Internet Without Borders + HowTo

In my not so humble opinion, the Internet is an open, international medium. It shouldn't matter where you come from - once you're online, you should be able to access all public information and services. Yet it tends to happen increasingly often that some resource just tells you something like [Access denied. You are not in an approved area. Now please go have an intercourse with yourself.] which is a thing that irritates me.

It's a long day at work and I wanted to refresh myself with some music. Blast, I had no music on my new laptop (ThinkPad T500, wee!) yet, so I tried to use Pandora, which I remember as a very clever, customizable and enjoyable streaming music service. To much disappointment, I was greeted with the message "We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S." I wonder who's behind this - my guess is RIAA and their cronies... No matter; my patience was gone, and my cyber artillery armed and ready for a devastating barrage.

A simple message for everyone who would impose borders upon the Internet:
I fart in the general direction of your futile and annoying restriction attempts.
And I can teach everyone else and their granny how to do it, too.

Fortunately, there is a bane of all network censors, overseers, or other control freaks, and it goes by the name of Tor. For you non-geeks, it's a magical black box that gives you privacy on the internet - feel free to skip the next paragraph.

Tor is a free, open-source onion routing network - to put it simply, your network traffic goes to its destination through several steps, making it practically untracable. The entry node knows who you are but not what you're doing. The exit node knows what you are doing but not who you are. And each of the transit nodes knows two other nodes you are using, but not who you are, nor what you're doing. Your internet service provider sees an encrypted stream of data going from you to the entry node, and has no way to know who you're really communicating with, and finally, the service you are really accessing only sees the last Tor layer (the exit node), and has no idea it's actually serving someone else. Someone, maybe, in a different country...

Bob doesn't know who Alice is, and no one knows Alice is communicating with Bob.

So, I will provide a brief guide to make an unsuspecting service think you are in a country of your choice, and also to make it practically unfeasible for someone to spy on your traffic. Let's suppose you want to fool the Pandora service that you are a good honest average US citizen, to get some great music streaming your way.

First, download and install Tor. Most of you will want the first stable Windows version.

Second, need to make Tor use only the exit nodes located in your country of choice, in this case, the USA. Tor uses the torrc file for configuration, and it must be edited. On Windows, there's a quick link to do it under Tor Start menu folder. On the end of this file, append these two lines:

StrictExitNodes 1
exitnodes exitnode1, exitnode2, ...

The tricky part is to get a list of nodes in the country of your choice. Here are a few from the USA: jalopy, nixnix, AoF, torxmission, mirnaloy, uday, logs, server4, peter0294218d7, tiberius, thesmokeroom, yamarit, MackDaddy, TorVille, ArulSelvan, linquist1, Doodles123, Blackmage, blackbag, sweetYellow, infogtor, tonkator

For other countries, or when these cease to be valid, another list has to be created. Fortunately, Vidalia (a part of the Tor bundle) lets us get an overview of the Tor network and find the nodes manually:


And finally, the application you are using needs to be configured to use Tor to route its traffic, at least for the destination required. Tor creates a proxy server on localhost:9050 which needs to be used. There are various means of doing this, a .pac (proxy autoconfig) file with this content can be used to configure your browser to use Tor for www.pandora.com site - just replace it with a different domain name for another service.

function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
{
if (shExpMatch(host, "www.pandora.com"))return "SOCKS 127.0.0.1:9050";
return "DIRECT";
}

Check your browser documentation or ask Google to see how to configure its proxy.

Done? Congratulations! Now you are ready to browse around the dumb restriction. Using Tor may slow the service down a little, but I find it really sufficient to seamlessly stream music at ~200 kbps. And this all was just an example - Tor is immensely useful for overcoming all kinds of network limitations, while keeping you anonymous. But about that maybe later.

Hehe, it really feels great to do a little hacking, doesn't it? Enjoy!

Shut up already!

Slashdot reports: "An editor for the Telegraph, Roger Highfield, recently volunteered to allow a UK researcher to shut off the speech center of his brain with a high-powered magnetic pulse. Regular speech is controlled by a section of the brain called Broca's area. Once the precise location is determined in the subject, a magnetic pulse can temporarily disrupt speech without impairing other cognitive functions. The link contains a video in which you can watch Highfield stutter and twitch while attempting to recite a nursery rhyme. A later test shows that he's able to sing the rhyme without difficulty, since singing is controlled in a different part of the brain (as you may remember from Scott Adams' speech disorder)."

Cool. I wonder who will be the first to commercialize this technology and advertise: Now it costs only $79.99 to save your marriage!  ;-)

Ladies and gents, please welcome psionics!

Slashdot reports that "OCZ Technology is putting their neural impulse actuator (NIA) into mass production for shipping next week. The device, aimed at gamers, works by reading bioptentials. 'These include activities of the brain, the autonomous nervous system and muscles — all of which are captured using embrace sensors located on the NIA's headband, amplified and sent to the PC via USB 2.0.' Users of the NIA will be able to control their in-game movements using only the power of mind. The device is priced at around $600USD." (Overclock3D reports a price of $300.)

Wicked! I can't wait to try this baby out. :-) Also, the number and coolness factor of applications I see of this technology as it matures, is uncanny... And wait till teh_pwnerer gets his hands on this! "liek i can pwn n00bz with me brain now lol!!!11 gg kthx"

The Holy Godmachine of Neuropsychology

Slashdot presented me with a real treat tonight. Obviously, scientists are able to read MRI of religious people's God proximity encounters, and then replicate them for a different person altogether.

"Scientific American is reporting on scientific work done to map the euphoric religious feelings within the brain. As a result, it's now quite possible to experience 'proximity to God' via a special helmet: 'In a series of studies conducted over the past several decades, Persinger and his team have trained their device on the temporal lobes of hundreds of people. In doing so, the researchers induced in most of them the experience of a sensed presence — a feeling that someone (or a spirit) is in the room when no one, in fact, is — or of a profound state of cosmic bliss that reveals a universal truth. During the three-minute bursts of stimulation, the affected subjects translated this perception of the divine into their own cultural and religious language — terming it God, Buddha, a benevolent presence or the wonder of the universe."

Well, scientists are able to create a deep spiritual experience at a press of a button. I wonder how that makes God feel. Does the machine make him come close to the person personally, or just replicate the effect without involving any actual deities?

Now I definitely need to get one of these godhelmets of my own. If for no other reason, then to find out how spiritual junkies feel. Then I could finally have a god of my own, one who would actually come to me at times.

Or then again, maybe this, just as all other scientific endeavors to undermine the spiritual authority, is just a fake. How? The Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage, of course.

Mister Persinger doesn't hold back, though, and keeps effing the ineffable. From the article:

"Persinger thus argues that religious experience and belief in God are merely the results of electrical anomalies in the human brain. He opines that the religious bents of even the most exalted figures—for instance, Saint Paul, Moses, Muhammad and Buddha—stem from such neural quirks. The popular notion that such experiences are good, argues Persinger in his book Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs (Praeger Publishers, 1987), is an outgrowth of psychological conditioning in which religious rituals are paired with enjoyable experiences. Praying before a meal, for example, links prayer with the pleasures of eating. God, he claims, is nothing more mystical than that."

LOL. Makes me think it would be cool to amplify effects of the godmachine, so that it has an area effect. Then, you could just proclaim yourself to be god, and all the poor confused people would believe you, because they would feel it. Awesome. My life finally has a meaning again! :-D

Mother Russia, father bomb...

After last month's resumption of regular patrols of strategic bombers, which were suspended after the 1991 Soviet Union breakup, Red Army* flexes its muscles yet again, this time by testing of Father Of All Bombs, an air delivered fuel-air bomb, yielding the equivalent of 44 tons of TNT. That makes it approximately four times as powerful as US Army's MOAB. (Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or Mother Of All Bombs.) It's not the bomb I want to talk about, though, it's the propaganda and attitude of Russian officials that caught me breathless.
"The tests have shown that the new air-delivered ordnance is comparable to a nuclear weapon in its efficiency and capability,"' says Col.-Gen. Alexander Rukshin, deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces. Gotta love that guy. This statement is misleading at the very least, because most nuclear bombs have way more power than that. For example, Fat Man, one of the first atomic bombs ever used, that was dropped on Nagasaki, had a yield of cca. 21 kilotons of TNT. That gives the mighty FOAB credit to merely 0.2 % of Fat Man's destructive power, which, while comparable, is nowhere close.

See the Russian report video for yourself:


But Alex is just awesome, he doesn't stop there. Sharing his wisdom, (estimated to be at least 23, ;-)) with the world, he claims, that the bomb is "environmentally friendly". Excuse me? Okay, maybe it does not have nuclear fallout with long half-life, but calling a bomb worth of 44 tons of TNT, that leaves "lunar landscape" in its wake, "environmentally friendly" is just outright funny.

Tu-160, the bomber that dropped daddy of all bombs earlier this week.

However, funny turns to insanely idiotic. As bloomberg.com reports:
The new weapon disperses a cloud of explosive material that is set off by a charge and produces "an ultrasonic shockwave and an incredibly high temperature," Perviy Kanal said on its Web site. After the blast, "the soil looks like a lunar landscape," according to the report.

The new bomb carries fewer explosives than the U.S. device, while the temperature at the center of its blast is twice as high and the area of damage much greater, Perviy Kanal said.

"This has made it possible to reduce the accuracy requirements and made it cheaper, which is necessary in the current situation," Yuri Balyko, head of the Defense Ministry's 30th Central Research Institute, told the channel.

The new weapon will allow Russia "to ensure the nation's security and at the same time battle international terrorism in any situation and in any region," Rukshin said.

Oh my. I feel dumber just for having read this exhibition of pure wisdom. So we have a weapon that turns an enormous area to lunar landscape, which, in turn, allows us to reduce the accuracy requirements, and, therefore, we can use it to battle international terrorism in any situation and in any region! Holy zombie Jesus, Russian military brains are just precious! :-D Now, if I were a Chechnyan partisan, that would be all I needed to hear to capture a building in the middle of Moscow, and wait for the brave Red Army to level their capital city with one of these babies.

__
* I know it's not called Red Army anymore. But hey, it seems that not many things have changed apart from the name...

Laser spy microphone for $3

Whee, that looks interesting, MacGyver would be proud. It probably is not one of the most convenient and inconspicuous surveillance methods, but hey, not everyone is 007. :-) I just have hard time believing that the signal from the photo-cell can get strong enough without being amplified somehow.
(http://youtube.com/watch?v=YVas2_bt6xc)