>>A Wisconsin man who wrote “Kip Hawley is an Idiot” on a plastic bag containing toiletries said he was detained at an airport security checkpoint for about 25 minutes before authorities concluded the statement was not a threat.
Ryan Bird, 31, said he wrote the comment about Hawley — head of the Transportation Security Administration — as a political statement. He said he feels the TSA is imposing unreasonable rules on passengers while ignoring bigger threats.<<
New security measures are coming up in November here on this site of the ocean. As a person who rarely travels I find the comments about security hassles while boarding planes quite interesting and amusing. Being firmly hooked up to the Internet I see little reason to meet people on the other side of the world - as long as I have three messengers, a conference program and two e-mail clients installed.
Call me agoraphobic, but I enjoy ‘the great indoors’. I am 51 and I have seen enough strange faces, buildings and landscapes to last three lifetimes.
The picture above is taken on one of my odysseys - somewhere near Guerrero Negro (Mexico) where I once celebrated my birthday. All the buildings of the village were plastered with posters telling ‘Gringos’ to leave Mexico. I think the photograph really shows my love for traveling.
Amongst people who run a relatively successful site the story has become a cliché. I am talking about doing your job somewhere on a Beach in Paradise, using nothing but a laptop computer hooked up to a satellite.
Have you ever taken your laptop out on a sunny day? If you did, you probably noticed that LCD screens are of little use when the sun is shining.
That is the way things are arranged in the universe. Computers are meant to stay indoors. Those who accept that fact will live a long and healthy life.
Being a journalist has become an easy job since covering wars is done from the office by parroting propaganda. Asking yourself why an amateur crusader like Milošević had to stand trial for crimes against humanity while our Western leaders are being cheered for ‘killing more men than Cecil B. DeMille’, will get you fired in ‘the free world’. Some things are apparently better left unsaid. We have all seen the well-dressed anchor men on TV interviewing the few journalists on the scene.
Would you describe the situation as a full-blown Civil War?
Not at all! People are just living the many joys of democracy while ducking for random machine gun fire and exploding vehicles. We must understand that things will get worse before they get better.
Ever since marketing people have taken over the media to sell cat food, tampons and shampoo, journalists are hired for their ability to obey. An independent attitude has become a handicap in their profession and as a result our news media are littered with crapola written by mindless desk clerks. It is getting harder every day to distinguish good propaganda from mediocre journalism.
Journalists may often be absent in war; they are always present in large numbers whenever some mega sports event is taking place and it was at one of those events - I believe it was the Olympics - that they complained about their laptops becoming useless once the sun started shining.
Of course there is a company who claims to have the answer to all that misery. I believe it is the same firm who invented the Touch Pad or a similar device that has driven more computer users to insanity than any well designed worm or virus could have ever achieved. Although I have forgotten their site address, I can still see their shining logo ‘Design Matters’.
Before I closed my browser on that thought I could not resist stealing one of their promo images to post it here for your amusement.
I am aware that there are some adorable creatures around who believe in design as a high culture art form and I often agree with them. The gadget above is definitely more than design. The ‘Lenovo’ is a highly artistic metaphor for all that needs to be said about modern journalism.
A poster commented on one of my illustrations with the suggestion that I might be color blind. Later he explained that he meant this as a compliment. I thought it was a rather odd compliment, but it reminded me of the beginning of color movies and later that day I searched my digital archive for the Brewster two-color clip consisting of a cartoon, a Chevrolet ad, a view of Newark and the New York skyline in 1929.
In the midst of a Video revolution on the web it is nice to see what film pioneers managed to produce using only two-color celluloid film in the beginning of the 20th Century. Even today I find the colors almost convincing, given the restrictions of the technique, but then again I might really be color blind.
Some of you will have noticed that AmeaNet’s server was down for about 16 hours last week. An earlier entry about this annoying and nerve wrecking event was withdrawn by me, because I was a little too emotional about it.
Fact is that we were seriously under attack by hackers once again.
Servers with lots of traffic tend to be very attractive for hackers. At first I blamed my provider because the attacks coincided with network problems on their end, but after studying thousands of lines of code and checking directory permissions I have to come to the conclusion that this was the fifth attack by Ukrainian hackers this year.
Previous attacks were quite harmless, but this one was serious. Using a security hole in our banner and classifieds program they managed to inject malicious code in our mysql database. Yesterday after 48 hours of playing detective on my own server I found the scripts they had left to nest Phishing sites on our server.
This is no small matter. Technically and legally I can be held responsible for these actions. The phishing sites were mimicking The Bank of America. It is part of a new cold war, it seems. So, I have not been sleeping very much and I have been very busy patching security holes.
I am really grateful that I once made the decision not to store credit card information on my server and to leave that task to our payment processor.
Some of you will have noticed that AmeaNet’s server was down for about 16 hours last week. An earlier entry about this annoying and nerve wrecking event was withdrawn by me, because I was a little too emotional about it.