Man! This is great! With thanks to The Barefoot Bum I have come across the Net Authority Offenders Database – a hilarious steaming pile of shit.

In short it is the site of a bunch of people who have taken it upon themselves to define a set of rules for what is not acceptable content for the internet. Here they are:

Since this policy applies to the entire Internet, we felt that it should be spelled out as simply and as universally understandable as possible.
As a result of this, we decided that the best way to write this document would be to model it after something that everyone knows and follows (or at least should!) in their daily lives already. We chose God’s own law—The Ten Commandments. To help keep things simple though, we have narrowed it down to five simple rules.

They then produce these five wonderful rules for the entire internet

1. Thou shalt not post pornographic material.
2. Thou shalt not post hateful material.
3. Thou shalt not post blasphemous material.
4. Thou shalt not post materials of an offensive political nature.
5. Thou shalt not post materials concerning bestiality, including interracial relationships.

That’s it then, five simple rules. But what about Thou shalt not post material that places thou in judgment of thy neighbours? As I recall Jesus indicated that no commandment is more important than the first two[1] and while they may argue that they are not in judgment of me, only of my postings I could still feel judged – not loved – by them. But let me make this plain, I don’t feel judged by them. At best they provide some comedy relief and an opportunity to highlight the absurd levels to which people can take a fundamentalist world view. What I should say here is that I have no problem with their world view being Christian; it would be the same if it were Muslim or Buddhist or Scientologist. The absurd bit is that they (a) reckon that they can provide a glorious umbrella of good vibes for the internet and (b) that rational people would give a shit about what they list in their database. If they had called themselves the Christian Net Authority I would have gladly accepted and supported their right to evaluate and classify my content. But the Net Authority? Fuck you.

And so, in the hopes of being included in their database and therefore being allowed to display the coveted Net Authority Violator badge I have submitted this site to them for evaluation claiming the offenses of Blasphemy and Offensive political material. Unfortunately I cannot offer anything in the way of Pornographic material, Bestiality or Hateful material (as far as I know).
I’ve also decided to provide a list of a few of my existing posts that would hopefully qualify as blasphemic or politically offensive, so if you’re here from Net Authority to check me out don’t forget to click on the links below.

Violate!

But before I get to the list I’d like to mention one more item on the Net Authority list of no-no’s which doesn’t seem to be explicitly covered by the five rules (perhaps a sixth is in order?) being:

You might think that a site that contains stories about dinosaurs for children would be innocent—but let’s stop and think about that for a moment. If you read the bible (you should, it’s great!) you know that dinosaurs never actually existed, and that God put those fossils and bones there to test our faith in Him. While the stories themselves may not contain any offensive material, the simple fact that they are about dinosaurs may cause a child to question his faith in the one true God.

I’ve written before about the Creation Museum, a popular Christian museum in the US that promotes a creation story in which dinosaurs were actually carried on board the Ark with Noah, and that people and dinosaurs co-existed to the extent that humans actually rode dinosaurs with saddles. Given the above statement from Net Authority I have also submitted the Creation Museum’s site to them for evaluation. I hope that they get canned too. Wouldn’t it be interesting if this site were to be included but the Creation Museum’s not? However, given many Christian groups’ propensity for arguments and judgment of one another, I doubt it. But, I would bet money that while I intend proudly displaying my violators badge the Creation Museum wouldn’t do the same. I await the outcome with glee.

God’s dinosaurs!

OK, on with the list.

Blasphemy

• Psychedelic Christian Worship in which I belittle Christian religious experiences as being no different to those produced by illegal psychedelic drugs.
• Buraq – Mohammed’s Wild Ride which derides the literal interpretation of the Islamic story of Mohammed’s ascent to heaven. I know that this post is about a heathen god who does not exist, but I hope that the Net Authority would consider blasphemy against gods of other religions to also count.
• Blasphemy pt1 – enough said. I still have to write part 2 in which I will publish some of my own blasphemic poetry.

Offensive political material

• Ron Paul is an Asshole – Strip Mall Advocacy is about Ron Paul (that blasphemous libertarian candidate) but it does have the word asshole in the title – ’nuff said.
• Blackwater – Guns for Hire – T-shirts for Sale is about the commercialisation of mercenaries. It criticises the very people who keep the soldiers in Iraq safe from those horrible terrorists.
• Bok van Blerk and the kids next door isn’t directly about politics, but it does suggest that minority groups who identify with past (often racially segregated) glory often become totally irrelevant to modern society. Hopefully that will be enough to count as a violation.

I haven’t searched through the blog’s archives, but I’m sure there’s more good stuff there too.

OK, enough with the satire. So what if a group of people want to make rules that, for them, define acceptable content on the internet. I’m really sincere when I say that I believe that to be a good thing. All groups, whether they are liberal or conservative or even anarchist, develop concepts of what the group finds acceptable or not. But to expect that I should feel obligated to abide by them just because you claim that they are for the entire internet is ridiculous. Net Authority; consider yourself ridiculed. Now give me my badge!

[1] Love my dad and love one another

I hate Facebook.

In just the last few months Facebook has exploded in South Africa to the extent where it is getting ready to surpass email as the communication mode du jour.
The reason for this is partly because South Africa completely missed the MySpace explosion[1]. All of a sudden South Africans are going crazy for the social web. And I don’t mean only young web-savvy South Africans. Everyone’s mom is on Facebook.

So why all the bad vibes from my side on the ol’ FB?
To be honest, I have nothing against The ‘book itself. It seems well built and scales well[2], and I agree that Facebook platform could be a Google killer. But there are two things re: FB that really are problematic.
The first has nothing to do with FB itself, but with the way that people react when you tell them that you’re not on the fucking thing.

What?! Not on good ol’ FB? How is that possible? How do you communicate with people?
Some Dude

Well, I communicate just fine with people – like I always have; y’know phone, email, in person. It seems to have worked OK for the last bazillion years.
Of course I’m not blind to the fact that the exact same question was asked of people who didn’t have a phone in the 1970′s or who didn’t have email by 1998. But the FB phenomenon has swept South Africa in just the last few months and there seems to be this vibe that in one fell swoop FB has wiped away all other forms of on-line communication.
You’ll notice that I didn’t include this blog in my list of non-FB communication methods – this is my second (and more serious) concern about the FB world.

The author of one of my favourite books of the decade[3], Jonathan Franzen, writes an essay in How to be Alone which changed my perspective on what it means to be private and how we are loosing our public anonymity.

[We say that we are all] very much worried about privacy. From almost any historical perspective, however, the claim seems bizarre.
In 1890, an American typically lived in a small town under conditions of near-panoptical surveillance. Not only did his every purchase ‘register’, but it registered in the eyes and the memory of shopkeepers who knew him, his parents, his wife and his children. He couldn’t so much as walk to the post office without having his movements tracked and analyzed by neighbours.
[...]
The ‘right to be left alone’? Far from disappearing, it’s exploding. It’s the essence of modern American architecture, landscape, transportation, communication and mainstream political philosophy
[...]
What’s threatened, then, isn’t the private sphere. It’s the public sphere.
[...]
My ‘sense of privacy’ functions to keep the public out of the private and to keep the private out of the public.[...] This is why the violation of a public space is so similar, as an experience, to the violation of privacy.

To be perfectly honest, Franzen’s essay actually deals with the public scrutiny of the private lives of politicians[4] but I believe that there is a relevant argument here.

The separation of the private and the public is fundamental to being allowed to be alone, and a healthy public sphere relies on a level of anonymity and separation that Facebook threatens. One of the reasons why I value this blog is exactly because it is disconnected, and while I’m not under any illusion that I am anonymous in it[5], it is an on-line, public space which is very much separated from the private.

This is the main reason why I have such a strong dislike of FB – it is assumed that just because we now have an internet platform that allows us to interconnect in a public/private capacity we all should want to.
I have no need to have my work identity interconnected with the private identity of my marriage. I have no need to create or be part of networks of updates and sharing of braai photos, travel calendars, birthday congratulations and geographical ‘meet-ups’. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone this form of interconnectedness, but why the assumption that it must be what everyone wants? I don’t want FB, I want separate identities and I want the full spectrum of the social and the disconnected.

So what to do about FB? Anita is just as nauseated by FBs omnipotence as I am, but has an even sharper take on it than what I do. Her main gripe is that, when she answers the inevitable question with `No, I’m not` they assume that she doesn’t understand the social web – how it works. Please. She understands the internet perfectly well[6] – she just doesn’t care about FB. And so she came up with what I think is a wonderful response. If someone asks whether you’re on FB, say `Well, yes I am!`. They will then counter with `Ooh I must get on your network` to which you reply `No, sorry – my network isn’t really open; but thanks for asking.`
The point is this: I (we) don’t feel the need to consolidate all of our social connections onto one platform. Some people I want to phone, some I send a quick email and then meet in person, some I communicate with through my work email, some through one of my personal email accounts.
I do have multiple identities, both on-line and in the physical world, I don’t want to change that.

And so I have eventually created an FB profile, but I’m not identifying myself in person and I’m not connecting it to anyone. I don’t want to.

Spread the word. I too am on Facebook, but I’m not interested in talking to anyone while I’m there.

[1] Phew! A close call there, because I hate MySpace even more than what I hate Facebook. At least Facebook has a simple, readable interface.
[2] i.e. doesn’t slow down to a crawl like MySpace does
[3] The Corrections
[4] it was written during/after the Clinton impeachment. Remember Ken Starr?
[5] I’ve always thought that it would be interesting to see how closely someone could identify me just from the content of this blog.
[6] and understands the impact of the internet on media and society better than most

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

I’ve been lamenting the lack of engaging, emotional rock music of late. Somehow I just could not get a grip on where music was going.
But no more. All of a sudden there’s an excellent selection of psychedelic rock out there on the internext and beyond. Here’s a roundup of videos worth dropping some bandwidth on.

On the pop end of the spectrum there’s Perry Farrel’s[1] new project – Satellite Party with some shimmering riffs on Wish Upon a Dog Star. The video is also way over the top psyched out. Has Farrel been spending time in Ibiza[2]?
Next is Kasabian‘s rocking new album Empire and the psych-as-fuck second single Shoot the Runner. If you watch only one video of this set it must be this one. Visually it’s as engaging as Gnarles Barkley’s mesmerizing Crazy of 2006. However, there’s a problem. Go to Youtube and you’ll see This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Sony BMG Music Entertainment Ltd. Sigh, clearly they don’t understand marketing to the wired generation. There’s a WMV version available (legally) here and I also intend breaking the law and hosting it myself.
Heading for heavy we find the White Stripes and the title track from their new album, Icky Thump. Boy, oh boy – Jack and Meg are H.O.T.! And the fact that they can get something as angular and prog. as this played on mainstream media is amazing. The chorus riff is a winner and the angular bits in between is testament to their total wildness. Rock On! Oh, and Meg is – I don’t mind saying – hot. hot.
Concluding this episode of I Took Too Much Acid and Now I’m Playing My Guitar Very Loudly is Queens of the Stone Age and the first single from their new album entitled Sick, Sick, Sick. QUOTSA are vicious and this one rocks out while it freaks you out on its canibalistic grind. Brrr… makes me shiver.

[1] Formerly of Porno for Pyros and Jane’s Addiction
[2] In the off season, of course. No international star would dream of going to Ibiza in summer with all the UK yobs.

This is the most illin’ thing I’ve seen in some time!
It’s Blingee and it deserves to be the next viral hit, because it is off the chain, the hook and the charts[1]!

Simply, it’s a web-based tool for pimping your photos and it is raw!

It makes me feel all raw and serious to bling my photos like this, so send this link (featuring my mighty, pimped viz) along to all of yo crew and rate the party girl!

Seriously, it’s a great idea and they deserve all the money they get for it.

Now if only I could look like this guy.

baby boy yoy stay on my mind

[1] to paraphrase Strong Bad