Category: Internet

Fight fair and come out swinging

Man sells 15 year old boy’s Christmas present – A Guitar Hero – on Ebay – to make a point about his pot smoking.

First, let me be the blue sky girl and say that in a perfect world, parents would own their f*cking children, and there’d be none of this goddamned tripe about how kids have rights, except the right to have such comforts as their parents can afford, like a sumptuously appointed privy, 7 hours of meaningful work a day to do, and more after you graduate from public school, and as many character building beatings as any adult within earshot with both energy and inclination may feel like doling out.  What the hell was this kid thinking?  That his wretched habit would not have consequences?  That his taste in friends would win him his father’s praise and a buss on both cheeks?  The son we may dismiss for the bone deep stupidity of youth which is his daily portion, hardly enhanced by a good lacing of BC Bud.
As for the dad, what a simp!  Advertising that he’d parked his cojones squarely over Satan’s beartrap of commercialism and me-too-ism?   No; he should have put the Guitar Hero quietly in the Christmas family hamper at work so they could fence the horrid piece of earsplitting devilishness for crack, and beaten the shit out of his kid.  Why make a public spectacle of himself in this shameful and moronic fashion?  This is not a day in which I am proud to be a Canuckistani parent, I’m telling you.

I think the dad should go RIGHT OUT and buy that kid a Bible, and clean out his room except for a night table and a drawer to put the Bible in.  I think the dad should ground that 15 year old parasite until he leaves home, which given the storm of freakish publicity (the father is not named, but you can bet your ass 10 minutes on myspace would turn the cowardly, short sighted bastard up) should be long about spring thaw.

In short, these two have broken the two cardinal rules of the Canadian father-son dyad!  The son GOT CAUGHT.  The father ADVERTISED IT.  May they both find a Chick-pamphlet corner of hell to scream at each other in for the rest of eternity.

Allegra has spoken.

The unexpected losses

Update to this post. 

 

I’ve been pondering the Storm Worm.  Since I’ve been thinking about a piece of software that is a ‘contiguous and not quite self-aware artificial intelligence’ for the last year or so as part of a fiction, finding out about the Storm Worm has made me very uneasy.

My first problem is direct and unequivocal – personally unpleasant.  I make a living from the inertnests.  The VOIP lines that carry the customer voices to me are dependent on the existence and functioning of the internet, which is beginning to look like another Ponzi scheme.  The contact management software is also web based.  Even if by some miracle we were able to switch back to ‘land lines’ after the internet crashes – and it will, and more than once – driving so many voices back to copper will put international telephony into turmoil.

My second problem is unpleasant for my children. Who will benefit from international telephony and the internet crashing?

Think about it.

Essentially, everybody who hates science; everybody who hates freedom; the buggy whip media; and the richest people on earth, who will be insulated from the worst of it. Theocrats, neo-cons, the super-rich and newspapers all have something in common now; imagine if they were able to bring porn, citizen journalism and science to its knees in a single stroke; imagine if various governments in the world were able to profit immediately thereby by locking up anybody they felt like with impunity because there was no one to report on it and the hysteria that surrounded the collapse of the internet made all geeks suspect.

I should have been name Cassandra, so filled am I with dire predictions.  It may be the Russian Mafia behind it… and I’d bet money that’s so – but like 9/11 more than one interest group will profit by the collapse of the internet.

What on earth can I do about it? Is there a silver lining?

Yet more awesome linkypoos

Finn Family Moominaddams
Cheese off your colleagues
Well, they have to live SOMEwhere.
Toenails and Forensics
Bigfoot video is 40…. I still think it’s a guy in a two part suit.  Why no feet?  Doesn’t the ‘rippling’ look like a costume folding?  Why the line right along the midsection?
If animals could blog….
These mushrooms are probably fake, but great for Halloween.
A GREAT language blog, hours of fun here.
Honest to God, I thought the kid would make an exit there and then.

Fiction and non fiction

I am in the process of writing a near future / SF novel which contains a kind of computer virus called (in the story) a nukeworm.

Then I read this.

Would anybody care to speculate what Phase II is likely to be?  In my story, a politically (as in wanting to change behavior of certain individuals) not criminally (as in MONEY) motivated group of hackers uses the nukeworm to harvest social networking information.  In real life…… ai-yi.