease,youtube,life,not ninja-worthy,mnp is for the children

Comments: 1 comment


Reinventing the Shipping Container

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D’B3HAUS [the bCUBE House] via alibaba and equitygreen

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Posted: September 25th, 2007
at 10:00am by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: too good to be true,not ninja-worthy,architecture,design,development,entrepreneurship

Comments: No comments


Know Thy Enemy

spam.gif

There’s so much spam on the internet these days, pervading everything and it’s quite annoying. Running a blog is like a constant battle in the war against spam. People spam your comments in order to direct a minuscule amount of traffic to their sites, which most people wouldn’t even be dumb enough to click on. A while back we directed you to a link which was talking about why spammers do what they do.

From the article, and from experience, it is evident that spammers operate a system which basically works on the principle that even if you only get a tiny return (ie number of clicks on the spam comments on our blog) the return will be greater than the costs you spent doing it.

Anybody else could easily verify the reality of the situation by remembering all the actual paper spam received at home on a daily basis. The average number of direct mail schemes per home per day might have dropped since e-mail went totally mainstream, but we all remember the days of getting about 6,000 AOL CDs in the mail. Funny how they (AOL) fought such long legal battles with spammers while using 99% of the worlds silicone to clog your mail slot (the other 1% went to Pam Anderson, who during the same period couldn’t seem to make up her mind). Don’t ask me why I was reading either of those links, just go with the flow. Anyway, we used those AOL CDs as coasters.
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Some bloggers go as far as to say that spam as we know it is the result of organized crime rings that can afford to conscript the cheap labor for their spam schemes. However, we know this isn’t 100% true given that we know personally college grads who make decent money spamming for spamming companies.

Ita€™s organized crime rings who hire programmers to automate everything they possibly can (domain registration, ISP registration, free email account registration) and hire menial workers for pennies an hour halfway around the world to do all the manual things they cana€™t automate (like get past image-based login systems). Which brings me to the second thing.

THIS IS NOT A HOBBY. If you want to be an anti-spam advocate, if you want to write software or maintain a list or provide a service that identifies spam or blocks spam or targets spam in any way, you will be attacked. You will be attacked by professionals who have more money than you, more resources than you, better programmers than you, and no scruples at all. They want to make money, this is how they have decided to make money, they really can make a lot of money, and youa€™re getting in their way.via

The author of the previous quote may be guilty of exaggerating but there is an interesting tinge of mobsterism. Especially given that spam companies have been known to take some pretty brutal retaliation methods… relatively anyway.

Such as:

  • Charges quickly surfaced that Lycos was crossing the line by launching a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack, which is illegal in the U.S. and most European countries. The antispam campaign also prompted quick retaliation from unknown parties, including a reported hack of the makelovenotspam.com Web site.
  • September 26, 2003 (Computerworld) After fighting unsolicited commercial e-mail for several years by compiling and distributing Internet "blacklists" used by Internet service providers to block e-mail from known spammers, two online businesses have given up their efforts after their Web sites were crippled by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks they believe were launched by spammers.

And that’s just the beginning of the unethical tactics that seem to run the internet spam world. Here’s some more links for the curious. And here’s an OnPoint (NPR) link.

What seems to be the main troubling idea presented from all the articles about spam across the internet, which probably nearly rival in amount (warning: facetious) the number of spam, is that the spam world is all about business. There are a lot of huge players in the game, including search engines, which have major stakes in the internet, political agendas, mind control etc., and they don’t like to lose. It all boils down to hard economics in the end. That’s why algorithms stay proprietary. In a perfect open source world it would be easy(er) to combat spam. Then we wouldn’t have had that corny-ass Lycos scheme or these fools right here.

spam.jpg

In 2004 the FTC’s A CAN-SPAM Informant Reward System: A Federal Trade Commission Report to Congress (PDF) asked whether rewards to whistleblowers are necessary for effective operation of US anti-spam legislation.

It commented that

potential whistleblowers would weigh the possibility of a reward against a number of opposing considerations: the likelihood of information they submitted actually being used, and whether the use would result in a successful legal proceeding; whether they would lose their own income; whether they would incur personal legal liability for their own part in the scheme; whether they would lose their anonymity; and whether they would become a target of retaliation by the spammer. via

We here at mnp just deal with the spam, but we find that it’s best to know thy enemy, so that you can understand what truly motivates them, for that is the way of the ninja. So, in that vein, here’s what others say:

By the most recent estimate, spam accounts for slightly more than 60 percent of all e-mail messages, triple the rate of only a year ago. That’s despite the efforts of Internet service providers to filter it out; despite ever-stricter state laws against spamming; and despite aggressive counter-attacks by anti-spam vigilantes. The reason for this, of course, is the fact that spam is the least expensive marketing ploy in history, which has obvious appeal for those with a something-for-nothing outlook. via

Understand your Enemy
The blog spammers i know have an intimate understanding of all the major blog software, the blog boom itself and how it can be used to further their own sites advantage in the search engines. Bloggers need to take this approach also.
Let me help you get up to speed…
It’s really rather simple: A link to a website with the right anchor text is valuable for search placement. Simple as that. By allowing users to comment and having their "name" as the link text that goes to their website you are enabling them to sign i[n] as "v|agra guy" or whatever - the keyword in the link text is what is important.
Contrary to popular beleif, it doesn’t really matter if your blog has a high PageRank or not, the anchor text is what is important.
With me? via

Stay on your toes, people.

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Posted: September 24th, 2007
at 7:30am by black octagons


Categories: youtube,computers,crime,web,not ninja-worthy,business,weaponry,2 hours on the internet,open source

Comments: 1 comment


Mayor Daley’s Spanish No Parking Signs

Chicago Taxpayers are paying for No Parking signs printed in the Spanish Language. Mayor Daley knows these fine people are fined for any minor infraction they commit. Daley targets these people for votes and taxes. I am suggesting Stupido Daley print signs in every language. If you notice, Daley "forgets" to print his name on any Revenue trucks or signs. Classy, right Amigo?

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Posted: September 17th, 2007
at 9:44am by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: not ninja-worthy,business,whips,politricks

Comments: 2 comments