If you get all of your news from media outlets in the US, you're totally missing out. Podcast clients like Miro make it not only possible, but very easy, and very convenient, to get on-demand news from around the world. You pick and choose your content sources, and episodes just download automatically. I see content every day that I would never, ever see from the US media. One example from just a few minutes ago is this two-part interview between Josh Rushing and Michael Mullen about the US military strategy in Afghanistan. Just ask yourself while you watch: "Would anyone in the American mainstream media ever dare ask questions like this?" I will list the RSS URLs of some of my content picks in case you're interested in checking it out for yourself:

• Al Jazeera English 
• Feed URL
• Nationality: Qatari
• Description: One of the three largest English-language news channels worldwide.  It's a 24-hour English-language news and current affairs TV channel headquartered in Doha, Qatar.
• Russia Today
• Feed URL
• Nationality: Russian
• Description: Also known as RT, is a globally broadcast English-language news channel from Russia, and the first all-digital Russian TV channel.
• Press TV
• Feed URL
• Nationality: Iranian
• Description: An English language international television news channel, based in Tehran.  It has 26 international correspondents and more than 500 staff around the world.

These are just three out of about thirty content sources that I receive video from daily.  If you have one that you feel should be listed here, let me know.  Or, if you want to see my list of Technology or Libertarian content sources, let me know.

Cursing can have a “pain-lessening effect,” according to research from the school of psychology at Britain’s Keele University

Click here for the article, and thanks to Jason C. for the link!

Michael Moore has announced that his latest documentary will take on the free market — that is, the freedom to produce, buy, or sell whatever you want, to whomever you want, at whatever prices you want. This is pure evil, of course. Not because it benefits everyone involved, but because it makes some people wealthy. And, according to Michael, that’s a big problem for America.

Says Moore:

“The wealthy, at some point, decided they didn’t have enough wealth. They wanted more — a lot more. So they systematically set about to fleece the American people out of their hard-earned money. Now, why would they do this? That is what I seek to discover in this movie.”

This is just dumb. As John Stossel begins to point out, it’s not the private sector that is “fleec[ing] the American people out of their hard-earned money,” it’s the government. Who robs Americans of half of their hard-earned income at gun point every single year? Who counterfeits endlessly to the point of causing massive and widespread malinvestment, job losses, inflation, and depressions? It’s certainly not the private sector. And it certainly has nothing to do with Capitalism.

(Note: This post was authored for the LRC Blog.)

The Cult of Scientology has taken over Google Adsense.

Right now, Google offers no way to prevent the ads for this cult from showing up all over your website. However, they say that in the meantime, they’re developing a category filtering tool.

It’s not available to the public yet, so in the meantime, you might consider Google’s competitor, the Yahoo! Publisher Network.

Okay, I’ve to get this off my chest. The way GNOME’s NetworkManager determines whether it’s connected to the internet is so fucking dumb. Now that several apps rely on the online/offline status from NetworkManager, this causes all kinds of really annoying problems that often occur at the most inconvenient times.

Right now, NetworkManager just determines whether it has made a physical connection, and if it has, it thinks it’s on the internet, and if it hasn’t it assumes there’s no connection available.

So, there are to problems with this:

* Offline-but-not-really – When I’m in the car, I have two options for connecting to my phone for internet access. I can either turn my phone into a WiFi Ad-Hoc node, and use it as a gateway for my laptop. Or, I can use Bluetooth to create a PAN and do basically the same thing. Either way, I have to set up the connection from the command line on my laptop with one or two commands. Of course, when I do this, NetworkManager has no knowledge of the connection and all of my GNOME apps that rely on it think there is no internet connection. This gets really, really old.

* Online-but-not-really – So the second problem is captive portals. For example, I’m typing this from a Panera Bread. I turned on my laptop, NetworkManager saw the open WiFi connection, and it automatically connected. Great, except NetworkManager now thinks it has a working internet connection… but it doesn’t, because I have to pop open a browser window and hit “Agree” before I actually have internet access.

The solution to this is so fucking easy… just ping! Each second, or every three or five seconds, NetworkManager should just try to ping a host like google.com… if you get a response, you’re online. This way, it doesn’t matter how you’re connected, or whether or not there’s a captive portal in the way… Why is this so hard?

Do you have a need to do a search and replace on an entire column in your MySQL database?

I had to do this recently due to a domain change.  Here's the easy way:

UPDATE tablename SET tablefield = replace(tablefield,"findstring","replacestring");

For example, when the shell service I started moved from silenceisdefeat.com to silenceisdefeat.org, I issued the following command to change all of the links in my blog posts:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content,"silenceisdefeat.org","silenceisdefeat.com");

You can do this via the command line, or using a tool like PHPMyAdmin by clicking on the SQL tab.  If you're running wp-cache on your WordPress blog, don't forget to clear your cache to see the change take effect.

A quote from the Department of Homeland Security website:

We're also actively monitoring travelers at our land, sea, and air ports. We're watching them for signs of illness, and we have appropriate protocols in place to deal with those who are sick. Precautions are being taken to protect travelers and border personnel. Anyone exhibiting symptoms is being referred to an isolation room where they can be evaluated by a public health official before proceeding to their destruction.

 The site has now been changed to read, "before proceeding to their destination."  However, a footnote still exists that references the typo and includes the original phrasiology.  Man, what a scary typo.

Over the years I've encountered many instances in which I've had to search through thousands of fonts in order to figure out which one was used in a graphic. Those days are over thanks to these two great resources:

1. WhatTheFont – This site actually allows you to upload a sample graphic and then tries to do the matching automatically.  Very cool!  The only problem is that the sample needs to be at least 100 pixels in height for it to work with high accuracy.
2. Identifont – This site uses a completely different approach — the process of elimination.  If you don't have a high-resolution sample and don't mind answering a few questions, this is the way to go.

While we're on the subject, FontyPython is a really cool font manager for Linux that allows you to browse through tons of fonts before installing them.  This is really convenient if you happen to be pirating large font packs while looking for one of the fonts you identified using the sites listed above.  If you know of similar programs for Mac or Windows, feel free to leave a comment.

This is mostly a note-to-self, so if you don’t have any interest in encrypted VoIP, you might as well go ahead and skip over this blog post.

First, some background information… I had an interesting phone conversation with Adam Panagia, the manager of AT&T’s Global Fraud department. From a conference bridge, we placed an outbound call to his cell phone without passing ANI to see how easy it would be for him to trace the call. He immediately answered and knew who was calling, which was pretty impressive. As it turns out, Adam was already listening to the conference call by sitting on the line of one of the parties on the conference. We know this was the case because after Adam hung up his cell phone and kept speaking in the conference, the “Talking” light on the conference web interface for one of the other parties would illuminate. In other words, Adam was speaking through the phone line of someone else who was on the conference call.

Adam, who works for AT&T can intercept and even speak on behalf of practically any long distance phone call with ease. In this case, he was intercepting a call in real-time that was originating from a Verizon land line. So, the carrier matters not. Obviously he’s not the only one who can do this. It goes without saying that there are likely dozens, if not hundreds, of government employees who can do the same thing.

So, if you’re interested maintaining privacy, you only have two options: Bypass the PSTN altogether or use encryption.

Why not do both?

The software released by the Zfone Project, which was founded by the creator of PGP, is of particular interest to me. Two-party phone calls can easily be accomplished by using Zfone on both ends with a VoIP softphone.

But what about conference calls? That’s a little bit more complicated, but it seems that the ZRTP patch for Asterisk could be used to allow each party to place an encrypted call to an Asterisk box, where a conference could be mixed.

But who wants to be limited to softphones? In theory, you don’t have to be. Sure, a company called TiVi makes software for cell phones that allows you to place encrypted VoIP calls over WiFi, but what about the analog phones everyone is already used to? I have an idea as to how to accomplish this: Get a tiny motherboard like a Mini-ITX or Nano-ITX, which can be had for cheap. Get a $10 voice modem. Install Asterisk with the ZRTP patch, and configure it to use the voice modem as an FXO port… and Bingo! You have a cheap homemade ATA with full encryption support.

I was going to go back and add links for all the acronyms, but since this was a very casual note-to-self, and since I have other work I need to be doing, you’ll just have to Google it if you see something you don’t recognize.