My sister has given birth to beautiful Lily Alice! Obviously I’m using the word “beautiful” in baby terms, she’s all scrunchy and newborn, but probably one of the prettiest babies I’ve ever seen. And I’m relying on photographs to help me form these opinions because they’re 3000 miles away. Which is quite a sad thing. I miss my family. A lot.

On the subject of reproduction, I recently discovered some more malfeasance in the dubious realm of the music/movie copy-protection racket. We came across a DVD that refused to copy to our hard-drive. Copying a DVD to your hard-drive is not necessarily illegal BTW; deciding to watch something later is not a crime. Normally I use vobcopy because it is simple and reliable, but this time it got to 16M of one particular VOB and then hung.

A glass of Google later I had discovered some recent “advances” in copy protection called things like “RipGuard” and “ARccOS”. They sound pretty bloody impressive in the press-releases (Google it, I’m not linking to the twats) but of course in reality they are the same old shit that the industry has been trying to con the public with for years: breaking the DVD in a way that “most” DVD players won’t notice. Just like they tried to do with CDs. If you get one of these DVDs, make sure you inform the vendor that it is damaged and demand a refund.

A reminder to the faithless: this will only penalize the legitimate users. If you buy a DVD that won’t play then tough tits. Whereas if you buy an illegal DVD, the dudes who get paid to crack the crap protection will have rendered it perfectly usable. They have people who can crack this lame bullshit – because they can spend money to buy people who understand how it works. The purchaser doesn’t have these resources. So the legit buyer is being punished again.

It took a very short amount of time for me to work out how to defeat this “Advanced Copy Protection” and I was only doing it out of bloody-mindedness by this stage. I don’t even want to watch the fucking film. BTW, the magic word is ddrescue.

Macrovision, who are, in my personal opinion, an anachronistic bunch of impotent losers, claim that with this “Advanced Copy Protection”

95% of casual users lack the knowledge and/or determination to be able to copy a DVD

Now, this is bollocks in so many ways it’s difficult to know where to start, so I’ll go for two main issues: firstly, “95%” is one of the 88.5% of statistics that are made up on the spot – can we have some evidence to support this dubious claim? Secondly, casual users do not copy DVDs; they get them after the <1% of expert users have ripped them using the multitude of simple tools that are available to them. No-one needs to worry about casual users, they are totally dumb. You don’t need to be an expert to buy a DVD from a woman in the pub or download a rip. By the time it’s available to buy, a single “expert” somewhere has already copied it.

Again, the hackers and crackers are not hurt by copy-protection. Only the buyer. You are buying damaged goods. Watch the movie, then take it back and complain.

If there’s one thing that every country in the world can agree on, it’s surely racism. Black, white, Kufar, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Prod, Jew, Atheist or Quaker [the list goes on], we can all agree that we hate one or more of them, even if we’ve never met them.

At long last the “Tea-party movement”[sic] has started to show its true colours. It started out as your average, rich, right-wing, oligarchical astroturfing effort, and has now become purified by the simple beliefs of the mass supporters. They never really cared about, nor even understood, anything they were vocally berating the current government with – they just hated the idea of having a black president. It was simple racism. And I use the word “simple” deliberately.

Well, it’s refreshing to hear the teabaggers come clean by shouting “Nigger” and “Faggot” to congress. All this will do is unite the genuine racists, and distress the Republicans who are not racists. The latter outnumber the former. You can bang on about Socialists and Communists without understanding what they mean, but when someone drops the N-bomb, you know what they think, and you know they’re stupid. My optimistic side suggests that this will split their cause.

Meanwhile in the UK, everyone is geeing-up for the general race-warelection in May which will let the general public decide between two duplicitous, desperate, power-hungry crooks, and the neo-nazis. Gorden Brown has ensured that the neo-nazis have the best chance of being elected since they formed, by changing the dumb voting system to something even dumber.

In the build-up to the racist fun ahead, there has already been a couple of friendly matches between The UAF and the EDL (the latter being a more closeted set of racists than the regular NF and the BNP).

And let’s not forget the progressive attitudes of Multiculturalism evident in South East London where a Nazi Granny is standing for the BNP. People of Lewisham, please, I beg you, make sure that her voters know what bullshit she is talking, and make sure her pathetic xenophobia isn’t given any credibility by people voting for her.

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Muslims,
And everybody hates the Jews.

— Tom Lehrer – National Brotherhood week

Today is St Patrick’s day, and everyone in the entire world is celebrating by wearing green, drinking stupid amounts of alcohol and explaining why they are, actually, Irish.

But why do we celebrate this wonderful day? What is it that we are actually celebrating?

Well sit back and let me explain the complex history behind this monumental holiday.

Let’s travel back 4000 years to soon after God created the earth. Everything was peaceful, and the bounty of God’s earth provided for every living being, meaning that everyone had food, shelter and warmth.

But there was one problem that no-one could have predicted: snakes. Ever since Eve betrayed the trust of Adam (and our Lord God) by eating the apple, Satan became empowered and propagated his evil seed into a thousand snakes. Each snake begat a thousand snakes and each of those begat a thousand more until the Garden of Eden was full of slimy, poisonous, evil snakes.

Theologian scholars have now managed, by advanced theological methods, to trace the original location of the Garden of Eden to what we now call “Ireland”! If you think about it, it makes sense! A beautiful green land, full of magic and wonder. If you still doubt this, then read Genesis and its clear and unambiguous description of Leprechauns.

Around this time lived an Irish lad whose name was Patrick O’Piseadeynnnegan (pronounced “omally”) living in Ireland after the English army had killed all of his friends and family for being Irish. Patrick was well versed in ancient Catholic prayers and realised that the one thing the snakes could not beat was the power of prayer. So for literally hours on end, he prayed for the death of the billions of snakes. And it came to pass, after a while, that God heard Patrick and decided to help him by throwing all of the snakes into the sea. And Patrick did say “you Lord are the most loving of Lords!” and the snakes did drown and leave the holy land of Ireland free. To celebrate, Patrick mixed together some Irish herbs with the green rivers of the emerald isle, producing a healthy, intoxicating drink, which we know today as “Guinness.”

And this is why, until this very day, we still celebrate St Patrick’s day by getting fucked off our tits on Guinness or any other alcoholic beverage we can get our hands on!

Happy St Patrick’s Day!

Here’s a couple more reasons to like Richard Dawkins. By the way, if you’re one of those people, like Jeremy Hardy, who thinks Dawkins is just another “Religious Extremest” then buy one of his books, read it, and then apologise for being wrong.
He currently has a couple of excellent campaigns. Firstly, The Out Campaign which aims to encourage non-believers to come out of the closet and say they don’t believe.

Secondly, Non Believers Giving Aid, aimed at all of those people who erroneously believe that aid can only exist when prefixed by the word “Christian.”

From a little blog on the New York times:

We always risk and often achieve a “I just heard this great new band called Vampire Weekend” moment by recommending Internet Things, but it’s been a hard day…

And I’m going to take the same risk; sorry if you seen this, done this, know this already, don’t care either way, but I’m currently captivated by the simple, powerful, beauty of posterous. It’s been around for a while but I’ve only just appreciated what it does.

If you need to declare, brag, or shout about something and you don’t have a blog, just email whatever it is to post@posterous.com and your email, together with any attachments, get instantly turned into a beautiful blog post. For example: http://veghead.posterous.com/. You don’t need to set anything up, sign anything, or even think about it. Just send an email, and a few seconds later you get mailed back with the url of whatever you posted. Of course, should you wish, you can maintain the url and keep posting stuff to it – just like a real blog – but you don’t have to. Try it!

Whether it will scale, get clogged with spam, or just vanish, we’ll see. But I love to see a brilliant idea brilliantly executed, especially when it’s so simple.

It’s really cheering when a website that is brilliant, although offensive to some, gets shut-down, and then gets resurrected. Whether it was by the power of logic or a clue-stick brandished at the censors, we’ll probably never know for sure. But I’m glad he’s back. Read all his stuff. It’s funny.

According to the “News”, we should all be approaching revolution by now, as the worst snow storm ever recorded plunges us all into dark misery. It has been snowing all day, but none has settled (even on the massive piles of snow which remain from the last storm). We even had to work at home today to avoid the return of snowmageddon and all day got to watch the perpetual snow, and its perpetual inability to do any more damage than very light summer rain.

So I’ve been working at home, which is the same as working in the office except that I get to have a bird on my shoulder, watch The Sweeney, and end up working later than normal. We also got a short lie-in, and a moment of panic when we discovered our cable and Internet were cut off. This only took an hour to resolve tho and, despite that, I still think Comcast are an enormous set of bastards…sorry Matt.

A good friend gave me a copy of A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present, which is a really good guide for helping people who live in North America to feel guilty, ashamed and angry; it certainly has that effect on me anyway. Obviously the people who should read it, won’t. But the more depressing it is to read the history of genocide, enslavement, and torture of native Americans, Africans and the poor of any colour, the more difficult it becomes to feel like progress hasn’t been made over the last few hundred years. The general feelings of despair, disappointment, and anger I feel normally when listening to the “News”, especially when it describes what all of those deluded tards in the “teabag movement” are banging on about , seem a bit silly compared to the state of the U.S. in the late 17th century. There used to be a slave code, explaining how slaves (and “servants” AKA slaves) should be punished for trying to rebel. The “Puritans” considered the act of massacring entire villages of native-Americans as positively Godly. There was also cannibalism amongst the poor – another thing that doesn’t get mentioned too often in history textbooks.

Whatever Obama turns out to be, the fact he was elected is something I will forever remember as being one of the most wonderfully significant events in modern history. It reminded me that getting depressed and cynical doesn’t help – we have to try to change things! For lazy bastards like myself, that’s difficult to acknowledge.

Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it

Karl Marx – Theses on Feuerbach.

Alternatively, just make sure you enjoy the nice times – not everyone is privileged to have such a luxury.

It’s probably not a good sign when two concurrent blog posts consist of quotations, but my brain’s been heavily bogged down with the languages of C, PHP and Python recently, so the English has to be borrowed. This is from Dylan Thomas’ “The Doctor and the Devils” (a copy of which I picked up in the Sally Army for about ten bob). It reminds me of the currently amassing army of ignorance commonly referred to as the teabaggers.

To think, then, is to enter into a perilous country, colder of welcome than the polar wastes, darker than a Scottish Sunday, where the hand of the unthinker is always raised against you, where the wild animals, who go by such names as Envy, Hypocrisy, and Tradition, are notoriously carnivorous, and where the parasites rule.
To think is dangerous. The majority of men have found it easier to writhe their way into the parasitical bureaucracy, or to droop into the slack ranks if the ruled. I beg you all to devote your lives to danger; I pledge you to adventure; I command you to experiment.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana.

Something queer is afoot and it’s making me nervous.
[This is a geeky post – you have been warned]
Unfortunately, for legal reasons, it can’t be discussed frankly, or in great depth in public, but hopefully you’ll get the idea.

There exist private, free to use, on-line services owned, run, and patronised by enthusiasts. They’re not pornographic or unsavoury in any way, but there are some who consider it illegal. These people are wrong, but they have friends in high places.

Recently one of these services has started to receive reports from its patrons claiming that it was broken. For the owners of the service, everything seemed to work fine, but a large enough subsection of their clients have been complaining, and they’ve started to take it seriously. The initial analysis revealed it to be a “routing problem” rather than anything to do with their software.

As you can probably guess, I’m one of the afflicted. Today I joined the IRC chat and left shortly afterwards. It’s difficult to explain why, and I’m not going to bother trying. But one good thing did happen: another irritated user contacted me privately and we shared our collective information. He or she (who knows or cares) had already been though the same exploratory processes I had intended to pursue, and had discovered a workaround. I tried his/her trick and it worked! We got chatting and established the cause of the problem and then speculated as to who were responsible. In doing so, we became aware that we were both on the same wavelength, and swapped a few subtle hints as to how we could be contacted in the future. Then, after a bunch of bitching about the admins of the “on-line service” we were trying to use, we went off to continue our research.

Here are the end-of-day results:

1. This is not a “routing issue” or a problem with a network, it’s deliberate.
2. The on-line service is being targeted by either an ISP, or a law enforcement agency that has power over ISPs.
3. It’s not a DDOS attack – some fool even suggested that “4-chan were responsible”…
4. The site realised that they were being nobbled by an ISP and so switched a bunch of IP addresses as “a workaround”; obviously they weren’t concerned enough to wonder about the identity of the agency responsible. I would be!
5. Me and my new colleague managed to work out a better way to avoid the issues, but decided to keep schtum about it – the little powermongers who run the service are quite incapable of accepting suggestions from underlings.

Get crypting people.