I can finally use this old joke Ive been holding onto for years. Ready?

"Why is Italy shaped like a boot?"
"Because you cant fit all of that bullshit in a shoe."

Ok, please stop groaning and/or chuckling and lets get to the "WTF now?" section of this post.
Actually, rather than go over the whole thing myself in this instance I thought it best if it came right from the horses mouth since it was well summarized in my opinion (in this case the horse is Matt Sucherman, Googles VP and Deputy General Counsel for Europe, Middle East and Africa):



Seriously. You aren't dreaming. This actually happened.
I say if this is how its going to be, pull the net out of Italy altogether. Nothing is safe according to this suit. You now potentially can be liable as a provider for any/all content users submit. This means any medium that users can insert anything into (pictures, video, text) could be potentially offensive and therefore as a safety measure must be removed from Italian access or face legal repercussions.

This means twitter, all social networking sites, all photo and video sharing sites such as photobucket and imageshack, all forms of chat, and even email.

The overall implications of this are astounding.

Attention Italy!
The abbreviation of your country has just been changed from IT to IY!
Your country will no longer share the same abbreviation as "Information Technology".
That perk has been revoked.

Now that I think of it, making sure access to information is monitored for "abusive material" has been done in Italy before.
Im trying to remember who was responsible for that...
Oh yeah, now I remember. Berlusconi.
No, wait... that's who is doing it now...
I was thinking of someone else...



Mussolini! Thats who it was! Whatever happened to him?
Its coming back to me now.
Wasnt he shot in the chest, then kicked, and spat on, hung upside down on a meathook and stoned?


Check this out if you would like to see just some of the day-to-day censorship the Italian citizenry are subjected to.
http://www.chillingeffects.org/search-c ... le.it&q1='
Try a few searches. Kinda crazy. Never guessed that was happening did you?

Here's is another interesting article on Italian censorship:
http://edri.blogactiv.eu/2008/09/26/the ... italy-but/

I really hope that the Italian public wakes up and starts doing something about this type of thing.
Maybe pulling the plug on Italy would be a much needed slap in the face to incite and wake the general public.

Related reading for further proof that this isnt a bad joke like the one I told:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/ ... italy.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100224/ap_ ... ogle_trial
http://www.dailytech.com/Italy+Convicts ... e17766.htm
http://www.tgdaily.com/business-and-law ... ourt-rules
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2360396,00.asp
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8533695.stm
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... TopStories
http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/24/technol ... onviction/


Update:

I swear I may strangle someone over this situation.

Heres a generalization of some comments Ive heard.
Note C = comment and R = rebuttal.

C: Google is responsible for what it has on its servers much like a property owner is responsible for what happens on their property.
R: The government is not responsible when you crash your car while using their property (the road). You are not responsible if 20 white supremacists decide to hold a meeting on your front lawn without your knowledge.

C: Google should filter the videos posted.
R: No way is that possible, especially when a site like youtube is free. Also, if by some miracle Google was able to have a staff that was able to keep up with the amount of video uploaded daily - (every minute, 20 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/t/fact_sheet - for once I will let you do the math on how many staffers working 8 hour shifts that would take, please email me your answers and equatations ) who are these staffers to decide whats deemed "unacceptable"? Whats acceptable in some countries isnt in others. Its a nearly if not completely impossible task.

Back on point though, This ruling is scary.
What this means is that if a host is responsible for what its users say/do, then by that logic the following applies:

All telecom companies are liable for the content on their wires if I call someone up and abuse them. Imagine prank callers bankrupting the telcoms from the resulting lawsuits?

Carriers and shippers are liable for their content if I deem a package or item I receive to be offensive in some manner (OMG this packaging looks kind of like nipples!)

If I get on a flight and get into a confrontation with another passenger, the airline is liable.

I got an email about Viagra that I find offensive! The ISP and email provider are liable!

I just received my newspaper and found an article offensive. Looks to me like the post system has a lawsuit on its hands!

I typed "tit mouse" into googles image search and was offended at some of the results! Googles liable AGAIN!

Some kid just walk past me wearing a t-shirt with an offensive slogan on it. Quick! Sue the retailer he bought it froms executives!

I could go on and on (actually, I kind of did... sorry) but to summarize, the way to solve this issue in my opinion is to just completely pull your services from the entire country. Let them sit there with no outside stimulus related to you in any way that may possibly offend them and cause them to file more lawsuits.
Maybe the affected public will start removing the people in power that are making these incredibly stupid decisions.
Maybe.

Of all the emails and comments I usually get on any of the tutorials I do, the prevailing one is ususually:
"How do you know all this stuff?" or "where did you learn all of this?"
To answer that, some schooling, some work/field experience and some self taught.

I often wonder why more people dont ask why I only really release "simple" tutorials. This is mainly because Im attempting to raise some interest to those who may not normally have any.
For example, if you visit informationleak, particularly the boards/forums, you will see a good number of people that are already pretty tech savvy. They often specialize in different fields and areas of tech and have their strong (and weak) points.
My tutorials are pretty simple and basic, and are usually aimed at grabbing the attention of a person that either is new to the technology field, or new to the particular field Im discussing in that particular tutorial.

You may also realize that I dont go 100% in-depth with a lot of my tutorials. They are designed to get the interested person up and running with a mild degree of confidence and able to start looking into the area further if they are so inclined. I try to pique interest and curiosity and mainly creativity. The reasoning behind this is if the person is interested in doing something they should be able to look into it further, ideally from the official source (manuals, documentation) but often they find what they are looking for in communities dedicated to whatever that something is. This way they can learn and discuss with like-minded folks.

Long story short, give a man a fish and you feed him for a day... teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime, or more to the point in this case may come up with something new and exciting, even if just new and exciting to them.

Why am I saying this? Because I love getting emails from people explaining how they took something they learned from me to the next level. The very fact that they took the time to tell me about it is awesome, since it shows a level of passion and pride in what they have achieved. Sometimes theres some really neat things that I end up doing myself, other times I may suggest something and that turns into something else, and so on.

... and to answer [email address withheld] - Of course I have a disaster recovery plan. I keep my resume in an off-site storage facility.

So whats the point of this?
1. I felt the need to write something.
2. Dont ask me how to hack. You already know how... with creativity.
3. Happy hacking!

This post was in the txt of posts that never make it.
What you say?
Welllllllll
I rant and write about a ton of stuff. You never read most of it.
I write many articles that never make it on this site either due to my never finishing or by the time I do I find the topic isnt so topical anymore, I lose interest or Im just too lazy.
I usually have a txt file that has a bunch of topics going on simultaneously with reference links and such, not to mention a bunch of stuff I wrote I never put up that eventually gets deleted.

For example right now I have something on Symbian going open source and Comcast changing its name.
Both articles probably arent ever going to make it to this page. I already find its old news.

Anyways - Heres one that didnt make it... well, I guess it did.
Whatever. Have an article I didnt ever mean to post.
============================================================
Verizon probably didnt do it for teh lulz.
============================================================
So Ive gotten a few emails from people asking me to look into 4chan apparently being blocked. Honestly I didnt see the big story, but now I see there are reports of it on cnet, pcmag, the twsj, etc. Sheesh.

Ok, first off, I hate 4chan. I dont go there. I normally have better things to do.
As far as Im concerned, its at best the Mos Eisley of the Internet ("wretched hive of scum and villainy").

So anyways suddenly it seems (if 3 days ago counts as sudden - thats February 5, 2010) there are reports that Verizon Wireless is blocking access to 4chan! OH NOES!

While I could give a rats ass about 4chans existence, I DO care about an ISP blocking a website, especially when they do not have a reason. So firstly, damn you Verizon for putting me on a path to agreeing with 4chan on something.

Now then, I began to look into it briefly and dug past all the jackasses hype of "OMFG WE R SO BAD THEY BLOCK US NOW WE R MOAR AWSUM" and noticed its not even all of Verizons network thats in question here. Its Verizon Wireless. So if you have FIOS, or regular Verizon DSL service, all is well.
Ok, people are flipping out about their mobile access to 4chan. Hmmm. Ok, whatever. Still weird as far as Im concerned that it would be blocked on one network but not the other.
This was starting to sound less and less like censorship. In fact, it had a familiar ring to it.

(Flashback - not too long ago ATT blocked 4chan, for its participation in DDOS and other attacks. It presumably turns out that some folks that have some beef with 4chan (or in desperate need of "lulz") spoofed some IPs to make it appear as if these attacks were coming from the 4chan site, when in fact they were not and thusly ATT blocked traffic to 4chan in a defensive maneuver to protect its network.)

I will spare you the bull and get right to the hypothesis.
Hows this for a guess on whats going on:

Someone realized that by making it look like a DDOS was coming from 4chans IP, causing 4chan to be blocked by ATT to protect from the attack, thus making 4chan inaccessible to millions of users (ATT) - which in effect created a DDOS-like effect on 4chan itself from the ISP (also, well played imo) worked very well and decided to do it again, but this time with Verizon.
Apparently, some investigation shows that its the return route to Verizon thats being blocked.
The packets can reach 4chan from VZW but 4chan cannot respond those packets as they simply get dropped, which sounds like attack defenses to me. Unfortunately for 4chan users the way tcp/ip works relies on communication both ways. Actually in a funny side-circumstance, 4chan users trying to access the site but cannot access it are just flooding the site with requests and forcing the server to send replies that are being dropped, which can cause among other things some buffer overflows, which is kind of almost hilarious to me in this particular context.

Update:
Relax people.
You can surf 4chan again from your mobiles at the time of this post with no fear of web filters on your mobile devices.
Just wait though. Heres another free prediction.
The uproar the mobile network blockage caused shows the popularity of browsing 4chan with mobile devices.
So how long until they finally figure out posting viruses for PCs isnt the way to go, and get their new lulz from dropping mobile malware?
When it happens, just remember they arent "cutting edge" for thinking it up.

Perhaps you are have been unaware of a court case involving Australian ISP iiNet and the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT). Well, to bring you up to speed a bunch of movie studios were going after this ISP called iiNet because they felt that iiNet had failed to take steps/action to stop illegal file sharing by its customers.

...but guess what?
They lost. Oh snap!

Not only did they lose, they had a nice precedent set.
But wait, Im getting ahead of myself. Lets hear what the judge had to say:


and also as a bonus:


Ok, so this means that “the mere provision of access to internet is not the means to infringement” in Australia... which makes total sense, to me at least. I mean, pretty much this says that an ISP is simply a service provider, which supplies a service to a customer. They aren't responsible for what that customer does with it.
Hooray! Logic!

Now before I get a bunch of emails about this, let me put it this way:
If this IS NOT how the decision should have went, then whats next?

Could one potentially say that its ok to sue Chevy for selling the armed bank robbers in the North Hollywood shootout a Chevrolet Celebrity?

Better yet, sue the Gov't for allowing access to the road that the criminals used to both get to and escape the bank?

How about suing a hardware store for selling someone spray paint that they used for graffiti?

Maybe go after a power company for supplying the power a marijuana grower powered his light with?

Can the water company be charged for "allowing" the water in the above marijuana scenario to be used for illegal purposes?

What people choose to use a provided service for is not the responsibility of the service provider -
it is the responsibility of the end user as an individual to abide by the law! </strong emotional opinion>

Not all is roses with this ruling, however. This is what the losing side had to say about the situation:


Wait... whats that? A silver lining to that last statement?
Hmmm...maybe. Especially when you consider that in America, the sheer cost of lawsuits has forced the RIAA and MPAA to scale back their legal campaigns against individual citizens.
You need money to pay all those lawyers.
Of course fines of $1.9M for 24 songs doesn't come down to anything but extortion anyway but apparently that's another matter all together.

Further reading:
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/3 ... vour_iinet
http://www.iia.net.au/index.php/compone ... gment.html
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/3 ... t_decision

PS - yeah I totally ripped a bunch of that from lightning - who had comment #43 @ http://www.computerworld.com.au/article ... right_case
Why? Because I agree and couldn't have put it better myself. Thanks.

Ok, so here's something I thought was cool. I heard today that some scientists, particularly Dr. Mark Dennis from the University of Bristol and Professor Miles Padgett from Glasgow University tied some light into a knot.

Woa.

Seriously though, here's the idea behind it, simplified to an extreme.
There are these things called optical vortices. To reduce it to the ridiculous, its like making light kind of spiral out in a direction rather than in a straight line. I suppose you could use the analogy of a toy slinky, with the slinky rings being the light and all going in one direction. What you would see if you shone that light on something flat like a wall would be a ring of light rather than a single beam.

Ok, so these guys took this to the next level as I understand it by creating optical vortices, and then manipulating them into knots.

So for those of you who are a bit behind, to sum it up some dudes made light travel in a spiral, then tied that into knots. Yeah, that. What did you do today?

So what?
Well....
The thing about optical vortices is that they can actually induce torque from the spiraling effect, depending on how many twists the light does in one wavelength and the more spirals (higher number of twists) the faster the light is spinning around the axis so the more torque it has. They can also be used to trap, manipulate, and even transform small volumes of matter.

Lets not get it twisted, (Ha ha, see what I did there?) we aren't talking about much force. Its enough force to work on a micrometer scale. Think of micrometer scale bulldozers, or micro pumps with no moving parts, or sorting or mixing particles and stuff like that.

What else? Well, computers use electrons which have two states, zero and one. That's 1 and 0... You know, binary. That's how they work. Now you have the possibility of quantum computing that uses light to encode and store information, and optical vortices theoretically have an infinite number of states because there is no limit to the topological charge (how many twists the light does in one wavelength) so this could lead to faster data manipulation and higher bandwidth. There's even talk of using this technology on radio waves to reduce radio-frequency congestion. Im not even going to get into that right now. Long story short(er) there's a ton of cool stuff you can do with this.

Ok, I hear you now writing me emails... "Yeah Halla, but that was all doable before this whole knot tying thing. So whats the big deal?"

The big deal is the fact that tying these optical vortices in knots proves we have much more advanced optical control, and so we can now do even more with optical vortices than previously thought.

For example you can manipulate these optical vortices to project hundreds or thousands of simultaneous three dimensional configurations, each with unique characteristics and make some seriously sophisticated nano-craziness, and who only knows what else.

I thought it was cool. Hopefully you do too.
Here are some links on the topic to blow your mind and/or waste your day:


http://www.physics.nyu.edu/grierlab/hot.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... screwed-up
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_vortex
http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences ... t-in-knots

Later people!
(PS - H4z3, you were the tie-breaker on this post. I hope you liked it. Now build me some nanobots!)