Even though I make use of Amazon ads on my site, I have no ethical problem with usage of Adblock Plus, nor can I understand “ethics” regarding the right to have two eyes. Some claim using Adblock Plus is “theft” based on logic even more ridiculous than the RIAA’s claim that either obtaining or purchasing music from RIAA-unapproved sources is “theft”.

And if Adblock Plus or its users find a way to bypass my tutorial – well, then, it’s my responsibility to come up with a new one.

Anyway, there are several ways for Web site owners using affiliate programs to reach users of Adblock Plus. This tutorial will focus on the Amazon affiliate program. NOTE: Be sure to follow your terms of use when taking into account this tutorial.

#1. HYPERLINKING YOUR CONTENT

By reading the introductory notes above, you’ve already seen this in action ) Here is an example of a post in a personal-journal-type blog:

I went to Stuart’s house yesterday, and watched Beavis and Butt-Head Do America. It was very funny, so I ordered it on Amazon.com. It was listed as “Temporarily out of stock” though, and I couldn’t wait. Then I found out both "Do America" and Volume 1 of the Mike Judge Collection were on sale at Wal-Mart, and decided to buy it there instead.

The code for the text links is generated from “Link to this page” on the Amazon Associates Link bar.

The referral link to the front page, used when I say “Amazon”, is:

http://www.amazon.com/?tag=xcoflco-20

(replace “xcoflo-20″ with your referral tag )

WARNING! Be sure not to over-do this as it makes your site look shady and will lower your rankings in the search engines.

This page has some tips on linking to certain things (comments, reviews, single products, etc…)

#2. TEXT UNDER ADS WITH SAME LINK

Adblock Plus users will see blotches of whitespace where your ads should be. However, you can simply place text under the ad to and hyperlink it to the same place.

For example:

Place the phrase “Buy Video Games at Amazon.com”, highlight it bold (or strong), and hyperlink it with the same link given in the banner:

Buy Video Games at Amazon.com

#3. SELF-HOST RELATED IMAGE

If you make use of Amazon’s Product Link banners, as I do on certain posts, Adblock Plus will remove the whole thing.

However, if you could combine a Referral Link with a self-hosted image, the advertising will still reach the visitor.

Take, for instance, the ad below for Sean Hannity’s Conservative Victory: Defeating Obama’s Radical Agenda:

An Adblock Plus user will not see that ad at all.

Here I have uploaded an image of the book, taken from Google Images, and scaled it down for page loading time using GIMP:

Buy from Amazon.com

I hope you enjoyed these tips, and remember, when it comes to your web site, the visitor is always right!

Transcript available at The Corbett Report

(The blackout on the X-Cop Fly Company blog started a few hours late for EST people such as myself, since the plugin I used here had a bug, and I could not upgrade to the fixed version until I woke up yesterday. Rogue Central @ coredumpcentral.org followed the full 8AM-8PM EST blackout.)

Why did I not announce this? Especially after posting material from Rogue Central @ coredumpcentral.org on the VOGONS forum just a few hours prior?

This was done deliberately. When you give the President dictatorial powers over the Internet, your business will just freeze. All financial transactions will be put on hold, including the ability to hire a lawyer. Already Obama has shut down thousands of domains using assumed nonexistent power. Many of these sites had a valid legal case, with Obama refusing to show any justification for his actions.

SOPA/PIPA is being sold in terms of how and when the MAFIAA will use it for copyright purposes. But the real issue is the amount of power given to the President over any business he feels like targeting, a further moving America away from capitalism and towards government-managed Hitler/Mussolini/FDR fascism. SOPA/PIPA enables the President to cut off any enterprise’s commercial activity (including hiring lawyers) and seize any property he wants.

SOPA/PIPA also subliminally targets Wikileaks-like organizations, since they often host copyrighted material as well as material exposing the fallibility of the governments of the world, and were subject to similar cutoffs from capitalism.

In other words, SOPA/PIPA gives dictatorial powers to one man. Obama has already seized banks, investments, and car companies, it’s only natural that he wants to seize the establishment’s biggest enemy, the Internet, and anything else he feels like seizing.

See these two articles and the podcast I appeared on regarding SOPA/PIPA’s non-piracy-related consequences:

• The Blacklist Bills Are Just Plain Silly
• Hussein Obama’s Upcoming Dictatorship: The Virtual World & The Physical World
• Podcast: SOPA, S. 1867, and the Police State

Again, remember that if SOPA/PIPA becomes law, all it takes is a single copyrighted sentence on a Web site, and any business in the country can be destroyed, anytime, anywhere, and forever.

Copyrights/Patents (Article I Section 8 ):

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

Relevant portions of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…

I have edited these comments into stand-alone original content for the site (as well as correcting a few spelling and wording errors) so that I may waive them CC0 1.0 Universal:

Copyright is Constitutional. The Constitution was an anti-free-market protectionist document from the start, even more so before the income tax allowed for increased free trade. The Bill of Rights was a bribe to bring in some of the more pro-Confederation states.

Everyone seems to be forgetting that the Founding Fathers’ copyright system was not a private property right, let alone one that enables seizure, breaking-and-entering, and extortion of businesses, but a 14-year grant, later extendable by an additional 14 years. And it only applied to “writers and inventors”. The closest thing to intellectual property at the time of the Founders was Crown Copyright, which they opposed and perverted into a business-centered protectionist grant rather than “protect the artist” Euro-tyranny. Ayn Rand brought in the “intellectual property” garbage, and sadly “free-market conservatives” accepted it as a super-property-right despite the previous 200 years of American history.

It doesn’t matter whether or not patents encouraged the Industrial Revolution. The Constitution was specifically designed to be anti-free-market. Mainly, providing a common currency for banking interests. The only free-market justification for our Constitution is that it’s much safer to leave it alone than to change it, given the welfare-warfare state as we know it today didn’t exist at the time it was written.

Presently, our ability to attain knowledge is threatened because said knowledge represents a threat to the state — not to “national security,” as is claimed, but to the legitimacy of the state itself. Julian Assange, through WikiLeaks, has made available to society a vast collection of information that undermines the state’s legitimacy. Assange cracked the government’s veil of benignity and brought into question the state’s tactics. His website undermines its moral authority.

WikiLeaks was only shut down for one day. The service found a new host, outside the immediate reach of the American government. Bureaucracy has been stumped by a new obstacle that, ironically, it helped to create (although the market let it flourish) — the Internet. Now it is the state that finds itself one step behind. Book burning has been rendered obsolete.

The Internet knows no borders, jurisdictions, or physical limitations. A server in Nigeria can be accessed from the United States. One simply has to look at the number of pirating websites seemingly immune to intellectual-property laws. This global network of information dispersion has made irrelevant the state’s tools of repression: How can a nation’s costume-sporting thugs effectively stop something that does not physically exist within their geographic jurisdiction? How can a government threaten with regulation an entity that operates outside its ability to enforce its laws? The state has been left behind.

True, governments have had some success censoring the Internet through security blocks and similar tactics, but just how effective these means have been is up for scrutiny. Even China’s vast army of “Internet police” has been ineffective at stopping the less technically challenged individuals from evading their firewalls.

More importantly, how many times has the government responded with force and failed? The recent events illustrate that government is losing and the market is winning.

We are above emulating the state’s tactics. The role of ideas has become so comprehensive that even government-empowered gangsters are susceptible once they realize just how ridiculous they have been made to look.

Bloody revolution is no longer with the times, because government’s armies are becoming more and more immaterial. As this WikiLeaks episode unfolds, and as government sows the seeds of its own humiliation, we will see government combated, not by force of arms, but by the supremacy of the market.

Read the full article

Or does it?

A whistleblower came forth and stated in a private e-mail, which OpenBSD leader Theo de Raadt published to encourage auditing and removing of the offending code:

My NDA with the FBI has recently expired, and I wanted to make you aware of the fact that the FBI implemented a number of backdoors and side channel key leaking mechanisms into the OCF, for the express purpose of monitoring the site to site VPN encryption system implemented by EOUSA, the parent organization to the FBI. Jason Wright and several other developers were responsible for those backdoors, and you would be well advised to review any and all code commits by Wright as well as the other developers he worked with originating from NETSEC.

This is also probably the reason why you lost your DARPA funding, they more than likely caught wind of the fact that those backdoors were present and didn’t want to create any derivative products based upon the same.

This is also why several inside FBI folks have been recently advocating the use of OpenBSD for VPN and firewalling implementations in virtualized environments, for example Scott Lowe is a well respected author in virtualization circles who also happens top [sic] be on the FBI payroll

You can read the OpenBSD mailing list post here. A less technical, easier-to-understand article is available on Hacking Expose.

I apologize to every reader of my blog for saying that OpenBSD was free of corporate and government taint. I also applaud Theo de Raadt’s publication of this whistleblowing, and hope that it will not only clean up BSD variants, but finally wake up the open-source sheep that unconditionally support every product, decision, and action connected to the Linux kernel team, the Free Software Foundation, and Google and get some serious reform done.

I’d love to see a new open-source OS in which:

• Donations from active developers only – all external funding is refused.
• BSD or similar permissive licensing is used, so that one will be free of the moneyed Free Software Foundation’s management decisions regarding future license versions. Even if “or at your option, any later version published by the Free Software Foundation” is taken out of the default template, changes in treaty and law (the reason for the GPLv3) would render the project legally stuck and thus still subject to the FSF’s management.
• In order to join the official development team, developers must sign a contract, swearing under penalty of perjury that they are not acting in the interest or on the payrolls of multinational corporations, tax-deductible nonprofits, governments and/or espionage.
• To counteract other distributions and operating systems which exploit the permissive licensing to engage in digital rights management or secret backdoors, the developers would “authorize” uses of the code which are “pure” and “free of corrupt influence”. If needed, the 3-clause “New BSD License” rather than the 2-clause “Simplified BSD License” could be used to prevent fraudulent endorsements.

Until then, assume every operating system and every distribution has been tampered with by the moneyed and powerful.

And that’s what I’ll do, under tags like “rant” and “journal”.

Woke up late and rushed to go somewhere. Had fun and came back. I’ll of course be voting tomorrow (later today – it’s 1 AM) and hopefully there’ll be great turnout. I just hope the Tea Party movement keeps going, even after 2012 (when Obama will lose

I honestly do not expect anything unusual from the upcoming Republican Congressmen and -women with regard to them being conservative or libertarian. Given that the neocons tainted Obama’s radical socialism and opposition to war, you can bet they’ll taint the Republicans again just as they did on 9/12/01. But we’ll see. All we can do is wait.

Think I’ll watch some videos and then go to bed. I did wake up late but am still tired, probably cause I went to bed very late. I might listen to college radio too. I started listening again after years, seems to now be just as top-down and commoditized as Clear Channel rather than college kids filling time slots with whatever they want. Though it isn’t always the case, there’s some feeling still left. But I doubt it will continue, too much money and power involved.

Iran’s terrorist president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad states the following about capitalism:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a U.N. General Assembly session on poverty this week that capitalism is on the verge of death and that it’s time for a new economic system.

“The discriminatory order of capitalism and the hegemonic approaches are facing defeat and are getting close to their end,” Ahmadinejad said at a summit meeting assessing progress on achieving U.N. goals to drastically reduce poverty by 2015.

“The undemocratic and unjust governance structures of the decision-making bodies in international economic and political fields are the reasons behind most of the plights today humanity is confronting,” he said, according to an English translation of his prepared remarks.

Hegemony and “the undemocratic and unjust governance structures of the decision-making bodies in international economic and political fields” are not capitalism. It is the linkage between government and business (Italian fascism) in which the wealthy control key institutions.

For example, NAFTA, WTO, the European Union, the UN, and the development of proposals such as “harmonizing” (forcing copyright laws to be exactly the same in all countries) and “the public’s right to know” (shutting down non-government-sanctioned news sources) are anything but capitalist. Despite hijacking the economic concept of “free trade”, which by definition means the absence of legislation and treaties, all require government legislation which is more friendly to corporations. This has nothing to do with free trade or capitalism, other than the pursuit of wealth.

And if one views the varying link between effort and pay as “discriminatory”, well then they’re right.

Bolivian President Evo Morales stated:

…it was jeopardizing the future of “Mother Earth.”

The claims that capitalism is bad for the environment is only true due to the fact that it is handled by legislation rather than the judicial system.

For example, a business-friendly environmental law from the EPA would create limits on releasing a pollutant. As this business would be following the law, a nearby neighborhood would be unable to challenge the sickness, except by trying to overturn the law in the federal court system (often a waste of time and money)

However, resorting to the judicial system would prevent this sort of intrusion and poisoning, forcing businesses to pay a fine and cease further activity in the region. As for out-of-court settlements, a parent would not be likely to sell out their dying children and relatives.

See this example of a Pennsylvania town filled with exploding tap water and “methane fog”, permitted due to a business-friendly federal environmental law which renders the state courts almost helpless.

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez also rejected the “global economic order, which continues to be an extremely unjust and plundering order that benefits rich countries.” The Venezuelan and Nicaraguan speakers raised similar complaints.

I assume this is referring to the pressuring of governments to accept pseudo-capitalist “free trade” treaties which force agribusiness/pharmaceutical-friendly patent laws, as well as the “nation-building” of Afghanistan and Iraq (which is also not capitalist, as the link to self-defense from these countries is weak if any). See this article about an neocon-penned Iraqi law forcing farmers to use “registered” (Monsanto-friendly and sterile) seeds.

If anything, capitalism is rising better than ever before, due to the use of the Internet to expose politicians’ past activities, videotape fraudulent news reports, spread classified documents, weaken copyright protection, and dig up laws and treaties the media doesn’t want you to know about and post them on blogs, as well as to organize protests and grassroots political campaigns. A past column from this blog describes this in detail.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor predicted Thursday that a case involving WikiLeaks would likely come before the court.

She said that the WikiLeaks “incident,” in which the group posted thousands of classified Afghanistan war documents online, “and others are going to provoke legislation that’s already being discussed in Congress, and so some of it is going to come up before [the Supreme Court.]“

When I read this, I recalled WikiLeaks’ claim that the New York Times was involved:

(Click images for full size.)

The New York Times has claimed involvement in the processing of these memos:

Again, here is the statement from Justice Sotomayor:

She said that the WikiLeaks “incident,” in which the group posted thousands of classified Afghanistan war documents online, “and others are going to provoke legislation that’s already being discussed in Congress, and so some of it is going to come up before [the Supreme Court.]“

Given that the New York Times has a strong left-wing bias, could this also be a pre-engineered vehicle by the Democratic Party to support a massive regulatory change in the Internet?

Keep in mind recent lobbying efforts for a “Drudge tax” on blogs to subsidize the newspaper industry, as well as changes in “fair use” laws so as to require a “copyright license” to quote news material, and proposed propaganda efforts claiming the mainstream media is a “reputable” “public service”.

“The power to tax is the power to destroy” -McCullock v. Maryland, 1819

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) won three critical exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anticircumvention provisions today, carving out new legal protections for consumers who modify their cell phones and artists who remix videos — people who, until now, could have been sued for their non-infringing or fair use activities.

The first of EFF’s three successful requests clarifies the legality of cell phone “jailbreaking” — software modifications that liberate iPhones and other handsets to run applications from sources other than those approved by the phone maker. More than a million iPhone owners are said to have “jailbroken” their handsets in order to change wireless providers or use applications obtained from sources other than Apple’s own iTunes “App Store,” and many more have expressed a desire to do so. But the threat of DMCA liability had previously endangered these customers and alternate applications stores.

On EFF’s request, the Librarian of Congress renewed a 2006 rule exempting cell phone unlocking so handsets can be used with other telecommunications carriers. Cell phone unlockers have been successfully sued under the DMCA, even though there is no copyright infringement involved in the unlocking.

EFF also won a groundbreaking new protection for video remix artists currently thriving on Internet sites like YouTube. The new rule holds that amateur creators do not violate the DMCA when they use short excerpts from DVDs in order to create new, noncommercial works for purposes of criticism or comment if they believe that circumvention is necessary to fulfill that purpose. Hollywood has historically taken the view that “ripping” DVDs is always a violation of the DMCA, no matter the purpose.

(note: this still does not give us back our VHS-era right to back up movies)
More information from Crooks & Liars

Three additional rights were also restored: the right to break copy protection when needed to test videogames for security flaws, old or obsolete “software dongles”, and (if no commercial solution exists) to make e-book readers more accessible to the disabled.

Pointing out the emperor has given a lap dance to special interests has resulted in things ranging from angry personal attacks to invented hacking reports to my ISP! But now, from talking to the same people, I think more and more people are starting to accept this as truth. It still doesn’t have mainstream acceptance, but I have a feeling it will be. I believe that Slackware Linux and the similar operating system OpenBSD are currently the least tainted with espionage and corporate interests. But Slackware Linux is still Linux, and OpenBSD isn’t very supported, though I don’t condone any corporate or government funding of any kind to OpenBSD, to maintain its purity and reputation.

I’m hoping that more people finally wake up and realize they have been ripped off and sold out by nonprofits which are no different than the corporate counterparts they supposedly oppose.

Rather than go on a standard political rant about this issue like any other blogger would, I thought I’d apply this to each amendment in the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution.

(Note that the content in this article may not apply to blogs hosted on major “community” sites such as Google and Myspace. Since they are run by major corporations, with Myspace owned by the parent company of Fox News, they may be subject to the same/similar issues as Twitter and Facebook.)

1st Amendment: No Establishment of Religion (basis for “Separation of Church and State”), Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Peaceful Assembly, Right to Petition the Government:
Blogs have empowered the people more than ever, as they expose media bias and blackouts, political scandals, and more corruption you would never find out about on TV or radio. Information about diverse religions and philosophy available on the Internet is discouraging many parents from vaccinating their children by temporarily changing their religion or claiming an exemption. Some religious issues reported by Media 1.0, such as sexual abuse issues in the Catholic Church, have been subject to further debate on blogs – for example, the role of the vow of celibacy required by most priests. Material critical of Islam, such as the movie Fitna and depictions of Muhammad, freely spreads through blogs, causing Islamic theocracies to play whack-a-mole, banning entire Web sites and threaten to execute their owners. As a means of news, blogs containing audio and video, such as embedded material uploaded onto YouTube, have enabled individuals to “broadcast”, regardless of archaic laws. Broadcast licensing was originally designed to prevent interference according to issues not present in the age of GPS, satellites, digital transmissions, and “simulcasting” (the ability to put multiple channels in a single frequency, such as with Digital TV and HD Radio). However, they eventually became a means of media control. It took many media blackouts for obscure anti-establishment politician Ron Paul to gain media exposure in 2008, and in the 2004 Democratic primaries an antitrust-minded man named Howard Dean was mocked out of the race over a pep rally. Many grassroots campaigns, spread via blogs, have been highly successful. The Internet has made it easy to send e-mails and faxes to Congressmen and -women, as well as make laws and transcripts available for full viewing.
What gives blogs the advantage with all of this over Twitter or Facebook is the fact that if you own or lease the hardware running your site, you have much more freedom, since the less contracts there are, and the more privacy rights you have (Facebook is notorious for a mysterious “selling out” on the importance of privacy rights some time ago), the freer you are.

2nd Amendment: Right to Bear Arms:
In a world of liberal and neo”conservative” media, true conservatives and libertarians have grown due to blogs. Efforts such as the “Ron Paul Revolution” presidential campaign of 2008, the successor group Campaign for Liberty, and Tea Party protests owe the Internet their success. In opposition to these efforts, bog-standard left-wing charges of “violent racists” and “angry white men” fly at innocent Republicans who now have a new opportunity to speak their mind. And unlike Twitter and Facebook, which respond to any one complaint by banning the user or material immediately, so-called “hate speech” and “harassment” accusations by the left-wing establishment can be resolved more easily and fairly with a hosting provider, even if similar bans are in their contracts.

3rd Amendment: No Quartering of Soldiers:
Many blogs, such as the anarcho-capitalist LewRockwell.com and Justin Raimondo’s Antiwar.com, frequently criticize wars, foreign policy measures, anti-terrorism laws, and the actions of the US military (in fact, LRC is banned from offices of US intelligence agencies). No longer are complaints about the military or government limited to our minds or homes – while none of us, whether criminal or peaceful, are anonymous to authorities in any way, blog pseudonyms enable us to publish all kinds of crazy ideological arguments without our families and friends even knowing. Again, Facebook and Twitter will shut anything “hate speech” down immediately.

4th Amendment: Search & Seizure, Warrants, Right to Privacy:
The establishment has grown very successful in defeating the protections of this amendment. Laws such as the Patriot Act have eroded this right, and social networks and search engines have become goldmines for both private industry and government agencies. Facebook and Twitter are no exception – those sites store backups of your actions even if you delete your account. Web hosts have their own privacy policies and law enforcement measures which may be much less invasive. Other laws, such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, have granted these same broad powers to copyright holders, though in some cases they are used for purpose of censorship or forming trust-like “holding” organizations rather than copyright infringement.
And while Media 1.0 will censor or twist anything that reflects badly upon its own industry (or any other industry for that matter), and Facebook has “mysteriously” reversed its stance on privacy rights recently, blogs such as Slashdot have risen to fill in the blanks.

5th Amendment: No Double Jeopardy, No Self-Incrimination, Right to Life, Liberty, and Property, Eminent Domain:
6th Amendment: Right to a Speedy Trial, Nature of Trials:
7th Amendment: Right to Trial By Jury:
Acts which threaten the establishment have led to intelligence agencies and copyright holders to engage in dealmaking which is slowly trending towards entire leasing of your machine. Blogs have been reporting these efforts by Microsoft, Apple, the MAFIAA, and others, as well as reporting hacker attacks on remotely-stored personal data, which is sometimes marketed as “cloud computing”. After eminent domain laws were extremely loosened to allow seizure of property by Wal-Mart, bloggers not only reported the story, but debated the consequences. Trial by jury is being threatened through the expansion of forced arbitration, mandated by a federal law irreversible by states, including to Web sites about cartoon characters, rapists, neglectful murdering nursing homes, and consumer electronics purchases, but people are getting together and fighting the law, and some arbitration companies have left consumer dispute markets. The banking industry’s role in the current recession, reported by bloggers with an anti-establishment bias, has helped with this issue as well.

8th Amendment: No Cruel or Unusual Punishment:
Information regarding foreign wars have been reported by bloggers, with Media 1.0 dishonesty even being videotaped. Torture and other events at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo would be easy to hide if blogs didn’t exist, and there would be less questioning the claims made by the President about national security and foreign dictators. The use of pseudonyms have encouraged people to discuss and debate the Israeli lobby without fear of being publicly labeled an anti-Semite, even if they secretly are one.

9th Amendment: Rights Not Limited to Constitution:
As rights such as copyright protection have been broadly expanded in length and scope, bloggers have been making use of Creative Commons licenses to waive such rights for the benefit of themselves and others. This even includes musicians who rely on a cult following and touring, such as Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead, who have left major labels and still kept their fans. Some have gone even further and released material entirely into the public domain, as controversial creationist figure Kent Hovind once did. I myself have released much of this blog’s content into the public domain.

10th Amendment: States’ Rights, Other Rights Belong to States & People:
Due to dissatisfaction with the establishment, fueled by blogs and the Tea Party movement, many libertarians have started a “Tenther” movement, proposing that the US become a confederacy where states have nullification rights over an ever-expanding federal government. Many want to repeal other Constitutional amendments associated with infringing on states’ rights, including parts of the 14th (birthright citizenship, bill of rights applies to states), the 16th (direct federal income tax), and the 17th (senate popularly elected like the house is, something I want to see repealed). Twitter and Facebook, once again, will shut down anything after somebody points the race card.

27th Amendment: Limiting Congressional Pay:
(part of original Bill of Rights, but not ratified until 1992)
Bloggers have been able to monitor Congress like never before, including not only laws and transcripts in their entirety, but also exposing financial and sexual scandals, ties to various lobbies, and other forms of corruption Media 1.0 would never report, and would be extremely difficult to spread via Twitter.

Here are all 3. Apparently Warner fucks are roughing up minors again, so #3 might get “muted” in its entirety for a Whitesnake clip in the credits (it is muted on other usernames).

(Click here for the previous post – contains details on the game)

However, often times people take advantage of the rarity of some CDs to sell unsuspecting (or, sometimes, desperate) people bootlegs. Often they are marketed as “(insert country here) Import” to increase the perceived rarity.

There is this one seller who operates under various names, usually Retrospect Records, but also Vegas CDs, Rock-it Records, or Adrian (sometimes Sam) McCaslin. He gets consistently high ratings on eBay, yet a Google search will prove his “metal/AOR reissue label” status illegitimate. Negative feedback exposing McCaslin results in negative feedback for you, with a rude tone, and a block from his future auctions. Check this thread at another label’s forum to see VegasCDs, a supposed lawyer with supposed knowledge of Russian export laws, in action – it’s really funny until he admits his faults.

Without doing appropriate research, I bought an “Italian import” of Lionheart, a 1984 out-of-print Iron Maiden side-project-of-sorts. I thought his username, which is repeatedly changed and at the time was something like “vegascds”, referred to a record store or eBay vendor based in Vegas. Instead, I got this:

(Click the thumbnails to see the full picture. Sorry for the blurriness, as I wasn’t concerned with staying still)

Seems fine…

This seems strange, “2005 Rock-It” without a copyright notice, and a phony UPC code which apparently belongs to “Perfection in Pain” by death metal band Corporation 187.

But the most obvious indicator:

Ummm…. yeah.

The audio on this CD was pretty low in quality, more evidence of a bootleg.

Fortunately we have ImgBurn, a “for advanced users only” software program (freeware) designed for burning ISO files to CD or DVD.

Here is a partial screenshot of the program:

Before we continue, it is important to note that there is a difference between CD-Rs and “real” CDs. Audio CDs and CD-ROMs are pressed in a factory, not in a CD/DVD-RW drive.

Click on the button entitled “Discovery”:

Make sure your CD is in the drive listed in the drop-down list highlighted in this picture, and note what comes after “Current Profile:”. I have circled the proof that this CD is a CD-R bootleg:

Proof this “rare Italian import” is a fake.

Now we will start with a real CD, purchased from a physical store sometime between 10-15 years ago. It’s the Foo Fighters’ self-titled album from 1995:

Now see what shows up in ImgBurn after I take out the Lionheart CD-R bootleg and replace it with the Foo Fighters CD:

I hope this has been informative. I think I’m gonna start doing similar instructional posts under a tag called “tutorial”.

Project MK-ULTRA, or MKULTRA, was the code name for a covert CIA mind-control and chemical interrogation research program, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, continuing at least through the late 1960s, and it used United States citizens as its test subjects. The published evidence indicates that Project MK-ULTRA involved the surreptitious use of many types of drugs, as well as other methods, to manipulate individual mental states and to alter brain function.

An outgrowth of that project is unofficially referred to as “Project Monarch”. It is a mind control technique which exposes the subject to a trauma so violent that his/her mind creates a dissociation. The victim’s brain becomes compartmentalized and a new personality, which is then molded and educated by the manipulators, emerges.

During their reeducation, subjects are said to be exposed to numerous symbols such as trees, spider webs, masks, mazes, butterflies, etc. They are also shown movies which contain specific symbols (or “triggers”) such as The Wizard of Oz and many Disney Movies. The same way those subjects are brainwashed and reeducated, mass media conducts a large scale mind control project, which starts at birth with Disney movies and continues with Hollywood flicks and music videos.

“Lady Gaga, The Illuminati Puppet” is from last August but still gets lots of comments, many of which are interesting. I like this comment by Charles Deckert:

Ah, I see now! They’re putting out “role models” for us all, aren’t they? I see now why the music sucks; the point lies in body language and neurolinguistics, which for today’s youth and even their immediate predecessors is easy to hide under a bunch of mindless noise (wrapped up with its own programming of course). The downgrading and desecration of art on all levels can be seen as a means of turning the clarity of the collective consciousness into mere noise and blur. Cinema has gone to shit, music has gone to shit, even literature has made the contents of Dom DeLuise’s septic tank much more interesting and educational. For this, I propose that those of us who’re artists in any field make it a point to put out what we do from the deepest levels of our brains and our hearts and to avoid getting sucked into the machine from which artists like Lady Gaga and Rihanna (and many others!) have been produced and payrolled to pollute our understanding and our tastes.

In the past I have pointed out my theory for the consistent, obvious mocking of moral absolutism found in the media – that a lack of spirituality leads to a hole which can be “filled” by unquenchable purchases of advertised consumer products, rather than dedicating your life to a higher power of some kind, spread through acts of selfless charity.
The commenter raises a good point – this may be part of a longer-term effort to instill moral relativism permanently to make way for consistent profits. (I always blamed crappy music on the RIAA’s legal-payola-by-proxy and anti-piracy settlements being more profitable than sales.)

Since 1977, RSA public-key encryption has protected privacy and verified authenticity when using computers, gadgets and web browsers around the globe, with only the most brutish of brute force efforts (and 1,500 years of processing time) felling its 768-bit variety earlier this year. Now, [three people] at the University of Michigan claim they can break it simply by tweaking a device’s power supply.

By fluctuating the voltage to the CPU such that it generated a single hardware error per clock cycle, they found that they could cause the server to flip single bits of the private key at a time, allowing them to slowly piece together the password. [They] were able to successfully hack 1024-bit encryption in OpenSSL on a SPARC-based system, without damaging the computer, leaving a single trace or ending human life as we know it.

Well, it was bound to happen someday…

Rick Springfield, 1981:

The Coca-Cola Company, 1993:

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