Slamland

After much gnashing and gnoshing, I’m back.

My wordpress sites got hit by massive attacks made possible by Win2k and IIS5 vulnerabilities. I’m bringing them back up on Win7Ultimate and IIS 7.5. Still gonna take a while though. I’m trying to hit my 1st Kindle release

Perfect storm

Last January my laptop took a dive when its cooling fan seized. Months were needed to acquire the part from HP. Mainly because it has to be imported to Switzerland. At the same time we acquired two new hosts that included Windows 7 Home Premium. One of them was to become SG’s new workstation/desktop machine and the other was slated to become my new Web Applications Server (WAS). However, since I use Active Directory, I had to upgrade both to Windows 7 Ultimate. Easier said than done since, I had to get the upgrade packages from the States. That took almost 4 months.

Rewind to May2011. At that time I was informed by Livejournal that my account had been compromised. Y’all may remember my posts on it. At the time I went through a frantic time of changing and resetting passwords. They were based on a misspelling of a rather long word but since I depend on login cookies, it didn’t matter. All the login cookies are on my laptop and I didn’t bother to write down the new passcodes. Further, in Feb2012, my mail server’s motherboard dies. You can probably guess where this is going by now.

No problemo, I thought, I just go to using the other new host for my workstation until I can repair the laptop. The problem is that the new box doesn’t have the login cookies on it and I can no longer remember which misspelling I used for the new passcodes, never having used it more than 6 times, many months before. Yes it’s a secure passcode, too secure. With all my domain mail accounts having gone the way of my old mailserver, I was stuck and could no longer access my websites. This has been the case for over 6 months now. Don’t forget that I’m still maintaining 10K words per week on my novels.

My laptop is now working again and I can once more post however, lots of lessons have been re-learned. The big one is about complacency. Murphy loves complacency.

Forward ho!

I will be completely redesigning and reworking my network of the next few months. I once more have a mailserver but I am deprecating those addresses. While I can do the anti-spam stuff, I can’t touch Gmail for spam killing. There are still lots of issues but the new house will eliminate many of them. There is a lot to be said for building something as good as you can and then ‘Stop messing with it!?’

One thing though, the Slamlander will be getting his own domain name.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

My publishing system is experiencing gremlins.

1Gonzolo Lira awakened me to this one. Before his post I was blissfully unaware of the NDAA¹ .

Those who read me already know how I feel about the various renditions of the Patriot Acts. The NDAA passes those so far that you can’t even see them in the rear-view mirror. Embedded into this POS² is a little something called Indefinite Detention AKA the Levin/McCain detention bill. It is a part and parcel of the NDAA. Last December, Glenn Greenwald, writing for Salon, did a detailed analysis of this bill and the three critical points incorporated within it.

1. The Bill codifies Indefinite Detentions: Basically, it suspends Article 1, section 9, of the US Constitution in its entirety and indefinitely. It even removes the requirement for a trial. Anyone may be detained simply on suspicion and no proof is required whatsoever. Of course, without the requirement of a trial, due process becomes a dim historical artifact. It might be noted that Roman tyrants gained permanent ascendency over the triumvirate, ending the Roman Republic, by the simple expedient of declaring a permanent state of war (This may mark the historical end of the Republic of the United States) .
2. It expands the scope of the War on Terror to the point that it can never be won. It becomes a war that does not end and therefore supports the first point (above).
3. US citizens are not exempt from this bill³ . It leaves open the possibility of subjecting American citizens to military detention and trial by a military court to include indefinite detention of anyone suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda or an amorphous group of “associated forces” that could cover just about anyone arrested anywhere in the world.
4. A fourth point that many analysts miss is that these are military detentions of non-military subjects and thus violates the Posse Comitatus Act. Although the Posse Comitatus is not a part of the US Constitution, it is motivated by said document and expands on it.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the NDAA shits all over the US Constitution and the US Bill of Rights.

1. National Defense Authorization Act of 2012  More links can be found on Google. [↩]
2. POS=Piece Of Shit [↩]
3. Surprisingly, this was done at Obama’s insistence. [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

Lawmakers and Gov. Jerry Brown refused to allocate state funds for an early presidential primary. This is from the LA Times and the discussion is here.

We bought a ticket in the nosebleed section because Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature refused to spend an estimated $100 million for a separate presidential primary early in the nominating process

Instead, they combined presidential balloting with the regular state primary on June 5, long after the Republican nomination surely will have been nailed down, most likely by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

That means Republican voters in the nation’s most populous state will probably have no voice in whom the party nominates for president. They can only shout a meaningless cheer or catcall. — Los Angeles Times

— Wait a hold it! Full tilt STOP! —

What’s wrong with this picture? There is no provision in the US Constitution for primary elections! Primary elections only provide the means to falsely propagate the the tyranny of the two-party system. Why should any state support ANY primary with scarce tax dollars? Each party should have and fund its own primary, should they even need one. I challenge anyone to find one sentence, in the US Constitution, that supports the concept of primary elections!

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

The spammers have decided that us little guys are not to be allowed to run our own email servers anymore. They didn’t do it via legal machinations rather, they did it the old-fashioned way; brute force.

This is the end of a 7+ month battle between spammers and myself. Until 3 months ago, I ran my own self-hosted mail server. All my domains were on it. I have just taken that system off-line permanently.

What happened is that I was getting barraged by 250+ spams per day on each account. My normal email was getting buried to the point that I couldn’t even find it. My mail bins were over-flowing with spam and I couldn’t even sort it from the legitimate stuff. MS Outlook was no help either. The Outlook rules processing was taking loads of time from my laptop and it still wasn’t effective. Long story shortened, after trying some seriously hefty solutions, including some paid front-end services, I had to give it up. There is no way to keep ahead of the spammers and still get my real work done. I was spending hours per day on it instead of on writing, marketing, and sales. It wasn’t doing my blood pressure any good either.

I have now gone to the dark-side and opened Gmail accounts. After months of testing, it is confirmed that Gmail does what they say on the label, they kill all spam. Yes, my new email addresses no longer have my personal domain names in them but I don’t get the spam either. Neither do I have to spend the hours of maintenance required to keep the mail server alive (it was continually choking on the sheer volume of spam).

It will probably take a few months before I get around to updating all my accounts with the new addresses but then contacting me will be easier and I will be more responsive. Sometimes we have to pick and choose the battles that we engage in. Are they worth the bother? In the end, what is more important, focusing on core activities or fighting over principles (principles that don’t put a single dime in my coffers)? No government could have passed a law that would get me to do this but the spammers simply wore me down.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

They’ve done it. You can no longer board even a train or bus without papers.

The Transportation Security Administration isn’t just in airports anymore. TSA teams are increasingly conducting searches and screenings at train stations, subways, ferry terminals and other mass transit locations around the country.

Whatever happened to the 4th and 5th Amendments?

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

Prosecutors and police are largely held immune from their faulty actions, not even compensating for the direct harm of their actions. My previous article on Mr. Morton, a man falsely imprisoned for 25 years, is but the tip of this iceberg. At the core of this is prosecutorial immunity and it needs to end.

The article is here and the discussions are there.

Once released, those arrested have little recourse. State and federal laws generally protect law enforcement agencies from lawsuits over such detentions as long as officers were acting on a valid warrant and had a reasonable belief that they were arresting the right person.

The problem is that these people, innocent victims, are not compensated or even returned to their homes. In the case of a Nissan customer service supervisor who was hauled by authorities from Tennessee to L.A. County on a local sex-crimes warrant meant for someone with a similar name. How did he get back home to Tennessee?

The worst of these was the case of Santiago Ibarra Rivera who wound up spending a month in jail, that’s a month’s loss of salary, probably lost his job, and all that he gets from Superior Court Judge Kathryn Solórzano is an apology.  Pardon me for thinking that as being a lot short of the mark. He is owed at the least, lost wages and a free ride back home.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

KEZ of War of  Winds just posted something that I have strongly agreed with for years. She comes at it from a slightly different direction but the destination is the same. Public criticism is there for one reason and one reason only, the self-aggrandizement of the critic. A real critic will hand you their critique privately and only on invitation.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.