Blackcap Blog

Published at 18:52 on 18 January 2012

Probably the worst thing about both is something that most opponents are not focusing on. Yes, such legislation will probably cause economic harm by making life more inconvenient for Internet entrepreneurs.

The worst threat, however, is that such legislation will provide both a rationale and an obligation to create an infrastructure of censorship, one that could later be exploited by the government in ways detrimental to civil liberties. And recent trends in the USA (warrantless searches, incommunicado detention, death squads, torture, etc.) have been worrying enough for civil liberties as it is.

Published at 10:19 on 4 January 2012

Gotta love the color that Fox News chose to represent Santorum on their map of how Iowa counties voted last night.

Published at 10:41 on 3 January 2012

That’s probably the best summary for the recent spate of shootings (including one of a ranger at Mount Rainier National Park). The suspect was both trained as a killer and then psychologically damaged further by his combat experiences.

Probably the most tragic thing about such killings is that the victims tend to be normal working-class folks as opposed the the ruling elite bastards who started the whole war in the first place.

Published at 18:57 on 19 December 2011

Of course I made a point to listen to (and record) Voice of Korea today. The executive summary of the broadcast is given in the title; the “news” pretty much followed that summary to a ‘t’, segueing from an eulogy of the “Great Leader” to praise for the “Great Successor”.

Unwittingly, the station in that land of shortages and hardship for the vast majority of its people also gave Kim Jong-Il a most appropriate send-off, being interrupted twice by power cuts. At least, that’s what I assume they were because both transmitters went off the air simultaneously each time.

The edited (I deleted the static during the total of 11 minutes and 46 seconds of dead air in the two interruptions) audio may be found here. If for some reason you want to hear everything in real-time, breaks in transmission and all, that audio may be found here.

Note that if you’re not that interested in hearing the two praise songs (one to Kim Il-Sung, one to Kim Jong-Il) that start each broadcast, the main “news” broadcast starts about 7 minutes and 50 seconds in.

Published at 12:41 on 9 December 2011

Maybe.

Both sides have every reason to lie and make the claims they are making. Admitting Iran did bring the drone down would be embarrassing for the USA, so of course Iran is going to assert they brought it down and the USA is going to assert Iran just got lucky when the drone came down due to a malfunction.

Regarding the latter claim, it’s interesting to note that the assertion US drones are often programmed to land if they lose communications is a statement consistent with both sides’ claims. It obviously lends credence to the US claim, as it explains why Iran was able to retrieve the drone intact as opposed to scoring only a few bits of charred debris.

It also lends credence to Iran’s claim. First, any communications for controlling the drone would obviously be very securely encrypted. Managing to crack such encryption in real time is highly unlikely. That leaves Iran with the option of simply jamming the control signal, by using high-powered transmitters to overwhelm it. If a drone is programmed to land when it loses contact, then jamming its communications link is effectively sending it a command to land. Note, however, that such jamming is hardly (as Iran claims) “sophisticated;” to the contrary, it is rather crude and brute force measure.

The only truly sophisticated technology Iran needs is a radar system capable of circumventing whatever anti-radar measures US drones typically have, so that such drones can be detected and intercepted. Interestingly, Iran claimed to have acquired precisely that capability last October.

At this point, however, it’s strictly a “he said, she said” story. What would definitively lend credibility to Iran’s claims is for a second drone to be captured by them in say the next six months. Such a feat would be more than can be explained simply by getting lucky.

Published at 11:03 on 8 November 2011

OK, you’ve just seen (in my last post) how much better than shortwave Internet audio quality can be. One might be tempted to conclude that demonstrates shortwave broadcasting is now obsolete. Not so fast.

First, this is an example where shortwave fares unusually poorly, even by its own standards. The signal paths between India and the USA are so difficult that India has never even tried to target the USA for their shortwave broadcasts. Even though I’ve been lucking out with a strong signal and low local interference the past two mornings, the signal still ends up seriously degraded by being forced to take a multi-hop path over the polar regions. That’s why it has such a fluttery character to it.

If India were to rent time on a transmitter in Eastern Canada or the Caribbean, for example, my audio recording would have had significantly better quality. It still wouldn’t have been as good as the Internet download, of course, but the newscast would have been completely intelligible instead of only partly so.

Second, the US Government does not particularly care if I listen to news broadcasts from India or not. So the government is not blocking my ability to download podcasts of their news bulletins, or requiring ISPs to report the names of their customers that attempt to do so. The Chinese are not so fortunate. If they want to hear news that has not been subject to their government’s censors, the Internet is of little or no use to them. On shortwave, they often end up in cat-and-mouse games with jamming transmitters, but in such games sometimes the mouse wins.

Basically, any communications medium that requires either payment for access and/or third-party (beyond the producer and consumer, that is) infrastructure is extremely vulnerable to censorship. Governments can track or block payments, or pressure the third parties into not carrying the offensive material. Pretty much any satellite or Internet-based means of delivering information ends up falling onto this category.

Direct-broadcast satellites could theoretically provide a real alternative, once there are free (to the consumer) options and they get to the point where there are a large number of such options under a wide diversity of ownership. Those latter points are critical, and current satellite broadcast options do not satisfy either one.

Therefore, shortwave is still really the only option for getting information into an area against the will of the government which controls it. Crappy audio quality beats no audio any day.

Published at 10:50 on 28 October 2011

Simply put, it will end up being litigated in court. It blatantly violates the Washington State Constitution’s single subject clause, so a legal basis for challenging it exists. Nowhere in the title or text of the measure on the ballot is scrapping light rail to Bellevue mentioned, yet (if allowed to stand unchallenged) it would most likely achieve that end. Based on the ballot measure that implemented the project, extending light rail to Bellevue has the support of both the majority in the Sound Transit district and the majority in Bellevue itself.

Therefore there exists both a means to challenge the measure in court and a motive (an electorate annoyed at falling for a bait-and-switch) to do same. And the absence of any mention of light rail in the measure will furnish ample evidence that the voters did not intend this outcome when they voted for it, which will probably cause any court-interpreted revision of the measure to gut the provisions of it which interfere with the proposed light rail line.

It may even get overturned by a subsequent bill in the legislature before it gets through court. Normally, the legislature is reluctant to touch the text of voter-approved laws, but again, the bait-and-switch nature of this one might bias the legislature in the opposite direction to the normal trend.

Moreover, the system listens to what Big Money has to say, and with the exception of Kemper Freeman, Jr., Big Money does not want I-1125 to pass. Transportation in the Puget Sound region is a horrible mess, this mess is making it hard for the Big Money crowd to do business, and the initiative will complicate the process of doing things to help relieve the transportation mess.

Naturally, when the inevitable happens, Eyman is going to go into conserva-victim mode and whine about how the evil courts and legislature are subverting popular will. Which will be something of a rich comment when one considers that the measure was obviously deliberately crafted to be a bait-and-switch. It’s not as of the single-subject clause is any big secret or anything: it’s right there in the state constitution, and Eyman’s initiatives have ended up being reinterpreted by the courts in the past because they’ve run afoul of it.

Of course, Eyman’s main motive in the thing is money. He earns it by hawking his services to the highest bidders in the right-wing crowd; he will laugh all the way to the bank no matter how much the legislature and the courts end up gutting the measure. Whether or not the thing eventually flies is completely beside the point.

Published at 18:14 on 25 October 2011

I have learned very recently that at long last Voice of Korea has an official web site. Unfortunately for those who wish to stream audio, the links that let one do that are currently not working. However, that will probably get fixed in the not-too-distant future, meaning that there will at long last be an alternative to shortwave for those who want to listen to official North Korean propaganda.

Until then, I plan on recording their broadcasts off shortwave, as time and propagation conditions allow.

Published at 14:48 on 20 October 2011

Figured I’d post this here because there’s a high change the right wing echo chamber (or possibly even the establishment liberal echo chamber) is going to start endlessly repeating otherwise.

Here’s an excerpt from a report from Greece itself (by an English-language newspaper that is not tied to either side that clashed):

One man has died in hospital after [note the wording here: after, not because of] violent clashes between communists and anarchists marred the second day of a massive 48-hour strike, ahead of this evening’s parliamentary vote on a raft of new austerity measures.

Dimitris Kotsaridis, a 53-year-old construction worker and trade unionist, died of heart failure at Evangelismos hospital on Thursday afternoon.

According to sources, Kotsaridis was a member of the Communist Party-backed union, the All-Workers Militant Front (Pame). He came from the Athens suburb of Vyronas and was one of around 50 injured people who were taken to Evangelismos hospital this afternoon. He was unemployed, married with two children.

A hospital statement said that Kotsaridis was transported by ambulance from the Zappeio mansion to hospital at 4.45pm. One man has died in hospital after violent clashes between communists and anarchists marred the second day of a massive 48-hour strike, ahead of this evening’s parliamentary vote on a raft of new austerity measures.

Dimitris Kotsaridis, a 53-year-old construction worker and trade unionist, died of heart failure at Evangelismos hospital on Thursday afternoon.

According to sources, Kotsaridis was a member of the Communist Party-backed union, the All-Workers Militant Front (Pame). He came from the Athens suburb of Vyronas and was one of around 50 injured people who were taken to Evangelismos hospital this afternoon. He was unemployed, married with two children.

A hospital statement said that Kotsaridis was transported by ambulance from the Zappeio mansion to hospital at 4.45pm. He had no injuries and no pulse. Medical staff unsuccessfully tried to resuscitate him for 50 minutes before pronouncing him dead.

⋮

[All boldface emphasis added by yours truly.]

So there you have it. The official statement, from the hospital that treated him, says that guy who died after the riots today died as the result of heart failure, not as the result of any injuries received (of which he had none).

Published at 09:18 on 20 October 2011

I was actually for a moment inclined to vote for the thing, because it bans red-light cameras, which are one of the many tentacles of the emerging total surveillance society. Alas, it is cluttered up with two other unrelated provisions related to tolls and gas taxes. So forget it.

And this is not just my personal pet peeve here. Article II Section 19 of the Washington State Constitution says that all bills (and an initiative to the people counts as a bill) must address only a single subject. So the initiative is yet another piece of legal garbage from Tim Eyman which will end up in court if it passes.