chris @ hive13

May 4, 2013

Mos Dub – Johnny Too Beef

Filed under: patriotstuff,piratestuff — Tags: , — chris @ 2:31 am

When I read this blog post about Assata Shakur being added to the Most Wanted Terrorist List, I noticed her story isn’t much different than those told by hackers that have been imprisoned. I also noticed that her criticism of the United States is summed up nicely by Mos Def.

“Beef” is a pretty harsh criticism by Mos Def of not just institutional racism in the U.S., but also of his own community. The track has powerful message, but the with the slower tempo means a lot of mixes use beats without much energy in them. Fortunately Max Tannone shared my concern and mashed up “Beef” with “Johnny Too Bad” by The Slickers. The result is a powerful reggae/ragga protest song..

Technically, “Johnny Too Bad” sounds more like rocksteady than reggae, but unless you are a ska nerd like me, the difference between the different genres of Jamaican music is fairly academic.

Here is one version of “Beef” that sounds like a freestyle on a radio show:

Mos Def has done “Beef” in a bunch of different places, including The Dave Chappelle Show, so it’s not a freestyle.

Here is The Slickers version of “Johnny Too Bad”:

And here is the mash-up, known as “Johnny Too Beef”:

April 1, 2013

This is why competition is so important

Filed under: hackerstuff,patriotstuff,piratestuff — Tags: , — chris @ 9:20 pm

February 18, 2013

Cory Doctorow’s Homeland Book Tour, Cincinnati Edition

Filed under: cincistuff,hackerstuff,makerstuff,patriotstuff,piratestuff — Tags: , , , — chris @ 11:39 pm

I am a huge Cory Doctorow fan. He’s easily one of my favorite writers, and Little Brother is easily one of my favorite books. Also, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town was a part of my inspiration for helping to start Hive13.

Doctorow is traveling around the US promoting his latest novel, Homeland, which is a sequel to Little Brother. For his Cincinnati stop, Hive13 set up a table with lock picking and 3d printing. I finally got to meet Cory, and tell him how his writing has inspired me to do things. He gave an incredible talk about the book and also about privacy, hacking, free speech, Aaron Swartz and about the increasing role of hacker-ethic inspired webware in politics.

Also, that’s me at the end, never missing an opportunity to shamelessly plug Hive13 :-)

January 31, 2013

i liek weird puppet videos (probably NSFW)

Filed under: piratestuff — Tags: , — chris @ 1:59 am

YouTube is a treasure trove of weird things. My new favorite thing is weird or inappropriate videos with puppets. I was a huge fan of the Muppets as a kid, and as an adult, nothing makes me happier than watching grown-up-ified versions of puppet shows.

First, we have a weird puppet video mit das dub steps:

Followed by an Israeli band with weird puppets and a surprisingly good cover of “Crazy”:

Crossing over from weird to wholly inappropriate, there is Learning Town which is one of several great shows on Geek and Sundry, which I cannot get enough of:

And last, but certainly not least we have Neal’s Puppet Dreams which gets points not just for juvenile phallus jokes, but also for Nathan Fillion:

January 24, 2013

THANKS OBAMA!

Filed under: patriotstuff,piratestuff — Tags: — chris @ 12:26 am

“Thanks Obama” is my new favorite meme. I think it is born of a combination of Imgur’s fascination with infomercial problems, and one of Penny Arcade’s rare political jabs.






December 26, 2012

I am in a rap music video

Filed under: piratestuff — Tags: , — chris @ 3:19 am

Achievement unlocked!

December 19, 2012

Noam Chomsky and Vinay Gupta, two great tastes that taste kind of scary together

Filed under: makerstuff,patriotstuff,piratestuff — Tags: , , — chris @ 4:24 am

This is recent talk by Noam Chomsky that intersects two ideas that I have been thinking about for a long time: corporatism/corporate evil, and American Exceptionalism. The talk is an hour long, it’s pretty dry and fairly academic, but it’s well worth watching:

There’s a lot of stuff in the talk about nuclear annihilation to the U.S.’s hypocritical relationship with Israel. It’s a lot to take in, but through it, there is a central idea of a shift in the global balance of power and the US taking a backseat to Asia. There is a lot of this talk from a great number of sources, but what is unique about this talk is the history of the American rise to power following World War II, and the tremendous amounts of energy and money spent on the ascent to that postion and the subsequent defense of it. I am reminded of Vinay Gupta talking about how the first world is essentially the product of colonialism, which is the result of military imperialism:

A central theme in both talks is that the western culture of financial and military imperialism is not sustainable, especially if Eurasia, led by Russia, India, and China, ascend the way that Chomsky and a lot of other naysayers seem to believe that they will.

UPDATE 2/2013:This blog post captures a some of the subtext that I gathered by comparing the two videos. Kunstler says the our nation is “lost”:

Apparently, there are moments in history when nations just get lost. I maintain that things would go a whole lot better for us if we acknowledge what is actually going on, namely: a major shift of direction into economic contraction after 200-plus thrilling years of expanding energy resources and easy-to-get material riches.

Gupta’s “collapse of civilization” or the sudden and unwelcome shift of the first world into the economic conditions of the third, seem to be a dramatic version or Kunstler’s economic contraction. Gupta sees the west as abusing its military might to prop up a lifestyle that is no longer viable and in doing so, is maliciously wasting the rest of the world’s resources. Kunstler seems to be in that lifestyle calling for us all to stop the madness before it’s too late.

Before you dismiss the idea of western civilization as unsustainable, I would like you consider this “Master Meme” in the context of the copyright wars. The big media conglomerates who oppose peer to peer file sharing and remix culture are using corrupt lobbies and poorly thought out legislation to put the digital copying genie back in the bottle. Their business models, fee structures, and outstanding debt are no longer sustainable given the revenues of the post-iTunes and post-YouTube market. These media moguls cannot accept the fact that the music industry, from around 1955-1995 was a 40 year fluke. They do not see that those days are gone and they’re not coming back. They are so desperate to get back to the “good old days” that they are willing to endanger our essential liberties of privacy and free speech in pursuit of their futile quest.

Now take that level of denial and willful ignorance, turn the volume up to 11, and boost the affected population into the billions, and you see how Gupta can call it a collapse with a straight face.

September 9, 2012

China’s patent office is the busiest in the world

Filed under: patriotstuff,piratestuff — Tags: , — chris @ 10:11 pm

I swear I don’t have a bias against the United States. I love this country, so much so that I gave almost 8 years of my life in the form of military service. Criticism is an important part of being an informed electorate.

This election season has really gotten on my nerves since both parties have told their fair of lies and half truths. One particular half truth comes in the form of Romney bitching about China’s lack of respect for our intellectual property rights, which is, if you will pardon the pun, patently ridiculous.

Sure China has cornered the market for shitty knockoffs, but thanks to some disastrous decision making during the Clinton administration, the crony corporatist establishment decided that we would no longer be a country of manufacturers, but a country of rent seekers.

While China may not give a rat’s ass about our intellectual property, according to this article the Chinese patent office is the busiest patent office in the world.

Hopefully the Chinese people will decide that they don’t like working in factories and China can get into the service economy like the U.S. did.

September 5, 2012

Corporate Evil Remixed

Filed under: patriotstuff,piratestuff — Tags: , — chris @ 2:24 am

While searching youtube for a link to one of my corporate evil talks to send to someone, I found something curious. I discovered that unbeknownst to me, part of my SkyDogCon talk on corporate evil was remixed into someone’s “Basics Of Underground Politics” documentary.

My part is at the beginning and it’s edited to highlight the crooked games that corporations play, followed by my criticism of mainstream media corporations and finishes with the Iron Triangle. What’s conspicuously absent is anything about non-profits and my call to use those same games to help our personal causes.

I’m then followed by some Zeitgeist/NWO stuff. It features some clips from Infowars and PrisonPlanet, but it sticks to bashing the Council on Foreign Relations the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The whole Alex Jones thing gets a little too close to tinfoil hat country for my taste. I guess that reading the Illuminatus! Trilogy in my formative years forces me think that all conspiracies that implicate Bavarian death cults are works of fiction.

I am not far enough yet in my studies in economics to know if the World Bank and the IMF are good, evil, or simply necessary evils. I can tell you from my studies that while the Federal Reserve dropped the ball in recent years in terms of monetary policy, it isn’t the vast conspiracy that some would have us believe.

The docu then ends with an interview with Aldous Huxley. While I certainly don’t buy into with the aforementioned world domination conspiracy, I am flattered to have my talk included in the same work as that of Huxley.

This isn’t the first time one of my talks has made it outside of the hacker community. Earlier this year, I got a thank you note from a high school English teacher for my Notacon version of the talk:

In both cases, the talks were remixed without my permission and I’m glad for it :-)

August 26, 2012

AT&T’s latest Anti-Neutrality Jack-Move

Filed under: gadgetstuff,hackerstuff,piratestuff — Tags: , , , — chris @ 9:05 pm

AT&T is a hundred year old monopoly, whose logo is the Death Star, so it’s not much of a surprise when they act like an evil empire. In case you aren’t a Star Wars fan and think the argument is invalid, the AT&T building in Nashville looks just like the Eye of Sauron. Fantasy and Sci-Fi agree that AT&T is bad news. It’s pretty tough to argue with that logic.

Retroactively poor branding judgement aside, AT&T has been known to be technologically duplicitous in the past, and it appears that they are up to their old tricks once again. Back when they were SBC, CEO Ed Whitacre bitched about Vonage’s attempt to “use my pipes free”. Now that they are AT&T once again, the mobile division is angry about Apple’s Facetime application. AT&T mobile would like to disable the Facetime app on AT&T iPhones unless the subscriber pays for a more expensive text and data package. Given AT&T’s sensitivity about who uses their “pipes” this latest move might sound logical, except that Facetime only works over wifi. This means that Facetime doesn’t use AT&T’s 3G or 4G network, but ONLY works over a wireless network connection to a residential or commercial broadband internet service. Facetime doesn’t touch AT&T’s mobile network, but AT&T still wants to demand users pay more to them to be able to use it. but it’s just them wanting to be paid twice for delivering the same data.

UPDATE: it turns out that iOS6 will do FaceTime over mobile broadband. The current implementation, iOS5, only works over WiFi, regardless of your carrier. This doesn’t let AT&T off the hook, however. According to this article, the proposed new voice and text plans actually offer 66% LESS data than current plans, in exchange for an almost 30% INCREASE in price:

AT&T also implies that forcing you onto plans with unlimited voice minutes in order to use FaceTime is absolutely necessary, because these “Mobile Share” plans were “designed to make more data available to consumers” (emphasis in original). But today, an AT&T customer with an iPhone 4S who is a moderate data user would likely opt into AT&T’s $70 plan, which includes 3 gigabytes of data and 450 voice minutes each month.

AT&T won’t allow that customer use mobile FaceTime. But if he or she “upgrades” to the low-end $95 Mobile Share plan, they’ll get unlimited voice, text and just 1 gigabyte of monthly data, and be free to use FaceTime. So it appears how much data you buy from AT&T actually has nothing to do with the company’s decision to block FaceTime.

Just like with Vonage, you paid for the data, and AT&T wants to charge you more for using it the way that you want to. This is, and always has been, about keeping people subscribed to expensive voice and text services that are being obsoleted by free/low cost IP-based solutions.

This isn’t a new business model. It’s the same model that North American organized crime works off of: extortion. Mexican cartels also employ a similar model, known as ransoming. AT&T wants to hold the FaceTime app hostage until you pay them off.

Depicted below is Freepress.net’s infographic on the issue. However, in my mind, the two main issues are that 1) Facetime doesn’t use AT&T’s network subscribers are already paying for data and should be allowed to use it as they see fit. This is simply a money grab and nothing more. And 2) this is what monopolies do. Aren’t you glad we all opposed AT&T’s merger with T-Mobile?

Before you breathe a sigh of relief and say “whew! I’m sure glad I went with VZW/Android/Skype, be aware that the only reason that your shit works is because VZW and Skype worked out a deal a couple of years ago.

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