Back in February I visited my parents. One of the things I brought back from them was a double-CD containing Red Hat Linux 3.0.3 of 1996 vintage. I also brought other neat memorabilia from my youth, but for various reasons they were forgotten in the chaos surrounding me.

Until five minutes ago, when I found this little tidbit from years gone. Excuse the poor image-quality as I don’t have a scanner and the only digital camera I have access to right now is the one in my cellphone.

Here’s a translation done by yours truly for those who are linguistically impaired:

Local rates to INTERNET!

* Monthly Fee 100 kronor
* Hourly rate 5 kronor/hour 8AM-6PM, rest of the time no charge
* Setup fee 120 kronor
* Free support by phone
* The first 15 charge-hours are complimentary…
* And we never charge more than 300 kronor per month!

This way you’ll avoid unpleasant surprise if you happen to be connected an hour or so longer than you had planned, and you don’t have to be afraid to call us if you have any questions! Mailbox and homepage is included.

For companies wishing to be seen on the World Wide Web we also offer a so-called WWW-hotel where you can host your pages at a very reasonable cost.

The above prices are not including VAT.

Call for more information.

Communique

Currently US$1 is about equal to 6 swedish kronor. That’s todays currency values as well, I don’t know what things were like back whenever I collected this clipping.

I’ve gotten a lot of questions and complaints. Most of them are of the “I don’t know how to do this/I’m too lazy to do it/What is XMPP anyway”-variety, and a few have been of the harsher “How dare you abandon our fantastic friendship, you must continue using MSN”-variety.

To all of you: There’s no going back for me. I don’t trust proprietary protocols any longer. I’ve been lazy for too many years, but now there’s a worthwhile open alternative - and with built-in encryption.

So, here’s a FAQ of sorts to answer some common questions I get:

I don’t want to change IM!

Well, that’s not really a question. But no one is forcing you. You can install any XMPP/Jabber-client alongside your regular choice of MSN or ICQ-client. They will work just fine, you’ll just need to keep track of an extra piece of software.

How difficult is it to use XMPP instead?

At first it’s a little confusing since anyone can setup a server anywhere. XMPP is not controlled by one entity, it’s more like email but for instant messaging and chat. Think of your Jabber-name as your adress on the internet, and then the server you’re connected to talks to all the other XMPP-servers out there. It’s completely decentralized, unlike MSN or ICQ or whatever who has one point of failure.

Can I keep my existing MSN/ICQ-accounts?

Sure. You can either use them through a transport or use a messenger-client with support for multiple simultaneous protocols. Under Windows there’s a good one called Miranda IM which handles multiple protocols. Linux users have Pidgin (which is also available for Windows, but I feel Miranda might be a more powerful choice) and Mac users can use Adium.

A transport works a bit differently, and not all XMPP-servers provide them. A transport is a gateway where you instruct the XMPP-server to connect to ICQ/MSN and then displays your contacts transparently in your Jabber-client. This means you only need to connect using one client yet can still use MSN or whatever. I’m using a transport right now.

Are there drawbacks when using a transport?

Unfortunately yes. Since MSN and ICQ are proprietary protocols there’s no open documentation for them. That means developers of transports have to reverse-engineer (techspeak for “guess”) how the protocols work. That means that some or many of the protocols functions won’t work. For example incoming filetransfers using a MSN-transport is quite flaky. In short: your mileage may vary when using a transport. If you want to be sure I’d recommend using a client with multiple protocol-support instead.

Why are you doing this, more details?

I’m tired of proprietary protocols. This is mostly a philosophical issue rather than a practical one, but I’m deeply tired of proprietary software and am trying to move away from it. Proprietary software is in my eyes legacy-software and has no real long-term future. The same goes for proprietary protocols.

The second major factor in my doing this is encryption. I’m transitioning to encrypting quite a lot of my online-presence and while encryption can be bolted onto proprietary protocols through third-party solutions it’s still not good enough in my opinion. XMPP was designed from the ground-up to have encryption, unlike MSN or ICQ where it’s an afterthought from people not even affiliated with the protocol. Also, the bolt-on solutions are essentially incompatible between different clients, meaning the people you talk to have to have the EXACT same software as you do to be able to encrypt the stream. XMPPs encryption works regardless of client.

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If there are any further questions, feel free to leave a comment or send an email.

In the light of recent events I’ll be switching completely to a different messaging-protocol. I’ve been mulling this over before, but have been too much of a coward to make a definitive decision.

No more though. Come Friday, June 27th, 2008 I will completely stop using MSN and ICQ in favor of a non-proprietary protocol. If you want to continue chatting with me after then (and by extension if you basically want to continue being my friend) then you will simply have to adapt.

My weapon of choice in the future will be the so-called “Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol” aka XMPP, formerly known as Jabber. There’s a multitude of clients available. Under Linux I recommend Pidgin and under Windows I feel Pandion is a nice and clean client. Mac users do good in choosing Adium.

My decision for this switch is two-fold:

1) As mentioned earlier I have grown weary of proprietary chat-protocols. I just don’t trust them much any more.
2) After the FRA-law was voted through I’ve become more interested in encryption, and most XMPP-servers come with encryption enabled by default. Jabber.se which is the server I use does.

If you’re too much of a chicken to completely give up your proprietary protocols though, you can either use a transport or use a client with multi-capability.

As for me, after Friday I will only be accessible for chat through XMPP. I’m isecore@jabber.se so give me a holler. While XMPP isn’t a perfect protocol, at least it’s free as in freedom.

Yeah, I’ve never really liked MSN, but today I finally felt I had enough. 9 out of 10 messages that I try to send never get sent due to “timeouts” or some other cockamamie bullshit Microsoft cooks up.

So, basically, MSN (or Windows Live Messenger or whatever the hell Microsoft has rebranded it as today) is dead to me. I never liked it, I only used it for those people who I consider friends and who insisted on using this braindead protocol for communication. I don’t really care if it’s that I use a third-party client or not, as far as I’m concerned that shouldn’t be an issue and if Microsoft are (once again) trying to abuse their property to lock users in, then I’m not having any of that.

So, if you contact me and get no reply: it’s not me. It’s Microsofts mess of an IM-protocol. Get me on ICQ or give me an old-fashioned phonecall. Either is preferable.

In the future I’m going to merge all my IM to Jabber, but that’ll be a while

There’s a lot of nutcases on the internet, and I just found one that made me laugh. I found this entry about the Songjiang Hotel being constructed in a former quarry. Down in the comments I found this gem from a mr “Michael J. Schmitz” who proclaimed that

LAST FALL WHEN I INVENTED THE TSUNAMI DESTROYER, MY EXPERIMENTS FOUND THE BEGINNING OF THE GLOBAL WARMING SOLUTION. http://www.inventube.com/blog/view/59/thetsunamidestroyer ON FEB 2/2008 I FOUND THE FULL SOLUTION TO DELETE GLOBAL WARMING NATURALLY. THEIRS A NATURAL MINERAL THAT HAS TO BE EXTRACTED AND PLACED IN QUANITY IN CERTAIN LOCATIONS AROUND THE PLANET FOR NATURE TO RETURN TO NORMAL. IF YOU CHECK service@stumbleupon.com AND CHECK MY BLOG UNDER ooofox YOU’LL SEE THE FIRST STEP TO LOWERING THE OCEANS TO OPEN UP CERTAIN AREAS FOR PLACING THE EXTRACTED MINERAL FROM 12 SPECIFIC COUNTRIES. IT DEPENDS ON ALL COASTAL NATIONS IF YOU WANT TO DELETE GLOBAL WARMING AND IT WILL ALSO DEPEND ON THE 12 SPECIFIC COUNTRIES TO GIVE THEIR AUTHORIZATIONS. IT WILL ALSO TAKE ALOT OF MONEY.

I chuckled a bit at it and then decided to see what Google turned up about this character. It didn’t really turn up anything of substance, except for more equally lunatic comments on various blogs and news-postings.

He posted this on another blog

I HAVE FOUND A WAY TO SOLVE GLOBAL WARMING, SO THAT AT THE END OF MY PLAN NATURE WILL RETURN TO NORMAL. I’M ALSO A DISASTER SOLUTIONIST= I SOLVE DISASTERS. I HAVE PROVEN SOLUTIONS FOR FIRE, FLOODS, FRESH WATER. I’M IN A PROCESS OF SOLVING EARTHQUAKES FOR DRY LAND. I ALSO HAVE A EXPERIMENT THAT CAN WITH STAND HEAT, COLD, COLLISION AND IF I USED IT TO BUILD A HOUSE, IT WOULD ONLY COST ME $5,000.00. I PLAN TO SELL MY DISASTER PLANS FOR $35,000.00 SO THAT EVERYONE WILL BE ABLE TO PROTECT THEMSELVES FROM THESE ABNORMAL DISASTERS, ALSO THE MONEY IS FOR GLOBAL WARMING. I NEED 12 COUNTRIES OF MY CHOICE WITH THEIR PERMISSION TO USE THEIR LAND FOR THIS PROJECT. IN RETURN EACH COUNTRY WILL RECIEVE EXTRA DRY PROPERTY TO EXPAND THEIR COUNTRY (ON COAST ONLY) I WILL HIRE THEIR PEOPLE, TRAIN ETC. TO HELP THEIR ECONOMY. FRESH WATER FOR 100 YEARS, MORE ABUNDANT FOOD AVAILABLE AND NORMAL NATURE BACK ON COURSE. MY GOAL IN LIFE IS SOLVING AND INVENTING MY NAME IS M.J.SCHMITZ 22001 125TH.ST.E. BONNEYLAKE, WASHINGTON STATE 98391 USA. IF INTERESTED IN BUYING MY DISASTER PLANS AND HELPING TO AFFORD TO SOLVE GLOBAL WARMING. THANK YOU.

When the blog-owner let the comment stay, remarking that it was hilarious spam, mr Michael J. Schmitz proved that he actually was a person and not a bot by replying:

ONLY SPAM I HAVE IS FOOD THAT COMES IN A CAN= SQUARE CAN. MY BLOG IS TRUE I HAVE FOUND A WAY TO DELETE GLOBAL WARMING. YEARS AGO I WAS LOOKING FOR A WAY TO DESTROY TORNADOS, BUT THEY WERE TOO ELUSIVE SO I PUT IT ON HURRICANES INFACT== A SCOOP FOR YOU AND I MAY STILL HAVE THE PAPERWORK. IN THE YEAR 2000 I SENT ALL GOVERNORS A PROPOSITION TO STOP HURRICANES FROM TOUCHING LAND FOR ONE MILLION DOLLARS FROM TEXAS TO CONNICUTT. THEY IGNORED IT INCLUDING THE TEXAS AND FLORIDA GOV.’S BUSH’S. LOUISIANNA GOVERNOR CUSSED ME OUT ON THE PHONE FOR TRYING TO CHARGE HIM A MILLION TO SAVE HIS PEOPLE BEING THAT HIS STATE IS 3 FEET BELOW SEA-LEVEL.= ALL IS TRUE.

This guy makes MegaHAL sound like an Oxford graduate. Absolutely hilarious.

Has anyone seen a movie called “Interstate 60″ produced in 2002, featuring among other people Gary Oldman, Christopher Lloyd and James Marsden? If you haven’t, then I strongly recommend finding it and watching it. For some reason it never got a big marketing campaign behind it, but it’s a real gem of a film.

There might be some minor spoilers down below, in case

Either way, there’s this excellent supporting character that shows up at one point in the film, name of Bob Cody. Played brilliantly by Chris Cooper, this character will almost always stay in my mind. He’s excellent, being a man who “says what he does and does what he says”. Essentially he’s a free-roaming cynic, and one of his pastimes is listening to the radio and loudly debunking what’s said on the same.

Example:

Woman on radio: The choice is clear. The Arion 620, the American-made car for the American driver.
Bob Cody: That’s a lie. The Arion engines are made in Japan.
Man on radio: Kill Signal, the movie everyone’s talking about, from Weber Films.
Bob Cody: [laughs] That’s another lie. We’re not talking about it.
Another man on radio: We’re the U.S. post office, and we care.
Bob Cody: Oh! That’s the biggest whopper of all.

Often I hear a Bob Cody inside of me. This is especially true whenever I see a commercial, and it’s unusual that I can contain my sarcasm about commercials and their claims. My friends and family know this well.

And all this yapping brings me to the point of this entry. There’s a company in Sweden called Viasat. The history behind the company is somewhat convoluted, essentially consisting of several different companies in various genres of business merging together over a period of some fifteen years. These days Viasat is one of the largest suppliers of satellite-television, but also maintains holdings in several of the major swedish TV-channels, as well as being the producer of the TV1000-network, one of the major premium movie-networks in Sweden. Essentially TV1000 is a swedish counterpart to HBO, but without the original productions. They broadcast movies and have no commercials, instead you subscribe to the service.

Viasat-channels are also broadcast via cable, in my case through Comhem which is probably the largest cable-TV supplier in Sweden. Me and Ann-Sofie pay for TV1000 since it’s a good way to keep track of movies, as well as being a good source for bored movie-watching in the middle of the night.

Whatever.

Viasat launched a service called Viasat On Demand a few months ago. I really haven’t checked it out until a few hours ago when I went to their homepage. Essentially it’s a video-on-demand service, you can rent movies over the internet and watch them. Nothing new here, it’s all been done before. The reason for my curiosity was that since me and Ann-Sofie already subscribe to TV1000 I was wondering if we could get a free account at this webservice. It had been implied through the commercials, so I got to wondering.

Those thoughts came to an abrupt halt when I saw the technical requirements. Translated from Swedish they are:

* PC with Windows XP or better.
* Internet Explorer 6 or better.
* Flash Player 8 or better.
* Windows Media Player 10 or better.
* A minimum of 1mbit/s broadband connection. 2mbit/s recommended.
* An updated WMP with individualization for DRM-encryption.
* The clock on your computer may not deviate more than 15 minutes from the clock on our servers.
* You must allow cookies.

This means if you’re running anything except 100% Microsoft-products or Microsoft OS’s you’re shit out of luck. It’s absolutely pathetic in my opinion. Why not just put a slogan on the front page saying “Screw you if you’re not a braindead lemming”?

The irony is even more obvious considering that Viasat On Demands slogan translates to “Entertainment On Your Conditions”. When I read this I heard Bob Cody inside of me shouting:

“Liars! That’s not entertainment on my conditions!”

Fairly surprising the Pirate Bay founders/owners were today charged in Swedish courts. I’ve read the articles and the whole thing is just nonsense in my opinion.

First we have Henrik Pontén who does his absolute best at spreading FUD in every direction possible. He claims to have read the mail-traffic from within The Pirate Bay and says that their primary goal is to make money off of copyright-infringement. Sure, I agree that TPB probably generates a lot of money - but I doubt that money goes to anything other than servers and bandwidth. It ain’t cheap running servers, and TPB eats a lot of bandwidth which ironically costs a lot of money. This doesn’t deter mr Pontén though, and he keeps yapping about the scene. He still refuses to realize that -like I mentioned in my previous posting- the scene is a hydra. No matter how many heads you cut off, new ones will replace the old heads.

I’m always fascinated by how politicians and lobbyists never understand the things they try to strangle. So many politicians think the Internet is like the phone-company: one centrally controlled being. The internet couldn’t be farther from the truth. The same goes for the scene - Pontén seems to really believe that it can be squashed. He also acts as if it’s something new. Mr Pontén, let me tell you something: I’m just an amateur here, but even I know that the scene is almost as old as I am. It predates general consumer internet-access, and has been going just fine since the early 80’s at the very least. You’re not the first person to believe that he can silence that, and you won’t be the last to fail either.

This whole process is of dubious ethics in my opinion. I read somewhere that the case-file of “evidence” against TPB consists of more than four-thousand pages of legal gibberish. Normally most legal documents detailing an entire case seldom exceeds five-hundred pages. Many people speculate that this is in order to overwhelm the pirates with nonsense, and instead of doing a fair and balanced investigation simply drowning them in legal jargon.

No, this is a complete railroad-job against TPB. It was ordered by powerful mediamafia-interests, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people high up in Swedish government and the legal-system has been corrupted by greed.

More links: Here, here, here and here.

UPDATE: Swedish IDG has a bunch of articles related to this travesty. Read them, but keep in mind that IDG probably has veiled interest in seeing the mediamafia win this one.

I whore love extensions. dildo Really, smut I do. Extensions, plugins, addons, whatever you call dildo it - I like prick them.

Firefox dildo is excellent in that dildo department, it can be extended damn like dildo crazy. My own Firefox honkey is wank like a tank. I’m whore running whore at least fifty extensions cunt right now, and every now and then bitch I prick delete the dildo ones I whore don’t use shit regularly and add in new ones that might come in bitch handy.

I’ve seen a lot of pretty useless extensions bastard - eggtimers, bitch todo-notes, that kind of cunt stuff. But now I’ve smut found the absolutely most useless of them all. The tourettes syndrome extension. It wank will give your text input fields the complete feel of tourettes, except without the tics whore and hooting.

Which I suppose would be rather tricky pussy to ass implement properly…

How it works? It will insert random vulgarities whore every two-three words or so, foreskin and if you need pussy a whore more vulgar version you honkey can foreskin get the one that inserts vulgarities ever other foreskin word. Guaranteed to make someone upset!

Check it whore out in pussy case you have too many piss friends!

Or: What Really Irks Me With All The Shopping And Comparison Sites Out There

I got a fairly fat wad of cash for christmas. Part of it has been stowed away for future purposes, but I’m considering investing some of it in a new case for my computer. Yes, it’s weird spending money on a computer that I swore long ago not to spend any money on, but I’m getting really annoyed by the HX-08 that I have now, and I don’t have enough money to buy a new computer. This has been my main case for 7+ years, and it’s getting a bit long in the tooth now.

Despite my modifications it now fails at being the decent case it used to be. I don’t mind that it’s big, very heavy (16 kg EMPTY!) or almost painfully beige. That doesn’t concern me. What does concern me is that despite my modifications to the cooling system it’s now running quite hot due to bad layout and too many harddrives. It was fairly cool when I only had one drive in it, but two drives makes it a bit toastier in there, and this means that I need to run the fans a little too fast for my sensitive hearing. This is not helped by the fact that the office here at home is noticeably warmer than the rest of the apartment, due to all the electronics in here. So, the cooling of my computer is becoming painfully noisy. The HX-08 was kickass a few years ago, and it’s held up quite nicely over the years.

But the faults are starting to show now. It’s just not very efficiently designed, and my needs are different these days. I don’t need five full-size 5 1/4″ drive bays. I need two at most! And the interior layout of the HX-08 isn’t really doing the trick any more. Even when this thing was new I wondered who in the hell decided that most harddrives should reside above the PSU, and thus needing extremely long cables since this is a full-size case, meaning it’s quite huge. The drive-cooling also leaves a lot to be desired, and all these years I’ve been too lazy to make the needed modifications myself.

The end result none the less is that my computer case essentially has become a Hummer. It looks huge, looks like it has a ton of space inside and even though it does have a lot of space, most of it is wasted and you can’t seat a lot of people in it despite it weighing four tons and taking up two lanes.

And this leads me to the search that I’ve been doing for years now. The search for the ultimate case. These days, I don’t care about it being the ultimate case any more, just being quiet and more adequate for my needs than my huge honking HX-08. That’s more than enough. A few years ago I had a huge jonesing for an Antec P-180 and such. These days I don’t care about that. I want something that doesn’t cost my first-born child yet isn’t a complete hazard either.

In fact, the Antec NSK-6580 seems perfect. It’s not complete crap, yet it doesn’t cost a fortune. Plus, you get a seemingly decent PSU with it. I like the sound of that, since I know from experience that Antec PSU’s are fairly reliable and decently quiet. Even though my current Enermax (of 2002 vintage) is fairly quiet it’s getting noisier due to the fans wearing out.

So, the NSK-6580 is most likely to be the candidate for investment.

This in turn leads me to the irritation that I experience. I’m very fond of the web and the Internet. I use it several hours every day, in fact it’s very uncommon for me to not do something net-related most of the days. I’ve been “online” (whatever the heck that means) since around 1995. This all means I’m fairly net-savvy and know my way around a search engine.

I’ve been wasting the better part of an hour now trying to find a decent review of the NSK-6580 to get some kind of confirmation that this actually is a decent buy. The Antec-page is of course not very informative, according to them it’s the best thing to happen humanity since sliced bread, and not only is it a computer-case, it’s a cure for everything that’s wrong with the world as we know it. Hallelujah. Yeah, not exactly objective opinions from the makers of the case.

Fire up google, search for “Antec NSK-6580 review” and what do we find? Page after page hawking the services of shopping-comparison sites and retailers that carry it. Not one single review from any serious tech-page anywhere. In fact, I’ve gone through the first five pages and nothing except shopping-bots and assorted similar crap. I’ve given up on finding a review-site that has tested the damn thing. I’m tired of trying to tweak my search with different phrases and still finding the same useless crap.

I remember not too long ago, maybe two years, when that same search-phrase would have given me what I looked for in the first two or three results. I’m sure they’re in there somewhere, but they’re lost beyond Page Number Whatever and I’ll never find them. Why? Because the commercial shopping-sites spend A LOT of money on SEO and making sure they end up in the top results. They spend huge amounts of money hiring really smart people and companies to use the whole spectrum of techniques to make sure they’re at the top.

Which means me as a consumer is square out of luck. I don’t want to wade through page after page of shopping-sites who want me to go to them and use their service all the while clicking their ads and what-not. This means that the genuine tech-sites who have done good reviews of consumer-goods are buried beneath a thick layer of commercialized crud.

And people wonder why the web and the ‘net has become a cold and hostile place.

I’ll tell you why. Because of the sites who only care about making money, and has no concern about burying other sites in the waste created by that process.

Well, I resisted it for the longest of times but now I’ve fallen for the temptation. Yep, I’ve gotten myself a Facebook-account now as well. I don’t really see it as anything else than yet another online community, but I have plenty of time and the curiosity about the place finally won over my cynicism surrounding hyped websites.

At least it’s a lot better than the putrid swamp that is Myspace. Wild horses couldn’t drag me into that place…