Starving poor people with guns and nothing to lose scare the rich; their presence in large numbers is one major component of a pre-revolutionary situation.
I like his books, but I don’t always agree with Charlie Stross when it comes to various other things. On this point, however, and in the rest of the post, I can’t but feel that he hits the nail square on the head.

Source: antipope.org

Adblock Plus, the sophisticated surfer’s best friend, is trying something that is sure to make waves: Adblock Plus is going to start showing “Acceptable Ads” by default. Yep. There’s no arguing that this flies in the face of, well, Adblock’s very name, but there’s actually some very strong logic behind it if you give it a little bit of thought. The assumption is, however, that most user’s won’t give it a little thought, which is why it’s going to be enabled by default. Don’t worry though, you can turn it off if you really, really want to.
Thank you, Adblock. As a content creator that tries to keep a site afloat using advertisement revenue, I salute you.

Source: geekosystem.com

Some of you may have heard of the Megaupload video which Universal Music Group has had removed from YouTube. Megaupload claims it is entirely their property. UMG seems to believe it violates their copyright and has twice ordered it removed from YouTube. On Tech News Today we exercised our fair use rights to comment on the story by playing some of the video.

Our episode has now been removed from YouTube at UMG’s request. Even if UMG does have a copyright issue in the Megaupload video, they do not have the right to silence commentary on their actions.

Tom Merritt, host of Tech News Today on twit.tv fights the good fight.

Source: plus.google.com

Ekstropodium

I seem to have stumbled onto a mystery on the Internet; a mystery that just becomes more and more astounding the further I dig into it. It all began when I was searching the webs for news from Congo, a country that I will be visiting in a month’s time (Brazzaville, not Kinshasa). One of the sites I landed found durnig the search was www.congoportal.com, which I opened up in a separate tab to peruse when the time came. Once I’d gone through the other tabs and checked out this Congo Portal, I was met with a single block of text, black on white background:

It is necessary to understand only that about fifteen years ago anybody still knew nothing about the Fashion house of “Ekstropodium”. On that place where now there is an office and a demonstration complex of this known firm, the shop of ready-to-wear clothes standard and not prospering completely not settled down. All has begun that the daughter of the owner of this shop has married for young, but as time has shown, very presented fashion designer. They have spent the honeymoon rather unusually. With group of friends-enthusiasts they have thought up and is simple for ridiculous money have prepared grandiose, to measures of a silent country town, advertising show. This almost amateurish action became the beginning of the tradition, transformed anything before not allocated of other small town in the most attractive place for those who has connected the life (though in some measure) with the fashion world. Also it would be very quite good to take an interest, the share price, mentioned in the will.

As you can imagine, I was confused.

Firstly, the paragraph is written in slightly stilted English; obviously not by a native speaker. Secondly, the subject is quite obtuse - especially this fashion house “Ekstropodium”. I Googled the name and got three results. CongoPortal.com was one of them; the other two were sponsor-a-minedog.org and inet-sec.org. Visit the two and see what you get. My analysis follows:

Firstly, sponsor-a-minedog.org is a page whose title is “Etti Sarotti”, but it also has references to things named “Grinvere D”, “Eric Katler”, and “Dzhudit Stoner”, later “Stonera”. The other Ekstropodium link, inet-sec.org, contains no new information or names, but just a very weird bunch of similar text; black on white and generally weird.

I decided to look into these other references from the second link, and I had no idea how deep the rabbit hole would become. Let’s start with ”Grinvere D”, which only appeared on three places on the Internet. The first was sponsor-a-minedog, the other two were www.videojournalismus.org and www.ntti.org.

Videojournalismus offers us a new name, “Martha Kritts” along with the obligatory strange text.

The other link, NTTI, which titles itself “National Television Transport”, brings Ekstropodium back, but spelled differently this time. “Ekstropodiuma” has two more mentions on the Internet. We also got the name ”Ronen Kritts” (Related to Martha Kritts?) and a repeat mention of Dzhudit Stoner, only this time without the “Stoner” bit added on.

Digging into what “Eric Katler” yields, I found a veritable treasure trove of information. I won’t quote them, but feel free to visit them:

I’ve read through them all and wondered about them for a while now, and I’m still nowhere near making sense of it all. There seem to be conflicting reports and a whole host of new characters introduced here, not all of which seem to jive well with each other.

A journalist named David Soms is mentioned in Scenari-Territorial, a “Centre Bermana” is mentioned in two different articles, and apparently Etti Sarotti is taken there in grave condition. Also, Etti Sarotti is somebody’s niece, but also somebody is the son of somebody else’s late wife Ronen Kritts. There’s a Mister Stafs and a Mister Shefner, who seem to be Criminal Police in the town of Sent-Riovera.

This is all becoming way too mysterious for me to dig into properly, so I’m setting up a Wiki so that I can summon the full power of the Internet to analyze this with me. I need your help. Please, join me in the examination of this mystery and help me dig into it! I won’t sleep well until we’ve figured this one out! Link to the Wiki coming soon.

HERE IS THE WIKI. I’m still working on getting all the info I have on there, but feel free to join me as we search for more!

Edit: I’ve found that many - if not all - of these domains are owned by the same person, and I’ve dug up the e-mail address to him. I’ve sent him an e-mail asking what’s actually going on here. Not too optimistic for an answer, but we’ll see.