Part of the reason why I enjoy US politics so much[1] is because the power structures are _so_ intertwined and _so_ corrupt[2] that it makes for wonderful absurdity.
The current hot mega-powerdemons are the friendly, fire-first-ask-questions-later folks at Blackwater. As reported extensively Blackwater have been involved in the deaths of Iraqi civilians in several incidents in Baghdad over the last months. The most recent incident, in which it is claimed that as many as 20 Iraqi civilians died, catapulted them to the top of the worldwide mega-demon charts. Haliburton must be totally bummed out about this.

Blackwater’s contractors fired their weapons 195 times — or an average of 1.4 times a week — from the beginning of 2005 through the second week of September [...].
In over 80 percent of the cases, Blackwater reports that its forces fired first, [...].
CNN

Sons of Bitches

So just how fucked up is Blackwater? Here’s their About us

Blackwater was founded in 1997 from a clear vision developed from an understanding of the need for innovative, flexible training and operational solutions to support security and peace, and freedom and democracy everywhere.

When last did you hear of a company started ‘to support security and peace, and freedom and democracy’? Whose freedom and democracy are we talking about here? Your freedom to drive a big truck and hoist a red flag? Fuck you.

Home Base

You’ll also be happy to know that at Blackwater you can shop online for branded caps, t-shirts, gun accessories and inspirational posters at the Blackwater Proshop[3]. So not only are they building a private army, paid for by US taxpayers, but they’ve also seen the need to diversify into lifestyle gear[4]. Anyways, if you’re visiting Blackwater’s site to get an application form[5] to make those big bucks over in ol’ Iraqland I suppose you may as well buy something, right? Guns and branded gear from the Proshop – you’re a pro now.
Are you puking yet?

Death has never looked this good

Hell, they even have kids apparel.

Raise them right

But the absurdity of a bunch of mercenaries selling glossy visions of bringing freedom to the uncivilized world through the wearing of rugged outdoor gear aside, Blackwater is knee deep in the types of military-industrial complex relationships that make US politics such a circus. Political Friendster’s Blackwater USA entry is littered with the usual[6] collection of powerful families, Christian groups, multi-nationals and inter-marrying of the US elite.
And these types of relationships pay off in cases like the legislation passed by the US congress yesterday that makes defense contractors operating in other countries(i.e. mercenaries), such as Blackwater, subject to US criminal law. Seems like a no-brainer, right? It is, the legislation was approved by a landslide majority of 389 votes to 30. But before the vote the Bush administration released the following statement in opposition ‘The bill would have unintended and intolerable consequences for crucial and necessary national security activities and operations.’
Translation, GW will veto the fuck out of that bill, regardless of how much support it has in congress.

The world is unrecognisable from the one my parents knew, it’s unrecognisable from the one I knew as a child. But the world is no less insidious or brutal, no less meaningless – it has been broken beyond repair for thousands of years. But we live in an unprecedented state of hyper-corruption, hyper-consumerism, hyper-death. And in that world Blackwater is what thecages is about.

[1] The other, possibly even more entertaining, reason why I enjoy it is because of the bizarre pageantry. The US presidential race events are run like a rock shows/revivalist church meetings. Hillary-ious.
[2] And I don’t mean the nice kind of corrupt found in dictatorships and military junta’s all over the world. There’s a special kind of corruption that exists in the US, epitomised by the revolving door.
[3] Isn’t that name trademarked?
[4] Boing Boing reported on this in 2006
[5] There’s something special about an application form that lists the types of guns that they will teach you to shoot.
[6] Don’t get me wrong, it’s not as if I’m claiming that the US right wing is the only side of the coin that moves in this terrifying world of secret handshakes. The left does it to. Everyone does it! That’s what makes it so much fun.

Darkness, darkness, darkness
Work is swallowing me whole.

Torrential rain causes flooding in the UK while the moles float drowned in puddles near my home.

I hate Facebook.

I hate Facebook and have started working on a post about it that requires me to create a profile on said hated social networking[1] site.

Given that I’m not exactly thrilled about handing FB some of my personal info. I had to create a new email address to which it could barf its enrollment confirmation.
I use Google for email[2] so this meant that I would have to invite myself to a new account. This, of course, meant that I needed a temporary email account that I could invite. So I ended up creating two new email accounts just to be able to create one FB profile, just so that I could get a screenshot of FB to dislike.

This, of course, meant new passwords – which brings me to my story.

lockdown

I currently have five active passwords, excluding the ones I use for work purposes.
They vary in strength and how often I rotate them based on what they are used for. In terms of strength they range from simple words, through associative phrases, complex concatenations of words with character substitutions all the way through to randomly generated garbage. Strangely the strength doesn’t seem to affect how often I feel I need to rotate a certain password.

I also use the passwords for groups of accounts. The weakest I never rotate and it eventually just ends up being discarded when I stop using the particular group of accounts[3]. I use a stronger password for accounts that I intend keeping but that don’t link to me personally. An even stronger password protects accounts that link to me personally. I limit the number of these strictly. Interestingly, this is one of only two passwords that are not at all associative – it’s just a phrase that somehow seemed right at the time and has stuck. I guess it says something about me that I want to have my very personal identifier be something that really has no connection to me as a person[4]. From there on the strengthening passwords are used for accounts that have a legal bearing and for technical, administrative accounts. By the time it comes to these passwords they are either long mangled phrases or simply a bunch of random characters/numbers.
There’s something satisfying about a password that cannot be pronounced in a conventional sense (though I do remember it phonetically).

Oh, and there’s one more – the password to my wireless router. I was so paranoid when I set it up that I chose a vicious phrase with a variety of crazi-time grooviness mixed in. I don’t remember it. Shit.

So what’s the point of me sharing my password profile with the world and thereby quite possibly upping the brute force attacks that this very site is likely to sustain? It’s about the number of passwords that I use. Is there anyone in the world who uses only one password and if so, do they know what they are setting themselves up for?
I once met a woman who used the same PIN for her cellphone, bank debit card and luggage. I just smiled politely and nodded when she told me this.

Where does the balance lie between stupidity and paranoia? How many passwords does it make sense to have? The question is probably not relevant. I don’t use sets of passwords to limit the damage that could be inflicted if one or more were to be compromised, but because they (and the accounts that go with them) separate my time online into layers of personal involvement.
Some passwords survive longer[5] than the accounts that they protect.

[1] I don’t network – never have been able to, never have bothered to learn how to do it. My bad? That’s part of my gripe with FB.
[2] don’t get me wrong, it’s not just FB that I’m nervous about – Google also has more of me on-line than what I would like
[3] i.e. loose interest in
[4] it’s somehow far more boring than the other
[5] the best passwords are the ones that change shape over time

Finally! After more years than I care to admit to, I finally have the internet at home. Yes it’s slow and expensive, but it is a kick in the teeth to the South African telecomms hegemony.

South Africa is pretty much at the back of the queue as far as the availability of internet service providers and bandwidth are concerned (due to archaic legislation and a bloated regulatory body).

The best way to stimulate economic growth is for a government to provide access to free telecommunications to all its people.
Nicholas Negroponte

So here’s to the death of Telkom and the rise of pervasive, uncontrollable connectivity

My first destination on the web[1]? Youtube – obviously. Me an a billion other yahoos[2].

Anarchist Guide to Flyposting

Star Trek Cribs

Daddy Yankee Gasolina

The good news is that the reason I have been very quiet over the last week or so is that we are currently preparing for the Postilion conference in March. We (the team whose name is no longer CFG[3]) are the main attraction.
Here’s a little blurb:

Interested in learning about the next generation of Postilion multi-channel and self-service financial and payment solutions?
Want to find out all about Postilion on IBM System p servers?
In the market for a settlement solution?

We’re the multi-channel guys – hooray!

View the features and functionality of the next generation of Postilion.

That’s us! We’re demoing a system which integrates a bank’s ATM/Terminal, Voice and Internet banking infrastructure into one.
Let’s hope it works.

[1] that is, after exchanging some messy emails with my hosting(host4africa – I’m not giving them an inbound link ) service about an error log that was left to grow to 932MB.
[2] pun intended?
[3] apparently calling ourselves the Community Finance Group is too limiting.

After wrestling with several automated downloading tools etc. etc. I’ve managed to collect a, hopefully, complete set of posts from http://thecages.blogspot.com.

These are now available from the blogspot archives.
What I now need to do is to add a little search engine to these.
Here are some highlights from the bloggo-days:

There has been some really arb. crap like Undies and Yaaow.
There’s also been brain farting like my extended look into ((a+1)^a) = (a^(a+1)) through the eyes of a mathematical illiterate in a1a-vs-aa1, a1a-aa1 and 2.2931662874118610315080282912508058643.

And in between the politics and the art and the music and the general time wastage there’s even been some mild blasphemy.