As somebody who was fast-tracked to the position of Master Blogger, I realise that I probably owe something back to the all of the normal bloggers out there. I have been pondering what I can give back but I had been uninspired. Until now, that is!

Having read a few random blogs in my research it has become very apparent that what most bloggers really want to do is to kill themselves. There seems to be a common theme about how miserable their lives are and how they want to end it all so it struck me that what they need is a simple, quick and painless suicide device that requires no bravery to use and can be built for quite a small amount of money from easily obtainable parts.

Inspired, hey?  It is! Honestly… Most means of killing yourself require a large leap of faith and may well fail leaving the person too much of a cabbage to even class as a Myspace user. My new patent free “MICHAEL’S DEATH MACHINE” (sorry but the upper-case is required) won’t fail and has the advantage that if timed correctly the user can even write a final blog entry whilst hooked up to it.

I am building my prototype now. This is somewhat delayed by the fact that the prototype is already costing a small fortune because needs to have safety mechanisms and measuring systems built in so that I don’t accidentally kill myself during testing. I don’t want to be providing shonky goods here! As a favour to Nature, Humanity and the Internet Community as a whole I think I should make this device as effective as possible.

Watch This Space, Bloggers!

There is a worrying thing happening at the moment. People are giving money to Pirate Bay so that they can buy Sealand. If you don’t know what Sealand or Pirate Bay is, then have a look here: http://buysealand.com/

The theory is that if Pirate Bay buys Sealand then a whole pile of operations varying from the mere dodgy to the sheer criminal can be run from there and nobody can touch them. So far they have raised $15,327 from donations. They state that if they can’t afford Sealand (I believe Sealand are looking at something in the region of half a billion dollars) they will buy another small island and declare independence.

Now I am a fan of Pirate Bay. If they want to give me a means of downloading episodes of Battlestar Galactica and Veronica Mars when I miss them on telly then I am all for this. If at the same time they are pissing off big companies that makes the whole thing even more fun. My problem isn’t with Pirate Bay, it is with the utter legal naivety and idioacy of these people. They seem to inhabit a world where they can own a nation state and commit illegal acts from it with no consequence. At the same time, there are wars going in in both Afganistan and Iraq against reghimes that supposedly committed illegal acts thinking they could do whatever they wanted.

Simply put; if they buy Sealand and start pissing off Sony or Murdoch, there is nothing stopping either of them getting a gunboat and blowing the thing out of the water for ever. They flaunt French Law? It’s not that hard a target for a single Exocet and those things sting! Why don’t they see this simple fact? They want to break the law and yet they want the law to protect them. Nobody out there is going to help them if someone decides they don’t like them; they are a large open target with “ABUSE ME BIG BOY” painted in neon on the side.

As I said, I rather like Pirate Bay and I’d prefer not to see it sunk for ever letting another pile of people with guns and money win. The legality of Sealand as an independent state is also very dodgy and even more so if it is sold. Nobody has ever taken that much time disputing it because previously it was just some random nutter waving a flag; as soon as they start to actually piss people off, methinks they will need a lot more than $15,327 to pay those legal fees. I have spent a good deal of my life and my money in court on issues like this over the years, it’s neither fun nor fruitful and the bastards nearly always win.

The other thing I find mildly amusing is the idiots who are giving them money. Fifteen years ago I wrote an article about the rot that sets in when things like this start asking for money - You can find it at http://lorry.org/Docs/life.cycle if you are curious. What is going to happen with all this money? Will it just end up being wasted on buying a pile of rock somewhere? It’s all very odd. Still they are Pirates, maybe it is all an elaborate scheme to relieve naive tossers of their money. If so then I wish them the best of luck!

The High Council of Master Bloggers and Online Mass Debating rejected my essay on the basis that it didn’t say what they expected to hear from a Master Blogger. Apparently, my point of view was completely at odds with the rest of the Mass Debating Society’s.

On the other hand, I pointed out that since I owned their website, they should reconsider and as such, I have been reinstated with full honours. I may now consider myself a Master Blogger and do my worst.

Ha!

So… To get my Master Blogger status back, I have been ordered to write some garbage on privacy, on-line security and freedom of speech. I am not really in the mood to make this a well written essay but this is for a weblog so it hardly needs to be Pulitzer material. I may rewrite it one day to make it read better.

I am a big fan of freedom, the right not to be watched 24 hours a day and the right to say pretty much what I want without being locked up for it. This is the reason I am leaving the UK; if you Americans think you have it bad then think again and look what is happening here too. I also think that I know something about on-line security and “Big Brother Monitoring”. I know this because I used to do it.

The problem with all of this is that I am somewhat divided in what I actually believe.

Generally speaking, I couldn’t care less personally about “The State” watching my Internet usage. I don’t do anything interesting enough for them to have any interest in me. Last week I looked up how they went from Nitro-Glycerine to Dynamite and I really didn’t see the need to hide my address when I did so, a few days later I ordered a new shemagh from a large Islamic web site. I think if anyone was monitoring my IRC usage they’d know I was fundamentally opposed to the hanging of Saddam and I have been chatting a lot lately about various socially subversive things that in Orwell’s 1984 would have had my testicles wired up to a flashbulb. The thing is, I am one of 60 odd million people in the UK and the amount of computing power to pick me out and profile me from this sort of usage is far too large for me to assume they are using it. The profile would also be quite wrong, I am not a terrist, I am a dissenter so I have to assume there is some sense there that would make the distinction. There are not enough people employed by the security services for them not to have. Ultimately this whole digital monitoring has to come down to them putting feet on the streets and actually physically watching the people they profile and with the money that our security services pay, this just aint going to happen.

I think it is pretty reasonable for me to make this assumption. As I said I used to design monitoring and profiling systems to watch people doing the things that they did. I worked for one of the biggest military contractors in the world putting in systems to watch the staff. Did we do this because we were convinced that they were selling secrets? Sabotaging systems? Moving satellites with laser death rays off course to blow up Greenwich Observatory? Nope - We did it because the police caught an employee running a kiddie porn operation from company machines and we found ourselves under a duty to do something about it. When we had all the monitoring in place, it’s not like we even did much with it, there were occasional keyword scans and weird activity matches but generally speaking they picked up nothing and there was never even a hint of the higher management or the government being interested in looking at the records we kept. Usually I would be cynical and say “Well the government could just be looking at the traffic elsewhere” but in this case, they couldn’t, the paths were all on hellishly encrypted satellite links; it wasn’t going to happen.

At another company I worked for, we decided to run some test scenarios with the police to see how quickly we could catch somebody if a nasty situation happened. A rather well meaning but somewhat naive member of senior staff there refused to let us put monitoring on their dial up systems which would have made life a little easier for us. All we did was to shift the monitoring systems upstream to the exchange, where he had no access to stop us monitoring whatever we wanted. The upshot of this was that the systems people who actually cared about the rights of users lost control of the monitoring that happened and was going to happen anyway. There is a certain futility in non-co-operation at this level, there are plenty of ways to skin the proverbial cat.

Way back in the early 90’s I was working on the Mitnick case and spotted that he was monitoring everything I did on-line. Every email, every private chat, all my IRC usage, all my secret passwords to other machines. The lot. I had to take a choice as to whether to let him know I had spotted it or to just carry on and watch him, watching me so he could be kept somewhere monitorable that he assumed we didn’t know about. It was an interesting decision and I looked into my past to help me make this choice. I had spent years watching other people; reading all their mails, watching their extra-marital affairs, their various mildly illicit activities and their crap attempts to get various people into bed. For the first month or so, I admit, it was kind of interesting and odd, realising you know things about people they have no idea you know but then, after a while, it stops being a soap opera and starts becoming rather tedious. You start to realise that most people do and say the same things and have the same sort of lives – Most people have secrets that they think are devastatingly personal but most people don’t see in very real terms that just about everybody else has the same secrets. I would hope that if someone is in the position to watch people in his way officially they’d also be the sort of person good at keeping secrets so this knowledge brings no advantages either, if anything, quite the opposite since it makes it a lot harder to talk to some people you know far too much about. Based on this experience, I decided I would have no real issues with letting a Sociopathic Hacker and all the other people who got to read the logs later watch everything I did; I would probably bore him to death well before he would ever find anything useful he could use. It got to the point where after a few weeks I just ignored his watching me altogether. He did at one point try to use some stuff against me but it didn’t do him much good. I never quite forgot I was being watched to the point of giving away anything useful and as I have said before, although some stuff I do on-line may at the time seem really personal, in the grand scheme of the world, it’s not.

Maybe this is the reason I am confused about all the modern obsession with normally sane people wanting all sorts of levels of military grade encryption on the messenger they use to chat to their mum or friends. Although most people will never believe me, very few people really do much on-line that hasn’t been seen a zillion times before. The perceived subversion isn’t really very subversive at all. Having an affair, buying a few grammes of cocaine, chatting with your mate about the latest insurance fraud you are committing; none of it is very interesting, people do it every day and the police aren’t the people who are monitoring your Internets. The Security Services have a lot more things to do than to be interested in general crime and they don’t pass much on to the police unless it is in the National Interest. There are a couple of things to remember, one is that if the police suddenly started to have access to all this extra criminal intelligence they’d have to build hundreds of new prisons and quadruple the size of the force, another is that they’d have to provide an evidence trail in court, and it is very hard to create valid evidence trails from monitored data, trust me, I have spent years trying. There’s also the problem that they may well have to admit to being able to gather intelligence in ways that people don’t know about. Think back to World War 2 and all the things that were allowed to happen just to cover up the fact that the Security Services had broken Enigma, nothing much has changed.

People are watching your Internet usage, I am not arguing that but I will argue that 99.999% of the population have nothing much to worry about from the people who are doing it. The threats on the Internet are not from “The State” they are from organised crime rings and people who prey on the stupidity of people in general. No amount of encryption and things will stop this in fact, the perception that you are safe because of it tends to make people let down their guard and be more and more open to slipping up. If governments want to monitor you, they will, and you won’t be able to do much about it at all. I have watched hundreds of naive people talking about how secure they were and it’s amazing that the more secure people think they are, the easier they tend to be to get evidence on.

I am losing the will to live now, so I will end this here and maybe tidy this up. I don’t think it is quite what the question asked, but then, I don’t care.

Sardonic though this journal may be, it still has my name attached to it so I am not going to take that dangerous step of posting online test results into it. That aside, I spotted an odd looking online test in Sherrie’s journal yesterday called “Do You Want the Terrorists to Win” and scored 96%.

Later on that day, in the mistaken belief that I still know anything at all about anything, I was asked to write an opinion on 9/11 with regard to all of the conspiracy theories. Did I think they had any merit? Did I think there was a government coverup?

Reading over my reply it struck me that contrary to what the test said I was becoming something of a woolly liberal, hell, I am even fence sitting on the spelling of the word wooly now (both are valid).

In the true spirit of oversharing, I shall include a copy of the summary. It’s not edited for publication so it’s not been tidied up much. It’s a bloody journal, live with it!

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I don’t have a single theory but if I had to write one I would say that my conclusion is that the Whitehouse are probably as confused as we are. They know somebody did it and they have more military intelligence than we do but they still rely on the civilian intelligence they get from the newspapers and broadcast news networks for much of their information. Given that this more often than not conflicts with what they say, things must get quite complicated for the poor dears.

After the attacks happened they quickly came up with a party line that al Qaeda did it; even though there are many questions about whether al Qaeda even existed as an organisation at the time. This conclusion was made on the basis of the quickest evidence found, in response to a nation that was baying for somebody to blame and for somebody to strike back at. Having committed to this belief, the Whitehouse had take appropriate action and wars were started which at the time were good for the Presidency, for many large US businesses and for a perceived majority of the American people. By committing to this conclusion they closed the doors on other avenues of investigation which may well be the biggest mistake of this whole affair. Picking al Qaeda made everything simple because they were the one culprit who were never going to deny, argue, or in any way challenge the accusations.

It would be surprising if many people at the Whitehouse actually believe all of their initial conclusions are completely true any more. Some of the conspiracy theories have some bits of merit and equal amounts of bunkum and there is confusion and bad evidence everywhere. At this point in time, unless somebody who actually planned or organised the act ever comes forward, the whole thing is now buried under so much misinformation, conflicting politics and business interests that we will almost certainly never know what really happened.

It is very easy to blame Bush and the Whitehouse but in a country and culture where two people knowing a secret is two people too many, it is almost inconceivable that this was an operation planned, controlled and covered up by them. In Financial Crime 101 the first thing taught is to “Follow The Money”. In this case the money trails simply don’t lead to the government. Big business interests, arms manufacturers, oil companies, the Nation of Israel all fit the frame and religious or political extremists operate outside of normal financial interests so they end up as likely suspects too but in this case, however clever I think Bush may be in secret, I don’t really think he pushed too many buttons that day.
Many truths are out there - Your choice is probably as valid as any.

It is 7.30am and I have just realised that I didn’t post that I was going to bed a few hours ago at just after 4am. Now I am a Master Blogger I realise that it is vital that I record such events with accuracy so I am feeling pretty crappy about all of this. As it happened, I just went to bed and read Sue Townsend’s “Ghost Children” but admitting that makes me realise that now I will have to write a review of it; quote endlessley from it and all that sort of thing.

All I can say is that it is jolly hard work being a blogger, I am amazed that us Master Bloggers have time for anything else at all!

It is now 7.37 and I am going to have scrambled eggs for breakfast.

I am learning about “blogging” so that I can become a blog expert; after all, that’s why I started this isn’t it? Well ok, it’s not but that’s beside the point.

See, I had a problem, when I went to bed last night, was I meant to report this in my blog so that my 2 avid readers would know I had gone? Was I meant to report my getting up in the morning too? I could have used my mobile phone to report that I had finished reading my book in bed, and was about to go to sleep although that would have annoyed the cat since I would have had to move to find the phone.

It seems that a lot of people now have voice blogs. These sound fun, exciting and useful if I am going to be duty bound to report every time I visit the toilet, I can just phone from the loo and leave the entry then and there instead of reporting it later. Always being one to adopt new technology face on I looked up these voice logs and found this fascinating article. It seems that voice blogging is bad because you have to listen to everything and that is boring - Text bloggers are more interesting and don’t ramble as much so that is ok. I get a little bit confused in this article that they seem to be using the phrase “Voice Blogging” to mean talking. They report going round to some old person’s house who then “voice blogged” at them for ages, over tea and they didn’t like that; apparently they would have preferred him to write it all down so that they could read it in their own time and skip all the boring bits that they weren’t interested in. See! Aren’t blogs amazing, they save all that pointless listening. I am amazed I didn’t take them up so much earlier.

Never fear though people. I am learning! And don’t worry, I won’t be taking up voice blogging, I wouldn’t want to waste your time. I shall write about my ablutions in long hand, like all the rest of the cool bloggers do.

I wonder… Would theiving a “Theftproof Wallet” from a shop; just to make an ironic point, be morally wrong?

I learned a useful thing this week when researching the origin of Quince Cheese. It all rests on the definition of the word cheese, which includes

Cheese:
A mass of pomace, or ground apples, pressed together in the form of a cheese.

From now on, every time I fuck up my jam making and make it so hard that you can barely stick a knife into it, I will declare it to be cheese. I have 5 kilogrammes of plum cheese in the cupboard, I am happy about this.

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Apart from the rather cryptic “She made me tea.” posted at 06:43 on August the 18th, 2003 and a prior posting on March the 20th, 2002 at 01:29 which simply said “Poo” (my considered review of Livejournal, I believe) - This is the only thing I ever really wrote in my previous weblog. I figured I should move it over to here anyway.