part 2 of where the world is now, a quickie

Ok so between my first post about the world and this one, lots of things have been happening.

on january 18th wikipedia, google, flickr and thousands of other web sites had either gone dark or added additional pages to protest and bring attention to the SOPA/PIPA bills being strongarmed through congress. it was the largest recorded infonets protest ever, the presence was pretty intense.

on january 19th, feds brought down megaupload.com without so much as a whisper of due process, arresting people in new zealand and confiscating u.s. servers in virginia. within minutes the internets troops began rallying. for the remainder of the day and all the way through right to this minute, hacktivist group anonymous has been dropping government and mpaa web sites using thousands of anonymous ddos attacks from all over the world. theres a program called LOIC(low orbit ion cannon) that anyone can use to help anonymous etc flood servers.

i spent part of the day in an anon-run irc chat coordinating attacks and constantly receiving updates on the operation.

i watched as they systematically took down the department of justice website, fbi.gov, mpaa.org, universal, etc etc etc.

it was messy but vaguely organized, with people from all over the internet chiming in to let everyone know what was up or down.
"mpaa down in lithuania, fbi.gov down in brazil, mpaa chugging in u.s., down in canada, fbi.gov back up in argentina, etc."

the chatrooms caption changed depending on the prime target at any point, which changed every half hour or so. it was a mix of noobs like myself figuring out how to use LOICs and HOICs and skilled cats using all kinds of things i didnt understand, but it sounded like they had a lot more power to work with than i did on my toshiba tablet.

aside from this, the supreme court on the same day had ruled to make re-copywriting public domain works legal, which essentially gives corporations yet another way to own things they shouldnt. this affects anyone using public domain works to make a living, such as orchestras now being forced to pay licensing fees to play certain songs they could legally play a week ago.

also there was a rather large protest at UC riverside, on again the same day, in which occupy l.a. joined students protesting the constant enrollment fee hikes. several hundred if not thousands of people eventually pooled, as did roughly 200 police officers. rubber bullets were fired into the crowd injuring a few, and a professor was arrested for allegedly assaulting an officer. the UC regency meeting was soon after closed to the public.

america, right now. november 29th, 2011.

the worlds a wreck right now and this place is no exception, in fact its probably the cause.

theres some particularly curious bills going through congress right now, they are called the "National Defense Authorization Act", the "Stop Online Piracy Act" and the "Protect IP Act". coupled with some of the other things going on including police departments with flying drones and the occupy movement/anonymous connections, it points towards certain directions the united states' focus is turning, now that we have all of these middle eastern wars handled and everything. seems like theyve had a lot of time to perfect large scale crowd control over there.






a new provision of the national defense authorization act give presidents the power to imprison anyone anywhere, indefinitely, without charge or trial.

“A ‘sleeper provision’ deep inside defense bills pending before Congress could become the single biggest hand-over of unchecked war authority from Congress to the executive branch in modern American history.”

new bits of the national defense authorization act

the aclu article

the act would “permit the federal government to indefinitely detain American citizens on American soil, without charge or trial, at the discretion of the President,”






the Stop Online Piracy Act is a bill that will effectively boot up americas version of the great firewall of china, brought to you by hollywood, the music industry and the u.s. chamber of commerce. itll give the gov the power to block any web site at any time, hold sites solely responsible for user generated/uploaded content and will make streaming copyrighted materials a felony.

SOPA(stop online piracy act)

the "Protect IP Act" was introduced by the senate. it is essentially the same thing as the house' SOPA bill.

on the surface this can and will include torrent sites, cover songs/video mashups, game/movie/music clips and protest/riot vids on youtube etc., causing them to pull probably millions of vids in fear of lawsuits, and will easily slop into being used to control the news, trends, the economy, and pretty much everything on the internet including blog newsfeeds and sites like 4chan and anonymous and anyone else they deem necessary.

a man burned himself in tiananmen square recently, but only one blogger covered it, zero chinese news coverage.

(taken by a british blogger staying in china)


google, yahoo, facebook and a load of others(pretty much the rulers of the country of "internet"), are opposing the bill

"If there is a law that requires DNSs [domain name systems] to do X, and it's passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president of the United States and we disagree with it, then we would still fight it," Schmidt told reporters at a London conference. "If it's a request, the answer is we wouldn't do it. If it's a discussion, we wouldn't do it."

"I would be very, very careful if I were a government about arbitrarily [implementing] simple solutions to complex problems,"
-eric schmidt, google ceo
meatspace tries to net the infosphere









also these things are happening:

"This is a tool that many law enforcement agencies never imagined they could have."

faa set to propose legalization of citizen drones




the occupy l.a. camp lasts another night after an all day standoff with the l.a.p.d.


occupy los angeles camp stands through another night, as of november 29th at 6:43 am

a letter clarifying the means of communication with the occupy l.a. general assembly for authorities, mayors office, lawyers, protesters, news and anyone else interested.



the camp reminds me of a story i heard from some olde timers (ha) about a place in san francisco called psycho city. it was a place people came to paint, tag up, piece, whatever right, without being hassled by the cops. the city didnt shut it down and the grafheads kept it under control, they had a little piece that was theirs and their colored it up nice and spent their time there. it got famous and more people came to paint there. after a time, the city finally shut down this mecca to graffiti.

once psycho city was closed, graffiti in san francisco exploded.


i hope thats what happens here with these camps being raided all across the country.




oh also economically brick and mortar stores are still on the decline despite a good (but terribly sickening) black friday, and chinese factory city minimum wage is up 20%. there was also a large explosion in iran in the city where its nuclear facility is located earlier today. iranian newspapers have since retracted the statement.