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Cluster F*ck 2011 (aka Election 2011)

Stoss — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 18:14:15 +0000

Over the past few days I have been sarcastically tweeting out random crap about the upcoming federal election in Canada. The problem with this approach is that I cannot sum up my frustration with this event in 140 characters. Below lies the complete platform with which I will base my future updates on this matter.

If I had to choose a motto for this election it would be this: An election that no one wanted, brought on by a reason no one cared about, at a time when we cannot afford it, amongst candidates that aren’t worth our votes.

This election was not spawned by the will of the people of Canada. It was spawned because of a light at the end of the tunnel by two wanna-be big-wigs and their fellow sheep, who leapt at the slightest opportunity that may give them a hope of adding PM to their business card. I mean, let’s be honest here: Iggy couldn’t lead an ant army to a picnic; Layton lives in a socialist dreamworld where money grows on trees and the streams flow with gold bullion; Harper’s platform is more anti-Canadian than the entire list of our enemies combined; Duceppe wants to split up our country; and May has about as much chance of changing Canada as I do getting a blowjob from Megan Fox. (Megan, if you’re reading this, I will vote Green if you do, in fact, blow me.)

And while Harper being our Prime Minister may leave a horrible taste in most of our mouths, it is certainly better than him having a majority government and wreaking his particular brand of havoc like George W did for his 8 years on the global scene.

On top of it all, we are still in the middle of an economic crisis. People seem to have forgotten that because we weren’t ‘as bad off’ as the US or UK, and because it isn’t exciting news. So, Sun and CTVGlobeMedia have relegated the story to the business section, which no self respecting ignorant Joe Blow reads anyway. Elections cost around $300 million. That’s $300 million less that the government can do something with. To put that in perspective; the Conservative budget, which Layton and Iggy both said they would vote against, offered $300 million to low income seniors as part of the Guaranteed Income Supplement program! So what they basically said was that they’d rather pay for an election, which by all rights should result in the same government, than give money to your grandmother. If this isn’t abuse of power, I don’t know what is!

What these guys seem to forget is they work for us. Given that 165 of 308 seats house didn’t go to Harper last time around, it’s pretty clear that he isn’t the Prime Minister of choice for over half of the country, but that doesn’t mean we should have an election every 18 months to try again!

Be offended, be very offended

Stoss — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 18:26:43 +0000

30 Rock aired its Season 5 opener last week and it contained within it a 15 second throw-away joke about having sexual intercourse with your wife when she is asleep. The Internet lit up with activists, rape care workers and apparently anyone who knows how to type, expressing their disgust at such an offensive joke and how horrible Tina Fey is for writing it and NBC is for airing it.

Now, I am not surprised about that. What I am surprised by is some of the debates I have read. In one of the debate essentially a Care Worker for rape victims argued that his free speech allowed him to call for boycotts, apologies, and ultimately eradication of something if he doesn’t agree with it.

Correct me if I am wrong, but the idea of free speech is not to limit the availability of potentially offensive things from existence. It is to understand that things exist which you may not agree with. Freedom is choosing what to agree with and what not to. And as long as no one is forcing you against your will to change your opinion, your freedom is unaffected.

Eradicating everything that has the potential to be offensive is absurd! The world would be pretty empty if we removed anything that potentially could offend people.

I am not saying the joke isn’t offensive and isn’t hurtful to a significant group of rape victims and their friends and relatives, but what I am saying is that that doesn’t mean the joke shouldn’t exist.

Recently some American religious fundamentalists decided that burning a Qur’an might be a fun thing to do. And almost everyone up to and including the President of the United States condemned it. I say almost, because one particularly public figure actually made the most sane argument of all:

In a strange way I’m here to defend his right to do that. I happen to think that it is distasteful. … But the First Amendment protects everybody, and you can’t say that we’re going to apply the First Amendment to only those cases where we are in agreement. … If you want to be able to say what you want to say when the time comes that you want to say it, you have to defend others no matter how much you disagree with them - Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City

It is exactly what should have been said of the situation. Finding something disgusting is not a reason for it not to exist. Potentially putting lives at risk is not a reason to not do something. You know what else puts people’s lives at risk? A war in Afghanistan…

Similarly, opposing a mosque being built near the former World Trade Center site because it happened to be Muslims who were responsible for the attacks is like banning black trench coats in Highschools because the Columbine Attackers happened to wear them. It might be considered sympathetic and kind for the church leader to abandon their plans, but it certainly isn’t a necessity.

Without sounding cliché: Can’t we all just get along?

Sometimes there is a compromise. Like censoring arbitrary swear words on shows like ‘The Late Late Show’ which airs at 12:30am! But as far as I am concerned, if you are up at that time of the night and offended, go to fucking bed! I love how sitcoms now use douchebag like it’s a definite article, but we still can’t get over fuck and shit. Who decided a noun referring to a piece of cleaning equipment is somehow less offensive than a synonym for sex and a noun meaning feces? Apparently some douchebag.

If you don’t like 30 Rock, don’t watch it (Similar to my unalterable hatred of the ridiculous waste of 22 minutes an episode that is ‘Two and Half Men’). If you don’t think burning the Qur’an is productive, don’t burn one. But don’t, whatever you do, tell me I can’t watch 30 Rock because you find its content offensive, or tell me that I cannot destroy any object I own, regardless of the meaning it may or may not have to you or someone else, no matter how distasteful or disgusting you find my preferences.

And if you hate the word fuck for some reason other than somehow society is convinced that the devil spawned the word himself, don’t use it.

Protection Against Protection

Stoss — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 20:16:12 +0000

The US Federal Trade Commission recently released a report about how online/virtual ‘worlds’ protect underage children from harmful or explicit images. They investigated the mechanisms these companies put in place to ensure that children 13 and under did not access “things they shouldn’t.”

Their first recommendation was to “…put in place more effective age verification methodology.” Well, holy shit! They cracked it! It angers me when an agency, government or not, comes up with a recommendation that is as useful as, “My plan is to come up with a plan.” A 2-year-old could have figured out that the reason why they can log into adult online ‘worlds’ is because there is no mechanism to prevent them!

But what is the solution? The fact of the matter is there is none. Just as 16-year-olds can use their sibling’s ID to get into a bar illegally, condoms are not 100% effective, and people continue to inexplicably love Two and Half Men, there is no protection that can successfully eliminate an intentional desire to do “things they shouldn’t,” except blocking out the potential altogether. In this example, that would include shutting down all bars, not having sex, and killing Charlie Sheen. Alternately, there is the the always popular ‘lock yourself in an opaque box’.

There are really two problems at play here, and neither have to do with technology.

Accidental access: While this kills my sex analogy because in my research, accidental sex isn’t that easy… You can certainly accidentally wander into a bar, a naughty website, or flick onto a tv show that shouldn’t be on the air.
Purposeful circumvention: You can purposely attempt to buy beer underage, lie about your birth date on the web or in paperwork, and tune into CBS.

Before we go any further, we will never stop number 2. As I said above, the FCC, FTC, FDA et. al. and their world wide equivalents can do all they want and spend billions of currency units, but if someone wants to do something and they can find a way, they will do it. Just as Philippe Petit (“Man on Wire”, highly recommend watching), DB Cooper, the 9/11 perpetrators, etc., etc. proved: “You can do whatever you want.” By the way, does anyone else see the irony in that guidance councillors use that phrase as a build up to young students, and then we spend government money trying to figure out ways to prevent young students from doing so?

Now in the accidental case the FTC found that even in ‘virtual worlds’ that were kid friendly, there were sexually explicit references, violence, and other “things they shouldn’t” have access too. This is nothing new, I mean go back and watch old cartoons, movies, read comic books, or walk down any street in a major city. Now stop. The reason we have to go back and re-watch the cartoons and movies, or re-read the comic books is because in most cases we were too innocent to get the joke. The reason why this next generation (who have been surfing for porn since they could double click their index finger) is growing up so fast is not because there are subtle references in their world to all of this, it is because sex, violence, drugs and the like are promoted on a daily basis to them as ‘bad’, and ‘bad’ things are intriguing! Remember?! Forget the sexually suggestive graphic in Sims online. 12-year-old girls see women in short skirts on tv or on the street and then go and buy “Cosmo: The pedophile edition” to find out why, or the 8-year-old who knows in explicit detail what a blow job is because MTV bleeps out mysterious words, so the curious mind has to go and find out why! And to add to it all, today they have the capability find out quite quickly, whereas when we were young we only had older siblings or ‘the cool aunt’.

We played cops and robbers as kids and never even put together the fact that this was violence personified. Today they play cowboys and Indians and are scolded because it is racist to portray Indians in that manner!

We try and protect kids against things they don’t understand, and they therefore want to understand it, and at an age too young to comprehend it. Instead of letting them hear the word “Fuck” and explaining that society doesn’t want them to use that word (A-whole-nother blog entry there), or letting them play with blissful ignorance without imparting our adult morals, we attempt to hide what has always been in the open and then wonder why they become more interested in it. Kids don’t need our adult constructs forced upon them. While we need to monitor their access to various things, whether it be bad TV or naughty websites, we should do this in an effort to guide them morally, not force them to learn adult life lessons at a younger and younger age.

PS: I hate Two and Half Men.

The Great Pretender

Stoss — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:22:55 +0000

Pretending is ingrained in us from the very beginning. As a child, we would sit Calvin & Hobbes style in a box and blast off to space, or watch the Muppet Babies invent crazy worlds and adventures, or turn a sandbox into a Jurassic playground. Imagination is one of the very components which make us human. We have the ability to invent things in our heads and seemingly make them real.

However, while imagination should be encouraged, and is quite frankly important to all aspects of science, technology, advancement etc., it also can be overdone.

As a society, there are some things which we ‘pretend’ that actually change the way we live. This can have serious consequence. But what is worse is that we pretend things that don’t make sense, just like thinking a box is a space ship and four -inch dinosaurs can terrorize our backyard…

We pretend things like people don’t swear, smoke, drink, insult each other, fight or argue. We pretend that age has something to do with abilities. In Canada you can legally consent to sex at 16, but can’t purchase a tape to watch others have sex until 18. You’re old enough to vote for the leader of our country at 18, but not mature enough to consume alcohol until 19. You can choose to purchase potentially deadly cigarettes at 16, but can’t sign a do not resuscitate until 18. We pretend that people shouldn’t die, and that when accidents occur it is always someone’s fault. We pretend we can protect society by putting in place legislation to enforce laws against people who purposely break the laws already in place.

The Canadian Women’s Hockey team, who just took gold at the 2010 Olympics, were seen after the game sharing beer and cigars on the ice once the stadium had cleared of fans. They have since come under fire, because one of their stars was just 18 and, of course, everyone below 19 doesn’t drink, therefore they were setting a bad example. On top of that smoking in a public place!? You must be joking! That is illegal in British Columbia! The problem is that every law has a purpose. For example the “No Smoking” laws were put into place to stave off second hand smoke in people who choose not to smoke. If I am at a private party where all parties consent to smoking, then why does it matter that the place was public or private? In a room the size of a 20,000-person stadium the smoke from 15 cigars would be like placing a droplet of cyanide in the ocean and calling it poisonous water… And a member of a professional hockey team having a drink before she is ‘legally’ allowed to? I’m surprised she wasn’t doing a line of coke off the naked thigh of their goalie. Just 6 days before this event, John Montgomerie (gold medallist in skeleton) walked through Whistler with a pitcher of beer in his hand, and not only wasn’t chastised, but was celebrated on CTV as “an every Canadian man.” Last time I checked drinking in the streets was still illegal.

RDS recently had a commentator make a derogatory remark about openly gay skater Johnny Weir. A gay activist group immediately filed a complaint to the CRTC and demanded an apology from RDS. But Weir himself asked, “Why?” He fully acknowledged that this is a free country and people have their opinions. It doesn’t matter if your opinion is ignorant in a free society; you are still entitled to it. People will always fight, and have ungrounded opinions. Pretending otherwise is not only foolish, but detrimental. If no one has the right to disagree with anyone else then in what way are we free?

NBC repeatedly showed the Georgian Luger in his final grave moments, finding new people and things to blame and then issued an apology when their Shaun White’s coach used a curse word (which are in themselves arbitrarily chosen and changed on a regular basis) on live television. It’s fun to pretend when people fuck up they say ‘frak’ and ‘derrnit’, but all we are doing is further perpetuating the falsehoods that are turning everyone into whining, snivelling babies when anyone does anything they don’t like.

Pretending is fun. It really is. But hell, even the Bible says we are born to sin, so even the Christian right has to agreethat watching an 18 year old have a sip of booze is expected (assuming that is a sin and not some arbitrary human-made rule) and two guys kissing is just a spec in the eyes of their God to the other 6.5 billion humans out there with the potential to lust, murder, adulter, steal, etc. Let’s stop pretending people and society are perfect and start enjoying the fact we are different and can make our own decisions as long as they have no adverse effect on others.

Disappointed, but not at the Olympics

Stoss — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:17:42 +0000

Dear Canadian Media,

I am tired, absolutely tired of phrases like “only # medals” and “disappointment” and “let down”. Canada is having one of their best games ever and continue to have hopes with a week left in the games.

Last night we lost, arguably, the most anticipated single game of the Olympics and what happened? We were on the streets of Vancouver with flags, horns, spontaneous national anthem singing, chants for our country and our athletes. I have seen the Maple Leaf on clothing and body parts here that I didn’t even know you could put it on.

The Canadian public is more psyched than ever before. Stop making up useless news and report the facts. Do the country you claim to represent proud and support these athletes who deserve more respect than the millionaire entertainers in the NBA, MLB, NFL etc.

I, for one, am not only impressed by our athletes, but feel absolutely lucky to be involved in this display of undeniable patriotism that rarely peeks through in The Great White North.

GO CANADA GO!

Sincerely,
A Canadian

Publicly Private

Stoss — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:33:31 +0000

I’m tired of reading about people ‘losing privacy’ with Facebook and Twitter. People are not losing their privacy; they are losing their common sense. There was an article this morning in the paper which cited examples of ‘loss of privacy’:

1) A UK worker being fired for comments that her job was boring.

2) Employees in a service industry being reprimanded for posting negative comments about customers on their social sites.

3) Causing of problems in relationships when one person makes relationship-based remarks, or when a person ‘updates their relationship status’ without approval of the other party.

Hold on, none of those are examples of losing privacy; they all made their opinion public on purpose. Everyone at one time or another is bored at work. Everyone complains about idiots they have to deal with, and everyone has relationship troubles. It isn’t the fact that those people had those thoughts; it is the fact that they consciously made the thought public. Consciously making something known to people is not losing privacy, losing privacy is something that you didn’t make known to people, becoming known to people. For example, having your private diary published, or your best friend write a tell-all book about you, or a doctor telling everyone about your genital herpes is a loss of privacy. Standing on a box in the middle of Times Square and screaming that you have genital herpes, or handing out free copies of your sex tapes to strangers is not a loss of privacy.

If Facebook openly released all of your pictures to the general public, not just registered Facebook users or specifically your ‘friends’, then that is an invasion, but they don’t (I didn’t say can’t). In fact, they are putting in more restrictions around what can be seen.

We live in a knowledge-starved world. We put Tiger Woods on the front page because we found out he had a secret, but then scream bloody murder when someone finds out ours. We can’t have it both ways.

The sad part is that government agencies are spending millions to study Facebook for security holes, when in reality we live in a society that cares less about privacy and more about reading about our acquaintances’ lives than ever before. If something isn’t meant to be public, don’t make it public. It is as simple of that. Posting “I’ve had a horrible day,” is enormously different than posting “I hate my boss and work is shit.” Facebook does not require the same level of professionalism as a man in a suit in front of a microphone (but then again, even Obama called Kanye a “Jackass”), but it does require some common sense.

And you want to talk about privacy? Well how about laws that restrict who you can love/marry, in what orifice you can have sex, or upcoming flight rules that you can either be photographed in an ‘naked scanner’ machine or have your genitalia juggled before you can get on an airplane? We don’t live in a private society at all when a government can invade it like that. BTW: This is for another entry, but ‘naked scanner’ is by far the newest gross exaggerated term. Given the above two options I will gladly let a couple people stare at my colourless, featureless ‘naked’ body only to have the picture removed immediately upon exiting the scanner. It’s not like Playboy is standing behind them saying “Yep, I’ll take that one for our ‘frequent flyers’ issue.” In those pictures you are no more nude than that chick’s silhouette on a trucker’s mud flaps.

This last year 3 or 4 guys got caught for misuse of a firearm and animal cruelty because they did really stupid, depraved things to a duck during a hunting trip. They got caught, not because someone discovered the duck, but because they posted themselves on YouTube doing it. Had that not happened, the ducks would have decayed or been eaten and, assuming they wouldn’t brag about it (which is a stretch based on the video), they certainly wouldn’t have been charged.

Why haven’t we learned from this? Because we are not used to a truly global media. While screaming on top of a box in Times Square all of your dirty secrets certainly isn’t maintaining privacy, it is not the same as electronically posting something that within seconds the entire world can see… Until, of course, someone starts streaming your NYC rant. Which really poses the question, do we have any privacy anymore? If anyone can video/photograph us doing anything and YouTube it, wouldn’t you think that would make everyone more afraid than the stuff they knowingly post? It sure does for me…

The Fight Against Futility

Stoss — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:35:52 +0000

Recently the file sharing site Mininova decided to stop hosting any torrent that was not sent in from a registered user with rights to the material that was being posted. It was if a million file sharers suddenly screamed and then were silenced…

With the fall of Napster, Supernova, Pirate Bay and now this I wonder the impact any of these widely publicized mini-victories has had?

The American “War on Drugs” was a late 60′s initiative and while various reports indicate drug use is down, an equal or greater number seem to report little change. Which isn’t surprising to me. If I ask any random yes or no question to any x number of people the result will likely vary from survey to survey.

It is impossible to determine the exact number of drug users for a variety of reasons. Avoiding the “since drugs being illegal, there is an apprehension about discussing their use” cliche, consider how I could go about calculating the number of smokers.

Obviously countries, and regions within those have different habits of smoking habits. If you broke down those regions based on something say like #of packs sold in a week, then determined the average number of cigarettes a smoker in that region smoked you could then calculate an estimate on the number of smokers in that region. Add all the regions up and (albeit with a fairly high margin of error), you could still get an idea of # of smokers..

There is no way to do this with illegal drugs in most of the western world. There is no idea how much of the product exists, and therefore no idea how much is sold and therefore no accurate measure of the use, or for that matter the change in use.

I am not arguing that the War on Drugs hasn’t worked, I am arguing that there is little they could do to prove it has and it has been going on since the 60s!

Assuming we know that for 40 years the government of the US (and many other countries) has put billions into fighting a war on something which we also know still exists and have no real way of measuring any affect, what does that mean in the case of Internet file sharing? Is the War on Pirated Music/Video identical to the War on Drugs?

Before every movie in the UK there is an ad with a famous person saying don’t copy this movie and there are plenty of celebrity anti-drug campaigns out there. The agencies doing the fighting have just as much propaganda available see the little bit I did on drug propaganda previously and the RIAA’s wonderful news releases on their slowly being killed industry which set a new record for profits last year.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not indicating that because music and theatres are making money this legitimises illegal actions, what I am simply putting forth is that fighting something that isn’t going to go away is like randomly waving your hand in the air with hopes it’ll hit and kill a fly.

It took 40 years to make an insignificant dent (if there is one at all) in drug use with “The War on Drugs” and its Most Wanted culprits are still in daily use. My bet is that the Internet landscape will change so vastly in the next 40 years that by the time the corporations fighting this massive swarm of file sharing website “flies” by waving lawsuit “flyswatters” randomly around the world the technology will have advanced far past today’s torrents and will become even more widespread. Their method is too much like peeing in the Atlantic Ocean: It isn’t going to change the pH level of the Pacific.

Driving me to Drink

Stoss — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:36:45 +0000

The other day in the paper there was an article about a 22 year old English man who died due to liver failure. The doctors were quoted as saying “He had the worst case of cirrhosis they have ever seen”. In fact his alcohol consumption was so bad that he was denied a liver transplant on the basis that it was felt he could never kick the habit enough to treat the new organ properly.

The mother has come out saying that he “made a mistake” and was not “given a fair chance” at a transplant. He also “didn’t know what he was doing … He didn’t know he was going to die.” The articles stated he started drinking at age 11 and binge drinking by 13. I am never one to trample a man’s grave, but does anyone else see anything wrong with this?

Just yesterday I was treated to a wonderful article linking alcohol to cancer. Wow. It sounds like this alcohol stuff is the worst substance on this planet! Killing humans! Causing cancer! We should definitely fear this beverage! It’s almost as bad as dihydrogen monoxide*!

But then, a little bit of my faith in humanity was restored, with an article talking about how a drinking age of 21 in the US is hurting society, not stopping any drinking.

The truth is everything is harmful. You can die from drinking too much water (DHMO?), people are struck by lightning by doing nothing more than standing outside! Hell, LIFE KILLS YOU! Every notice that 100% of lives, end in death?

The problem here is not the substance, whether it be alcohol, pot, tomatoes, red meat… the problem is the over consumption and lack of education about a substance.

I hate to say it, but one thing the government got this one right with the Canadian Food Guide. Having a moderate amount of various foods. Another example where our government succeeds?

Check out these 2 pages:

Health Canada Drug Facts

Drug Enforcement Agency (US) Drug Facts

Canada explains in calm and clear statements what we need to know about drugs. Click on any of the drugs listed and they use phrases like: ”May be addictive”, “Scientific studies are not complete”, “Smoking can lead to bronchitis”.

The US site in contrast uses phrases like: “It’s like playing Russian Roulette.”, “can lead to addiction, impairment and even death.”, “far better not to start, not to experiment, not to tempt fate.”

See a different approach here?

Moderate consumption of any and all substances is fine. Binge drinking is bad, period. We’ve all done it, I hope not at age 13 and hopefully not every day, but we have all done it. Smoking tonnes of pot, while popping e? Yeah, probably not an ideal hourly activity. But remember your 21st Birthday? Yeah, neither do I.

Drugs don’t kill people. Alcohol doesn’t kill people. Red Meat doesn’t kill people. These can kill people. However, having the ability to do something is not the same as actually doing it. We all have abilities we choose not to use. “With great power comes great responsibility” one Peter Parker used to say. Part of having control of our fate is being able to have self control of our fate. Learn your limits and read realistic literature not propaganda. Enjoy a glass of red wine instead of a bottle or 3, have a juicy, medium-rare steak every couple of weeks instead of 2 meals/day, drink 8 glasses of water a day, not 50.

Is it sad that this man died? Absolutely. Was he given a fair chance? Well, if you were giving your liver to someone and you got to choose who, would you have chosen this man? Doctors get paid a lot of money to make these decisions, certainly not something I am going to tackle. Suffice it to say, I don’t think the British healthcare system is broken.

*Please, please, please tell me you know that DHMO is H₂O aka: water!

What a Hack

Stoss — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:16:30 +0000

It was recently announced that 1 month ago perennial Stoss Blog antagonist Twitter had a security breach when a high ranking executive’s account was accessed by a “hacker”. The hacker correctly guessed the users’s secret security questions to gain access to the account then surfed through corporate data and released it to well known techie sites. As the hacker himself posted: He did this to make people aware of the importance of security.

The articles I have read have used this as an excuse to bash the practice of “1 password for all sites” and the use of easily guessed security questions like “hometown” or “mother’s maiden name” which are ubiquitous it seems in the land of web sign up sheets. It’s almost as if some assmonkey whose only knowledge of security was the aluminum key that locked his pansy-ass diary decided one day it would be great if we could secure our most personal data using such totally secret, impossible-to-find-out data such as our pet’s name or the street we live on! Yeah, no one would be able to penetrate that code!

But I don’t so much have a beef with this. It’s security practices in general, both corporately and personally that are appalling! We focus so much energy on enforcing ridiculous rules that are absolutely unsubstantiated and yet no energy on the flaws in the human logic of password selection.

Here are the fallacy’s behind my favourite policies:

1) Change your password every 3 months & don’t use the same password for 10 changes

The genius that came up with this should be shot in the chest simply because it is now become the most ridiculous belief since the Hayley’s comet morons killed themselves to ride it to utopia. Would you change the lock on your house or your car doors every 3 months? Hell! Most people don’t change them when they move or sell their car! How many previous owners have a key to your house do you think? I have never figured out the logic behind this absolute waste of time policy that does about as much good as putting duct tape over your monitor to stop UV radiation. If someone finds out your password, they aren’t going to wait for 3 months then go, “drat, foiled again!” when it fails. It only takes a few minutes to download the entire contents of your harddrive, so by the logic of preventing data theft we should change our password every 5 minutes, right? If anything this helps hackers, because people are not random! We get lazy and append a number or capitalize a different letter to form our new password, so a hacker can guess for months on end and, once he has “your pattern”, will perpetually have access to your account. And this is the reason why not using the same password for 10 changes makes no sense! If anything this encourages using mypassword0 through mypassword9.
I also love the idea of “3 months” and “10 changes” seemingly being industry standards. What possible study could have resulted in these numbers being determined as the “optimal” values?
I love policies that seem picked out of a hat and then spoken about like they are a gospel to the industry. As if 91 days is a magic number for a criminal to guess your password, so better change it before day 90!

2) Password strength monitors and post-its

“Don’t tell anyone your PIN”, “Never write down your password”, “We will never ask for your password in an email”. BUT what we will do is analyze every character and tell you if your password is “strong” enough. Strong enough for what? To knock out Superman? To cut a diamond? We are talking about basic mathematics here. A password of length 5 made up of all small letter only has about 12 million combinations, throw in one capital and it is about 60 million combinations. Throw in a number somewhere on top of that and you are now at 3.5 billion combinations! That is a pretty big number. But consider most companies/websites have a 3 wrong and you’re out policy (A policy that does make sense), that is a hell of a lot of attempts on your password and if you can’t figure out after the ten thousandth time your account was locked that someone was hacking you than you deserve to be shot like the guy who proposed the stupid policy above.
The thing here is that the combination of letters, number, capitals and special characters is almost irrelevant, the most secure password is random, entirely random. I am still using a random letter combination I got generated for me by Geocities when I had my first webpage over 12 years ago. Sure, mathmatically it is probably trivial for a random generator to exhaustively guess it, most personal computers can do 1 billion+ calculations a second. But the point is it ain’t that likely! Just don’t use a simple dictionary word like “idiot” or “password” and you are probably in good shape.
I also love how secure it is that we are typing in a password that no one is supposed to know, but it can tell you “how strong” it is, meaning somewhere your password characters are analyzed. How is that different than me saying “psst, tell me your password 1 character at a time and I’ll tell you if you need more numbers or capitals, but don’t worry, my mind will forget it immediately”.
And of course this is where post its come in. The problem is not writing your password down, it is writing it down in the context of your computer and login. For instance:
Stupid: Writing your password in permanent ink on your monitor
Bad: Writing your password down and placing it in the top right drawer at the office
Less Bad: Writing it on the birthday square of your mother in a day planner you keep with you that has no reference to what that random word could mean or what login is associated with it.
Even better. Hiding it in a tattoo on your ass, written backwards and upside down. Of course you’d have 10 of them and have to re-design it every 3 months….
Writing a random word and placing it in a random location is not a bad idea at all! In fact if anything it’s a safeguard in case someone needs access to your data!

Locking all of your secrets behind a single alphanumeric combination is as logical as locking a door to a convertable or keeping your safe key hanging on the number dial. However in this day of technology we have to have something to allow us secured access to our information, and until we all scan our eyes, fingers and ass prints into a global database or want to prick our finger for DNA each time we want to read email, we are stuck with it. Be smart and just don’t fall into the trap and think that your security policies actually have as much bearing on security as they do on wasting your time. Oh and I know your mother’s maiden name and eye colour, so don’t use those as your “secret” questions.

www dot withdrawl dot com

Stoss — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:15:28 +0000

The other night I came home to no Internet. It appeared I could not get an IP address from my ISP. (un-geekly written: Internet had a booboo). I wanted to call the provider to tell them I was down, to make sure they were investigating, however I realized to do this I needed access to their website where their phone numbers were…

I was going to call my parents to catch up with them, but my VoIP phone needs Internet…

I wanted to write this blog entry, but… etc.

We are surrounded by Internet so much these days, that it is seemingly becoming almost a necessity of life. I tried calling an embassy the other day for information and their telephone line directed me to the website that contained the phone number I used to call them; very helpful.

While 84% of households in Canada and 74% in the USA had Internet in 2008, that is still beat by 90% of Iceland and 86% of Norway (like there is anything else to do in those countries anyway).

What else on this planet is as ubiquitous as the Internet? What else reaches so many generations and so many business verticals? Maybe driving? It is estimated that under 200 million Americans drive, so what’s that, 60%? That comes close. But then again, I have driven only a dozen times in 3 years. Which would you rather go without your car or your Internet?

With the web becoming more and more mobile, being connected is not only becoming easier, but it is becoming more inescapable. A new technology called MiFi is being advertised now in the USA. BUY THIS STOCK! This technology will be wanted by anyone who travels anywhere, ever! But this just goes to show how much we crave the Internet. We now have what is essentially a portable router to carry around so we never have to be disconnected anywhere a cellphone works, which these days is pretty much everywhere, except maybe anywhere North of Toronto or West of Thunder Bay.

The CEO of Google recently gave a speech to a group of University graduates where he told them to turn off their computers! And how rightfully so, except 5 years from now he’ll have to amend his statement to “Turn off your cellphones, toasters, coffee mugs, and iEngagementRings” in order for people to truly be disconnected.

What Hogwash…

Stoss — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:34:35 +0000

I mentioned briefly in my last post about the Swine Flu. And today I read that Air Transat and other airlines have suspended flights! Has this world gone mad?!

Swine Flu World Wide Stats

This picture was in the UK morning paper. Notice that the only place that has any deaths in it is Mexico? Yes, the US A just confirmed its first death this morning, but since I have been typing (According to word press 80 words), 43 people have died of cancer and 39 by communicable diseases! 152 deaths in 2 weeks in Mexico is not a significant number!

Now, please don’t take this as “Go out and lick sick people’s faces”, all I am saying is be reasonable! This is same problem i wrote about in “Tazed and Confused“, people don’t understand reasonable precaution versus gross over-reaction!

I am flying in the next coming weeks to Canada (13 cases), the US (65) & Germany (3). And now for my favourite part: Math!

Country	Population (mil)	Percentage Affected
Canada	35	3.4×10^-7%
USA	307	2.1×10^-7%
Germany	83	3.6×10^-8%

So, statistically 0% of the population. Last year globally 1600 people died by falling out of bed. Including 450 people in the US. At that rate the Swine Flu would have to be in action in the US for 1 death every 2 weeks for about 17 years!

I’ll take my chances.

Editor’s note: I just read another article which said the “US death” was actually a Mexican boy in the US. If this is true, are we really counting a death on US soil as a “US death”?

Direction of Anger

Stoss — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:11:41 +0000

Many of you have probably heard about the young girl Tori from Woodstock, Ontario who has recently been kidnapped. I feel so sorry for the parents and family of this child. She has been missing more than a week and I am sure none of you reading this, nor I writing it, can imagine the state of affairs around this town and the involved parties.

But this entry is not about her or her family. This blog is about the knowledge-less, Monday-morning-quarterbacks who are directing their anger at a senseless crime towards the Woodstock and Provincial Police.

I am tired of reading “An Amber Alert should have been issued within hours of her being away”, “She was always abducted, never missing” etc. The lead investigator of this case even had to take time away from investigating to tell everyone that this was just terminology! As he stated: The process of finding a child, whether decalred missing or abducted is the same! “A rose by any other name…” if you will. Media obsession and factless opinions has caused people to focus not on the important part here “A little girl is missing”, but on who to blame for her not being found (yet). I refuse to quote the commentary I have read over the past week. Needless to say it focused on lazy cops and scrutiny of a not-fully-publicized case.

So I did some research so I could speak to these people directly:

First off, Tori does not meet the criteria for an Amber alert. Taken directly from the Amber Alert website as criteria for issuing an Amber Alert: “There is sufficient descriptive information of child, captor, or captor’s vehicle to issue an alert”. In this case we have a blurry photo of a person in a white jacket, who by all accounts is walking beside the girl, not necessarily “with her”. Whether this is right or wrong, I am not making a statement.

Secondly, and this is the painful part, of all abductions by a non-family member in 2007 only 17% were recovered. This is a very sad statistic, but what I mean to indicate here is that an Amber Alert is not a golden ticket, so stop praising it like it’s the miracle panacea we’ve been striving for!

The senselessness of blaming the police for not solving a crime in the time of a CSI episode is beyond me. Place the anger where it belongs: On the deranged men and women who perform these acts. Fight for tougher sentencing, a loop-hole free legal system etc.

Fact: The man who admitted to murdering my Uncle got less than 1 year in jail. This is not due to lazy cops, it is due to the fact that a criminal who is caught gets time taken off any sentence if he is “forced” to stay in jail during the trail. We award criminals for having to wait to be tried and sentenced!

Fact: The person who killed my 2 cousins is still at large 15 years later. I do not blame police, I blame our justice system for not allowing police to charge the man they know did it without further evidence. The case remains open.

Don’t fight the battles you think you can win (ie. taking fighters of your safety to court à la the BC taser inquiry), fight the battles worth fighting. That is the only way change will be made.

Tori, I wish you well and hope for a safe reunion for you and your family.

A bright idea!

Stoss — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:46:57 +0000

Sometimes I get to work before anyone else, not because I am overly keen, but I live an 8 minute walk away… Pretty hard to blame traffic.

When I do this I do not turn on the 57 fluorescent lights that line our ceiling so I can sit at my desk in the very back of the office and work. The morning sun is usually enough light for me to find my seat and turn on my computer.

I have been doing this for 3 years and yet my coworkers are constantly surprised that I am sitting in the dark! Is it such a novelty for me to not want to bombard my eyes with blue-tinged, glowing chemicals at 8:30am?

On this note of turning lights off, recently “Earth Hour” seems to be deemed, by the media at least, a success. But really… Was this event really a success?

I was in a meeting the same day as Earth Hour occurred. We came into the room turned out the lights so that we could view the projector and held the entirety of the meeting in the darkened room. When the meeting was done, we got up to leave and the host of the meeting turned the room lights back on and closed the door to the now empty room. Why? What is our obsession with having everything lit up to its fullest potential? I walk through cities at night and see rows of 50+ story buildings with every floor brightly shining into the night! Even if there is some one on every floor, is it necessary that every single light be on? The linked Wiki page says the TO saw a 15% decrease in electricity consumption during that hour. Now I am no expert on energy, but if all I had to do to decrease consumption by 15% was shut a light switch off for one hour, and energy is a big concern for me, can’t this be done every night of the year?!

As my former roommates know I do tend to prefer darkness, probably my inner geek coming out, but I don’t think it is this preference that makes me think that Earth Hour (note the highlight) is a ridiculous concept. It is the fact that turning off a light when a room is empty is common sense that makes me come to this conclusion! All throughout Europe they have sensors that turn off hallways lights in hotels and business when empty, and turn on lights as soon as doors open. Even our office building in England has that, and we are a small building. These are not expensive tools, and according to Earth Hour, can save 10s to 100s of MWs every hour!

Regardless, you have to admit that organizing a global project to save sporadic amounts of energy for one hour in 88 out of 195 countries is not an efficient way to tackle this problem. Declared success or not, the real problem Earth Hour was trying to address wasn’t even scratched. How can you make the smallest dent in a problem by changing your behaviour 0.01% of the time (1 hour out of an entire year). Let’s put it this way: I want to lose weight using exercise. Using the Earth Hour Methodology® I only need to exercise 1.15 minutes in a week. Sounds good to me, but how many health experts would advocate that as a solution?

Look, I am not an environmentalist. I try to apply common sense to my daily life. Don’t throw wrappers on the ground, reuse shopping bags, use reusable containers for leftovers etc. So before the environmentalists say I am dismissing the effectiveness of the awareness Earth Hour spread, all I am saying is: Take all the effort you put into Earth Hour; The viral Tweets and Facebook groups, the banners, the government lobbying and put that towards a longer term solution and the Earth would benefit more.

BTW: This is all assuming that the Earth benefits from this… But that is another blog entry

A View from the Street

Stoss — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 11:58:13 +0000

As was my view in this entry of my blog, I can now provide even further proof of this ridiculous world we live in.

Google Street View has recently come under fire when trying to photograph a specific town in England.

Now the camera has been used by the public for about 100 years. Over those years there have been some drastic changes that now have evolved into digital pictures. Pictures that don’t physically exist, but that can be immediately transferred around the world. This evolved into Google Street View: The ability to see, given a postal code, an area in pictures.

Every single article I have ever read on this topic includes some form of this quote:

But it has been accused of invading people’s right to privacy. Those left embarrassed include customers filmed leaving sex shops and a man caught being sick in the street.

In fact some articles even claim that divorces have been filed, which of course seems really ridiculous…

What the people in this particular village are now discovering is the same phenomenon that I spoke to before: By making a scene you are in the end screwing yourself over. Also known as the Streisand Effect.

Google Street View is not an invasion of privacy. Why? Privacy is the ability to keep things about you private to you or a group of people. The front of your house is not a private matter. I am willing to concede that the ability to view a streamlined picture of an entire street could be used for evil, but in the same token so can phone books! Millions of telemarketers use phone books to call you every single day. All a phone book is is a collection of every phone number alphabetically for a town. All Street View is is a collection of house fronts for a village in the order they appear on the street!

All technologies have the ability to be used for undesirable purposes. Do you think it is a coincidence that when you are listed as single on Facebook ads for singles in your area appear in the toolbar? No! This site is data mining what you upload to try and entice you to buy something. 20 years ago a company would spend millions on researching people to figure out who was single, what age range some one was in, what their favourite movies are, and now we are voluntarily typing that data into an international database!? For Christ’s sake there are marketing people who have wet dreams about this sort of thing!

CCTV is all over the UK. I am on camera every single day. There are people everyday being caught coming out of sex shops, vomiting in the streets and yet someone taking a static, let me repeat, STATIC photo of your house is an invasion of privacy? Are you kidding me? I walk past houses everyday, I see though the front windows and sometimes see a family having dinner, sometimes see the tv on. Is it really private knowledge that people eat dinner and watch tv? Hell, a friend once told me she was coming home from work and her neighbour had the blinds open watching hardcore porn!

The bottom line here is that irrationality and un-education about a technology or a cause makes the situation worse. If all these people did was read Google’s Policy, they could perfectly quietly ask to not have their pictures on the site, and Google will comply as several hundred people have done and no one would have known. (Coincidentally, just as you can do with the phone book)

Unfortunately my house is not on Google Street View, so I cannot show you my lovely flat and let you invade my “privacy”.

Tazed and Confused

Stoss — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:01:48 +0000

Many of you may have heard about the trial of the mounties in the taser death of some nut at an airport. I don’t want to minimize a death in anyway, and I feel for his family and friends, but many words have been thrown around about these officers: “knee-jerk reaction”, “impulse acting”, “instinctual” etc. and all I can think of is “Wait… What?!”

These are police officers we are talking about! In most cases all they have is a knee-jerk reaction time, or a split second to make a very difficult decision. We are literally listening to a group of Monday morning quarterbacks tell us what “They would have done” and that is absolute bullshit. I have never faced a situation where a person was directly threatening my life or the life of others around me (although perhaps I should get myself in those situations, according to Die Hard 4, Transformers and most action movies all I have to do to get the hot chick is save the world), but I can certainly say that my frame of mine would not be the same as having to make a decision about über-stressful work. Sure, hitting send on an email to an executive with the word “fuck” in it isn’t smart, but it isn’t a mistake that is going to kill me!

In the same regard, an actress recently died while skiing. A headline in the UK from this tragedy: “Natasha refuses £6 helmet”, are you kidding me?! A woman has died and before the dust settles on her grave we are starting to say that “helmet action is overdue”? The article I linked even says that 2 people who died (of the VAST 3 he talks about) were wearing helmets and still died! Dying is a risk of being MORTAL it is what makes life so much fun to live! if there wasn’t a fear of dying the X-games wouldn’t exist!

Everyday people die from smoking and car accidents, and yet we legally sell cigarettes and hand out driver’s licenses to anyone who wants them, but 1 famous woman dies and someone decides it’s time that helmets be mandated for skiing, what happens when someone dies after that law is passed? Is the next logical step to wrap all people everywhere in styrofoam?

We are so bent on saving everyone, that we forget what rational safety is.

Skiing has been around since over 1000 years! How could we have survived that sport for so long if helmets are mandatory for it?

Taser’s have been around for 35 years, and we are just now realizing that people can be injured by injecting them with electricity?!

Wake up people, death is inevitable and no bylaw or government mandate will solve that.

Few see anything wrong

Stoss — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 18:54:58 +0000

As always I have an opinion: The recent Virginia situation as before when this has occurred is being brought out to be a sign of the decline of society. This is because it is easy to point to a moron with a gun and blame him for all the fear in the world.

What you never hear is that the decline of society is the cause, not the affect. And this is where I step in.

We now live in a world where a 16 yearold girl with her tits popping out of her waterbra can talk on one cell while txting on a another and last night was rammed harder than King George’s 12th century castle during the crusades by the highschool quarterback who eats E for breakfast alongside a 6-pack of fine 3% beer and a picture of the American flag which he gives the finger to for 3 hours a day. And few see anything wrong with that.

We now live a society where anyone (as the shooter did) can purchase a Glock and 50 rounds of ammunition and have it described by the store owner as “an unremarkable purchase”. And few see anything wrong with that.

We also live in a society where dozens of twisted, murderous Hollywood movies gross billions of dollars each year and yet the shooter now has two “twisted plays” he wrote posted on the internet as “proof” that he was psychotic. And few see anything wrong with that.

And, we live in a society where you shoot 32 people and CNN does 24-hour coverage of the “ongoing updates” including: What colour his toothbrush was, the MacDonald’s employee who served him a Big Mac just minutes before the shooting and the climax of the story: The frowny face he used on MSN the night before to end his conversation with his German penpal. This guy got exactly what he craved: attention. And few see anything wrong with that.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not in anyway condoning or rationalizing shooting 32 people, but to have the chief of police and president of Virginia Tech stand on national TV and say that the shooter “was a loner” is just a sign that they would rather polish the knobs of a self-righteous group of spoiled brats and dismiss the sociopath as a nobody, loser, than address the fact that there is a large societal problem here.

Can stupidity be stopped? Of course not! And to think otherwise, is to disillusion yourself like the majority of the western world. It isn’t the fact we can stop it, it is the fact that we need to acknowledge it that is my concern. I have said it a million times, you cannot legislate against stupidity. It is impossible. If someone wants to do something dumb, whether it be to shove fireworks up their ass and light them, or kick a dog in front of a bus or shoot 32 people for no reason… they WILL. It is not a question of if, it is a question of when.

Stop feeding the fire with your insistence that only “loners” are capable of this type of massacre! This was a stupid, stupid act. In a society where we can accept drugs, alcohol, glorified media, depraved sex, horror and destruction as daily things that occur, do not try and convince me that a “loner” who was mad at his ex-girlfriend is the cause for decline in our society.

Recent Events

Stoss — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 00:13:03 +0000

Typically I write about derivitives of personal thoughts and conversations, however, in light of recent events, I will combine random thoughts with actually reality.
DISCLAIMER: Facts may be changed, twisted, diluted or exaggerated in order to make this more entertaining…. If you want news spell Stoss with a C and two N’s.

Shedden has recently become a famous place for what the news says is one of the largest mass murders in Canada. People look at this as a bad thing. I disagree. I think the fact that one of the largest mass murders in Canada is represented by 8 people being popped gangsta’ style in the middle of nowhere, is a good thing. In Detroit, that’s a Wednesday…
Now, in 2 years on Jeopardy when the answer is “Rhubarb capital of Ontario” and someone says “What is Shedden?”, they aren’t actually asking, they know!
Now, I am not “all for” dumping bodies in woods, however ya gotta admit, if you had dead bodies lying around in your backyard, it’s easier than digging a hole…

This weekend was also Easter. I am not sure what is worse; believing that a giant bunny hops around delivering chocolate to kids or believing it happens on the weekend Jesus rose from the dead…. As most of you know, I am not a very religious person, however, I do know my Bible stories, and at no time during Holy Week was Jesus ever given chocolate. He was given stones, but that was in a different manner….

Social Commentary

Stoss — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 01:06:13 +0000

I have to comment on this article, because it shows a LOT of what is wrong with society.

I am not sure if you followed this story, basically because I have no idea who “you” are, since you are sitting at a computer looking at this at any time and in any place.. So regardless, here is the Reader’s Digest version:
Morgan Spurlock (of SuperSize Me fame) was asked (NOTE: Asked) to give a talk to a group of Highschool students about his experiences.
Upon arrival to the school, the school administrators asked him not to bad mouth McDonald’s because someone on their board own’s one. This in my mind is absurd! The only reason why this man has the little amount of fame he has is because of his research into how crappy fast food is! When he refused, he became the bad guy.
Then during the lecture, he reffered to himself as retarded, and insinuated that the highschool teachers smoke pot.
Two points here:

He is retarded! Anyone who injects that much McDonald’s into his body, without some sort of torture being threatened upon him, has to be! This is not an insult to the mentally handicapped people, this is an illustration of how freaking STUPID Morgan Spurlock is!
I dunno about you, but I think many of my highschool teacher’s smoked pot, and if they didn’t they sure as hell should have!

Because of his comments, he had to post the above mentioned article as an apology. Now I 100% agree with his decision to not apologize for the words, but explain that they were not meant as hurtful. He was hired to entertain. Making derogatory remarks IS entertainment, just ask Hollywood… Will & Grace made a sitcom out of that concept.

Some of the comments to his entry are from parents not even in the same country as him saying how ashamed he should be! (oh yeah, he said “Fuck” as well, b/c we all know that is the devil’s tongue speaking)…

Does anyone over 30 REMEMBER highschool? You used to mock the fat kid, the ugly kid, the stupid kid! And yes I mean you, the one reading this who I have no clue who you are! It’s a generaization that ACTUALLY works! Oh yeah, and I bet most of you once, just once, dropped an F-bomb!

The kids of the school wrote in some of those comments how they were not offended and how they thought he was great, and everyone else was taking this too far… these are 16 year olds being more rational than the 45 yearolds teaching them! The principal actually called them immature for laughing at such trash humour! TRASH HUMOUR! Turn on MTV! Listen to 50 cent! Morgan is a fucking saint compared the crap these kids are into!

It boggles my mind that rational people can be so irrational about a man who isn’t even famous! He is like Subway Jarrod’s evil twin! These two have the combined influence on society as a Canadian flee has on weather patterns in China! The only reason I heard about this is b/c of the uproar! Not b/c of the original comments! These parents are furthering the evil they are trying to defeat by making it more public!

People are starting to go insane. That is the only possible explanation. I hope there isn’t an insane gene that turns on inside me when I have highschool-age kids, because if I am considered sane now, you guys better watch the hell out!