Cave People

Mentioned more recently on the new AJ00200 blog in an article titled Our Tax Dollars at Work

It amazes me that every 2 years people everywhere come out of their caves. What do they do? The watch TV and do exactly what it tells them. Sadly, event occurs right before the election of the new congress and these people have had no idea what has gone on in the political world the past 2 years. The come out and vote however the television ads tell them to.
It is because of this that America has set itself up to be mislead, to be confuse, and to fail. The people who can afford the most advertisement are the exact people we don't want in Washington. These are the corporate lobbyists, namely, the Republican Party, who favor big business and have made many promises to these corporation for tax cuts in order to get the money they used to fund their campaign.

This wouldn't be near as bad if the Republicans were running a fair campaign, but instead they have only pointed out things that have went wrong in the past 2 years and blamed it on the Democrats. How is this fair? Democrats have been cleaning up their mess. Democrats were handed the worst economy since the great depression walking in the door. The Republicans caused the mess, and when the Democrats are finally cleaning it up and the economy is recovering, they want to come back in to mess it up again!
I don't know why anyone would vote for the Republicans after what they did to us, but apparently all the Cave People who make up most of the eligible voters favor their corporate funded ad campaign.

The Democrats need all the help they can get if we are to continue to get the economy back on its feet. We've made it this far and I'm not backing down now! I urgently need your help. You need to vote for your Democratic candidate this election if you want to continue to live in an economy controlled by the people and not by corporate monopolists!

Ghostery

The Firefox Ghostery Addon is a must for anyone who values privacy. It allows you to be notified of and disable just about every tracking program used on the Internet. such as Google Analytics, Google Adsense, and 348 others! It does seem to have a problem on images.google.com, but using the classic version link at the bottom fixes this.

Ubunu 10.10

Ubuntu 10.10 is out, not much different than the last version, but the new Ubuntu Font does look quite cool. Not much of a reason to rush to get the download, but it is definitely not a waste since there is a lot of other programs updated with it.

Ubuntu 10.10 released on 10/10/2010

BBot 5.0 Release Coming Late

Well, it turns out the the BBot 5.0 release will be coming late. There has been a new, unexpected bug in the API that has not been noticed because the feature is little used. I may end up releasing this version with the bug as it is not a security problem, but it could get really nasty if left unchecked for even longer.

Either way, hopefully I will be able to release this version soon.

A Week with my New Laptop

Last week I bought a Toshiba Satellite L655D-S5050, which is what I consider to be a very nice laptop. I had a bit of a problem getting my WiFi to work in Ubutnu, and even using an Ethernet cable didn't work, but upgrading to 10.04.1 fixed this problem.

I now have a really nice laptop that I got for a crazy low price running a secure OS and its perfect for 3D modeling/animation in Blender, and I successfully ran the Beta version on it.

I would HIGHLY recommend this laptop to anyone.

Government Censorship

I was just reading some scary articles about a bill the Obama Administration will be suggesting soon (don't get me wrong, I like Obama, its just that everyone does something really stupid in their life, and sadly, he is doing it right now). You can find some of these articles, like this one from the EFF, and here and here which tie in very closely with internet censorship. So, here is a nice guide to keep you safe from a government takeover.

Use Linux for your computers opperating system.

Although this is the hardest one to do for most people, its is also the most important. Linux is the worlds most secure opperating system, so as long as you keep it up to date and use a secure password, the government will have a very hard time trying to hack your computer, which would be a great way to spy on you and censor your every message. However, this is not as hard as you think. There are many great Ubuntu distrobutions which are very easy to use, particulary Ubuntu which is very easy to setup, and even lets you keep your normal Windows or Mac opperating system on your computer as well. Ubuntu also includes the tools you need to encrpyt your files and so on.

Create a public key

This is probably the second most important thing which you can do, but it can be somewhat complex as it involves encryption and more work to use the encryption. They can't spy on you if they can't read what your saying, so really make an effort to encrypt all sensitive data. I good guide on this can be found right here. The more you encrpyt, the better! Encrpyting your e-mail can be made easiear with the EnigMail Addon for the Mozilla Thunderbird Email Client.

Use Tor

Tor is a program which encrpyts all your network traffic and sends it all over the world before it reaches is final destination. This hides your orgional location as well as encrypting your network traffic. (For the techy people, it also hides your IP address).

Always use https links

When you see a link or url that starts with https:// not http:// (note the extra s at the end), that means that the connection is encrypted, although, this type of encryption can easily be fooled by governments that have too much power, so watch out!
See also: Encrypted Google Searches

There is always more you can do to stay safe online, so if you have an addition you would like to add to this post, just leave a comment, and I will get it in as soon as I can.
To the people who think that the government should be monitoring our messages:

As the rest of use know, the government can easily abuse this power. It starts out as "We are only monitoring suspected terrorists" and then it moves to accusing people of being terrorists just to monitor them. Or its "We are only monitoring suspected criminals" to "We are only monitoring people who we think may be doing something wrong, but have no idea what or where they are doing anything wrong" to "We are monitoring everyone to make sure they don't do anything wrong." And when they start monitoring everyone, all privacy is gone.

Blender3D 2.54 Beta

I'm am a huge fan of the Blender 3D Modeler. I've used it to create 3D models, do special effects, and I've watched some rather good movies made in blender. The beta version of Blender has a new GUI making it look much, much better, and it also includes support for Python scripting, which I am particularly looking forward to playing with as I am a Python geek.

The New Blender GUI

It does take a little getting used to because of the new interface, but I am sure once you become more practiced with this latest version, you will never go back to the old version.
You can get the 2.54 Beta Version, or, if you want to use one that is absolutely stable, you can use the latest stable version.

One last note about the beta version, it requires Python 3.1 which you can download at the on python.org.