INDEPENDENCE FROM ALIENS

If you don’t know what this is about, you haven’t been paying attention.

Hint: it’s about aliens.

If you are not celebrating the anniversary of the day when America somehow saved the world from an alien FAILvasion using a computer virus then have an awesome Thursday instead.

Lats make this a reader participation thread: what are you guys up to these days? This is a question in X parts:

• What game are you playing?
• What book are you reading?
• What shows are you watching?
• What are you coding?
• What other hobby are you indulging in right now?

I’m currently mostly playing DotA2. I think I have an untouched Hitman game somewhere in my Steam library so that will probably get installed and played next. I’m finishing up Only Forward which is an odd book but in a good way. I’m like two episodes behind on the new season of True Blood, and I think Dexter started last week so I will have to catch up on that too.

I’m not currently coding anything new other than maintenance of stuff, and work related crap. I’m also tinkering around with Warhammer (as you know) and have an idea for a coding project related to that, but it would be kinda big and therefore I’m sort of procrastinating and just throwing ideas around. How about you?

I actually recommend it to my own students as one of the ways they can avoid data loss, and never again be in the typical “dog ate my homework” situation. The use case I usually put forward to illustrate it is this: you can start writing your paper in a campus computer lab, then hit save, go back to the dorm and continue right where you left off. Then when you go home for the weekend, and forget to take your laptop your paper is still saved on the cloud, so you can safely finish it for Monday even without your computer. It is saved and backed up automatically, it has built in version control and you never have to bother with thumb drives or emailing yourself the right file ever again.

Not to mention that the build in collaboration tools make Google’s platform the perfect tool for work on group projects. And if there is anything college educators are fond of, it is forcing students to work together against their will.

Granted, the service is not without its problems – but the more jarring privacy concerns do not really apply to the purely academic use I recommend it for. For that, it is invaluable.

This is why I was shocked and surprised to find out Oxford University decided to permanently block all access to Google Docs and Google Drive services. Yep, that’s right – they blocked it at the firewall so you can’t use it unless you go through a proxy.

Why would they do such a thing? Because apparently pishing via Google Surveys service is a thing to do at Oxford these days:

Almost all the recent attacks have used Google Docs URLs, and in some cases the phishing emails have been sent from an already-compromised University account to large numbers of other Oxford users. Seeing multiple such incidents the other afternoon tipped things over the edge. We considered these to be exceptional circumstances and felt that the impact on legitimate University business by temporarily suspending access to Google Docs was outweighed by the risks to University business by not taking such action. While this wouldn’t be effective for users on other networks, in the middle of the working day a substantial proportion of users would be on our network and actively reading email. A temporary block would get users’ attention and, we hoped, serve to moderate the “chain reaction”.

If this seems ridiculous knee jerk reaction to you, that’s because it is. I would say this was a clear case of cutting of the nose to spite the face, but I think the truth here is much simpler. I think that this is merely an example of “I don’t use this service and therefore is useless” attitude that is unfortunately quite prevalent in the IT industry. Some BOFH decided to disable extremely popular service that has immense utility to both students and professors alike, on a whim and as a half-assed baind-aid solution to a prevalent problem.

Once could argue that because of the magnitude of the problem they had to do something, but a quick trip to their archives shows that they had this Google Survey problem for quite some time now. So its not like this was something new that just popped up and forced them to act. It was an ongoing issue that has been escalating over many months.

I do acknowledge the fact that there are no easy ways to deal with spam. Blocking Google Docs is something you could easily get away with on a corporate network. That’s because corporate IT typically provides users with the tools they need to do their job, and gets to define the allowed communication channels that meet company security policies, to the exclusion of all the others. The IT role in academia is a little bit different, and such a block seems like a gross overreach. Hell, my finely tuned bullshit detectors can actually detect hints of institutionalized apathy on the part of the IT crew, and executive meddling from the University officials that put pressure on the IT staff to do something about a problem they don’t understand.

The problem with this solution is that it merely scratched the surface of the problem. While Google Survey service makes Pishing easy and convenient it is nowhere near as prevalent as the more traditional approach of hosting the pages just about anywhere else on the internet. It also creates a worrying precedence that could turn into a policy. Why stop at blocking Google Survey? What if the spammers shift to Dropbox? Do you block that too? What if they use cheep Dreamhost accounts? Do you put the entire IP block owned by that company on the blacklist? The thing about spammers is that they are nothing if adaptable. They are keenly aware that their pish pages have a lifetime that can be measured in mere hours. Their schemes are designed to work with a revolving pool of attack pages. Blocking a single service is merely a temporary setback to them – one they can probably circumvent in about an hour (and that’s if they are lazy).

Oxford could have handled this issue differently. The less unorthodox and approach would have been aggressive server side filtering. I’m quite certain that automatically holding emails containing Google Survey links in quarantine would have been much less disruptive choice.

User education could have gone a long way too, but the blog post reveals exactly how they feel about that aspect of the job:

Now, we may be home to some of the brightest minds in the nation. Unfortunately, their expertise in their chosen academic field does not necessarily make them an expert in dealing with such mundane matters as emails purporting to be from their IT department. Some users simply see that there’s some problem, some action is required, carry it out, and go back to considering important matters such as the mass of the Higgs Boson, or the importance of the March Hare to the Aztecs.

Translation: our users are idiots, we tried educating them but it didn’t take, so fuck’em. If I was a professor at Oxford I’d be a little bit offended by these assertions. Granted, users do tend to be idiots. I often re-iterate this point on this very blog. But I would never dream of putting down my own user base like this in an official company blog post. It is just a tad bit unprofessional. You’d expect more from someone employed by a prestigious university such as Oxford.

If I’m reading the comment thread at Hacker News correctly, the block was lifted approximately 3 hours after the linked blog post went online. The reason? Massive outcry both from the students and instructors. As expected, Oxford community has embraced Google’s cloud service and incorporated it into their workflows. Many users suddenly found themselves cut of from their research data and unable to retrieve their class assignments.

What can IT professionals outside of Oxford learn from this?

Firstly, regardless of what you think of an application or service it might be invaluable to your users. It is never a good idea to disable or phase out software and services without first determining how it will impact your users. I learned that the hard way few years ago when my department tried to phase out old versions of office and get everyone on Office 2007. It was nearly a catastrophic failure, and not just because of the OOXML quirks. It turned out that a significant portion of our clients still relied on a the nearly forgotten Microsoft Binder application, which was shipped with Office 2000 and XP, and was available as an Add-In in Office 2003. Suddenly dozens of employees found themselves unable to open important, mission critical documents and had to be immediately downgraded in order to be able to do their work.

Secondly, regardless of how hard a project may seem, the best solution to a problem is the one that is least disruptive to the users. A perfect IT department is one that is virtually invisible to the end user. Banning and blocking of services should only be considered in extreme circumstances, and after making sure they won’t cause unnecessary disruptions. For example, blocking Facebook and Twitter to prevent people from using them on company time, or tweeting corporate secrets might seem like a great idea. But if your marketing department just launched a news super-important, viral social media initiative you are very likely to get in massive trouble unless you can blame the decision on someone with pointy hair.

Finally, while users are silly and at times act dumb it is never a good idea to make fun of their incompetence in official press releases and public blog posts. I’m not saying we should coddle them – they are responsible adults, and it is their own choice to remain willfully ignorant and to push themselves into irrelevance. But, who are we to judge them for that? Patronizing, passive aggressive comments in official documents can and likely will backfire and ruin your day.

What kinds of things have happened here since 2011?

• I found Jekyll and discovered a new way to create dynamic websites without server side scripting. I used it to create a teaching blog which I have been kinda neglecting lately.

• I lost a shit-load of weight (that’s a metric shit-load, mind you not imperial one). I’m happy to report I kept it off.

• I tried to establish a forum and build a community, which was going fairly well until I ran out of steam, and everyone just got kinda bored with it.

• I wrote a dissertation about the merits of vim and then followed it up with a really long post about configuration options and plugins. People actually liked these.

• I played Mass Effect 3, and just like everyone was angry, disappointed and heart-broken over that turd of an ending. Before I finished the game, I kept thinking: “How bad can this be? The game has been pretty good so far… Everyone is probably exaggerating as usual.” Nope – it was worse than I could have ever imagined.

• On the upside, Avengers movie was glorious. A year ago, most people knew Joss Whedon as “that guy who did Buffy”. He should have been known for Firefly but most people I know IRL have never heard of it. It is hard to believe he is now one of the most sought after directors in Hollywood.

• I got an iPad which turned out to be a great little tool. In my initial review I mentioned it was more of a “read-only” device but I must reverse this verdict. Since that time I have actually used it creatively quite a few times. For example, I used it to draw illustrations for my Max Payne 3 review and my offbeat fantasy setting, and to hack things (while logged in via ssh).

• I joined Pintrest. I was told it was for girls only, but nowadays I probably use it more often than Tumblr. Go figure.

• I have reduced my pocket footprint. Btw, that key-shaped multi-tool is gone. It got confiscated at the airport. At some point I removed it from my keys and put it in my wallet. The TSA were not impressed wit the tiny harmless serrated blade. They considered giving me a full on terrorist treatment, but it was way to early in the morning, and I didn’t have any liquids on me so all I got was a disapproving glare.

• I figured out that my iPad is pretty much the ultimate E-Book reader. Also, it is too awesome and expensive to carry around with me everywhere which is why I wouldn’t mind a cheepo Kindle as my on-the-road reader.

• I built a Linux server for $30. I’m still using it, and it still works great. I have actually bought another Pogo Plug since then, though I have not set it up yet.

• I tried browsing the web with just Lynx and it kinda sucked. I’m quite amazed how bad the experience was in this day and age of mobile web. And especially on all the geeky sites I visited.

• I went to Disney World. It was rather fun. Would do it again.

• I wrote another dissertation sized essay, this time about the origins of the mouse.

• I got hurricaned by Sandy and discovered the french press method of brewing coffee in electricity free environment. Also I discovered that my iPad could go for over a week without charging with me using it every night as an E-Book reader.

• I freed up close to 20GB of disk space on my Ubuntu box mostly by deleting unused kernel images.

• I started a new programming series where I try to explore the right way to use PHP (if there is such a thing as the right way for PHP).

In addition to all of the above, my dad has won a bout with brain cancer. It was quite scary for the entire family but it all ended well, so I write it up as a positive thing. So the year was pretty decent, not counting unfortunate medical issues and natural disasters. We all learned a few things, accomplished some good stuff and had fun doing it.

What am I planning for 2013? Honestly, I’m not sure yet.

I’ll try to continue the much neglected LaTex learning series, and the new PHP series which was actually quite fun to do. By the time you read this, I pretty much completed the pastebin app, but you probably have only seen about half of the series which will continue into January. After that, I might embark on another, more complex project.

The reinventing fantasy series was also pretty fun, so I plan to continue doing that.

I also got a few new gadgets, and video games from Santa, but haven’t had a chance to talk about them yet. So there will be a few more reviews coming in January and maybe even February. Other than that, I’m sort of expecting more of the same with one small change – depth.

I want this blog to give you more in depth reviews, more exhaustive commentary and more extensive guides and howtos. There is a bunch of posts that I published this year that were a bit half-assed. I knocked them out just for the sake of putting something up, without much thought or research. Going forward I’d rather skip a post or two and use the time write something of decent quality than to just post for the sake of keeping up with the schedule. So I guess this is my new years resolution – more depth, more quality.

How about you? How did this year treat you? What are your resolutions for 2013?

Robot Santa

The brilliance of Futurama’s X-Mas holiday is that it is not only mandatory, but also completely secular and non-denominational. While Robot Santa may have been initially constructed to serve as a proxy for the Saint Nicholas figure of Christian mythology, he transcended that role. Due to a bug in his programming he judges all people of the world naughty, and thus deserving of extermination. He doesn’t discriminate based on faith or nationality – he is an equal opportunity killing machine.

So in the Futurama universe, even those who never celebrated Christmas are more or less forced to celebrate X-Mas. After all, even if your preferred holiday is Chanukah, Kwanza or something else entirely, you still need a place to cower in fear on December 25th. Robot Santa’s reign of terror brings together people of all faiths and creeds. It is quite beautiful in the messed up, disturbing way.

Anyways, best wishes and happy holidays! We will return to regular programming after later this week.

Happiest Place on Earth?

I haven’t been on vacation in a while, so I figured why not visit the so called “happiest place on the planet”, aka the Walt Disney World in Florida. I have never been there as a child, so I figured visiting the place as an adult ought to be both entertaining and eye opening experience. Especially since I was being accompanied by seasoned Disney veterans (dare I say fanatics) who planned the whole trip and optimized it for maximum fun. Bear in mind that my entourage 100% composed of adults, so we were not encumbered by squeaky childlings or stroller spawn, and free to eat, drink, be merry and act irresponsibly.

I might write something more extensive about my experience later on, but here are some of my first impressions and reflections on the trip:

While you could make an argument about Disney World being the happiest place to be (after all it all depends on how you define happiness) it is definitely the cleanest establishment I have been to. I was incredibly impressed with the efficiency and aggressive approach to cleanup and upkeep they had in all the parks. You would be hard pressed to find any litter or garbage anywhere on Disney property. Everything from the bathrooms to the main thoroughfare streets is immaculately clean. Disney actually seems to employ roving janitorial patrol teams that scour the parks for any filth or signs of damage and eradicate it with an impressive tenacity. One day I have even witnessed crews trying out puddles on the sidewalk after a rainfall so that the guests don’t get their feet wet.

I have never seen such an approach to cleanliness anywhere else. I spend most of my time in Jersey or NYC so I’m used to filth, litter and garbage lining the streets, overgrown lawns, stained carpets and jumping over puddles of odd organic goo on the sidewalk. Spending a week in Disney’s immaculately clean parks was like visiting some strange alternate dimension where people suddenly started giving a shit about their surroundings. Naturally such an aggressive approach to upkeep must cost a lot of money…

Which brings me to my next point – I don’t think I have ever visited a place that was more engineered to separate you from your hard earned money. This is the part that made me question the “happiest place” a bit – after all, how happy can you be when you are essentially bleeding cash the entire time you are there. The entire place is engineered for profit. Most rides funnel the exiting crowds through gift stores hoping to catch some impulse buys. All the good picture spots are manned by professional photographers who will be more than happy to take your picture for you, with or without a costumed character. Everything is branded, sold at an immense markup and (if you happen to stay on Disney property) can be charged to your room key. I was both impressed and shocked by the absolutely ruthless efficiency with which Disney parks fleeced and wrung out currency from the unsuspecting crowds. I guess this is the part of the experience you are blissfully ignorant about when you visit the parks as a child.

Disney World is a gigantic money making machine that prays upon your nostalgia, and uses it to trick you into puking up wads of banknotes on every step. Fortunately I happen to be mostly immune to this sort of thing. Sure, I grew up watching Disney motion pictures just like everyone else, but I really had no desire to own anything with Mickey ears or Disney logo on it.

That said, the parks are rather fun. I was especially fond of Epcot, especially since they were having their annual food and wine festival:

Epcot

Epcot is both impressive and depressing. Impressive because of what it is, depressing because what it could have been. You see, Walt Disney envisioned Epcot as an utopian super-community. It was supposed to be a model micro-city constantly riding on the bleeding edge of technology. He wanted to employ the same social engineering tactics his company used to build money making monster-parks, to create a healthy clean super-community of the future. A place which would always be a little bit ahead of the curve, because Disney would funnel money into it to keep it on the absolute forefront of technological progress. It was supposed to be humanities spearhead launched into the heart of the singularity. It was ambitious and awe-inspiring project.

Unsurprisingly after Walt’s death the entire plan was scraped. Instead of this impressive money-drain, Epcot was turned into yet another theme park – albeit rather unique one. It is now a place that celebrates both retro-futurism of the 70’s and cultural diversity of the world. It is probably not as fun for kids as the other parks, but a great place for adults to get drunk while walking around the lagoon and trying on silly hats in each of the country specific pavilions. And that makes it a definitely awesome place to visit.

Btw, if you are going to be visiting Disney anytime soon, do the Segway tour. It is both fun an informative – you get to learn a lot of back-stage details about Epcot and it’s history, and you get to ride a fucking Segway around the park like a boss.

Have you ever been to Disney? What was your experience?

Happy 4th of July everyone! Here is a picture of Will Smith and Jeff Golblum:

National Heroes

Why Will and Jeff? Oh, you know – the usual. Space aliens, computer virus, nukes, yadda, yadda, yadda. You know the drill. It’s American history guys, you should know this. And don’t tell me it’s not legit because I have it on good authority that Aliens totally did exist:

No seriously, Independence day is about Aliens

Enjoy the holiday guys! Stay safe and don’t blow yourself up!

Oh. and if you don’t live in US and you don’t celebrate it, then please do not enjoy it. If you do happen to enjoy it, our government will buy your police and go all Megaupload on you and you will be charged with aggravated holiday infringement. So yeah, watch out.

For the last few years… No scratch that. For the last decade I have been living a rather unhealthy lifestyle – eating poorly, not getting much in terms of exercise and etc. Most of my waking hours of the day have been spent sitting – in a chair at my desk, in my car, at my computer desk at home, etc. In other words, I have been living the kind of life style that my body was never designed for.

Homo Sapiens have evolved as hunter gatherers, and endurance runners accustomed to trekking across the Pleistocene savannahs in search of edible things that can be scooped up, or whacked with a stick. Most of our existence on this planet as a species has been spent either chasing after food, or running away not to become food. Our bodies are perfectly adapted for just that. While most animals use fur for thermo-regulation, we use an all-over subcutaneous layer of fat which not only helps to control heat exchange but also lets us package any surplus calories we ingest for later use. Our sweating mechanism is one of the most efficient heat dissipation methods in the animal kingdom making us perfect long distance runners. While we are not the fastest beasts out there, our energy/heat management, and our low friction/low energy bipedal gait let us us to out-walk just about any animal. Early Pleistocene humans used these natural adaptations to tail prey until it dropped out of exhaustion, then whacked it upside the head with a stick, and still had enough energy to drag it back to their cave.

We actually haven’t invented laziness and “being fat” until a few centuries ago when the agricultural revolution gave us a reliable source of food that did not need to be chased. Our civilization has been growing at an astonishing exponential rate of progress, and the slow process of natural selection / evolution has simply been unable to catch up. We still have bodies of Pleistocene endurance runners, but many of us lead lives that do not require much in terms of physical exertion. What’s worse, we have easy access to high caloric diets our ancestors could only dream off. All the surplus energy we consume but don’t spend, gets packed away for a rainy day in our fat tissue. Thanks to our civilization being stable, and comfortable institution such a rainy day never comes and so we become fatter, heavier and less healthy.

This is what happened to me. A sedentary life style combined with careless dietary habits resulted in me putting on quite a few pounds. Let’s face it – being an introverted geek working in tech industry carries enough of a social stigma. Throw in being fat into the equation and your are getting dangerously close to becoming a walking stereotype and/or punchline. One day I got fed up, and decided that this weight gain thing can be hacked and made to go away. And it can’t be all that difficult either. After all, have you ever talked to the meat-heads at the gym? They are not what you would call the brightest crayons in the box, but they manage to maintain a fairly competent grasp on their weight just by using some dietary restrictions and exercise.

So since about June I have been working on tactical weight reduction and I think I did pretty well so far:

Before and After - this is still work in progress

In about 5 months I have dropped a bit over 50 pounds, and went down from pant size 42 to 34. Most of that was done by simple calorie intake reduction, because my lazy ass did not feel like going to gym very often. I only threw regular cardio exercise into the mix at the beginning of December.

Weight loss is a big business – it’s an industry in and of it’s own. My weight problem was not unique – a lot of people find themselves in a very similar situation. There are tons of resources out there that claim they have mastered a perfect system that will work for you. Some of them work, others don’t. The point is that you don’t really need any of them. You don’t need weight watchers, you don’t need Tae Bo, Zoomba or whatever else bullshit is trending these days. I did it without any of them.

Here is all you need to know: if you want to lose weight, don’t eat so fucking much.

It sounds simplistic, but it’s true. If your weight is related to metabolic problems rather than poor diet and lack of exercise, then you are playing a completely different ball game. But for an average fat slob like me, the problem is ingesting more calories than can be burned in a day. When you do that, surplus is squirreled away into the fat tissue. If you eat less calories than you can burn, the deficit is taken out of said energy storage. Your body is more or less a deterministic machine in that aspect.

And yes, there are other nutritional factors that play the role here: saturated fats, carbs, sugars, etc.. There have been books written on the proper balance of all the different food groups and their effect on weight. But calorie intake is by far the biggest, and most important factor. When you start counting calories you will usually get reduction in your consumption of fats, carbs and sugars as a freebie bonus. Most low calorie foods contain lower amounts of those things almost by default. They are tailored to more health/weight conscious consumers – a market where you want your nutrition label have the most zeros, and the smallest numbers in every column. Think of calories as the CPU clock speed of your food, and the other nutritional detail as secondary details cache, bus speed and etc.

How many calories you need to eat is a tricky question because it depends. There are about a million calculator tools online where you can plug in your weight, height, age and sex and it will give you a ballpark number you need to maintain a stable weight. You go under that, and you are in mass reduction territory.

Here is what worked for me: I have almost completely cut out sugar, and sugar substitutes out of my diet. I drink my coffee with a splash of milk these days, and it actually tastes better that way than the cream and sugar soup I used to devour. Plus I get to pretend to be a coffee snob now so it’s cool. I also severely limited my carb intake by kicking out white breads, pastas and similar items from my daily diet.

I also gave up diet sodas and artificial sweeteners. There is a lot of contradictory research out there about these things and I’m not sure how much of it is factual. I honestly did not dig deep enough. The fact is that according to some claims things like aspartame may potentially fuck with some of your neurotransmitters that are responsible for appetite control. I used to drink a lot of diet coke in the past, and I can attest that since I have quit it, I had much less of an urge to “graze” on snacks between meals. Granted, this is anecdotal, and not scientific evidence – still, swearing off soft drinks of the “diet” variety and artificial sweeteners is probably a good idea when you are trying to shed pounds.

Other than that, I just counted calories and used common sense (ie. get a salad instead of a burger or for lunch). I did not give up these things though – I will still eat all kinds of garbage, but I just cut it out of my daily life. Once in a blue moon I will treat myself to a disgustingly fattening decadent meal, but then I go straight back to calorie counting, healthier choices and exercise.

This is sort of the the lynchpin: commitment. You can’t view it as a “diet”. Diets don’t work, because by definition they are temporary. The only way to get any results is to view it as a lifestyle change. You have to accept that you will be eating healthier food, and watching your calorie intake for the rest of your life. In fact, you will have to be more rigorous about your regimen as you age, as your metabolism is going to keep slowing down. I have tried losing weight in the past, but I have never treated it seriously. This time around I decided I must make a permanent change, and accepted the fact that I will have to curtail my eating habits. Once I did that, it sort of became effortless. All it required was a little bit of willpower to prevent myself from grazing and snacking. That and exercising some common sense when shopping for food.

Anyways, I just wanted to share my little accomplishment. I know it has absolutely nothing to do with the usual topics on this blog. I probably won’t be mentioning it ever again, but this weight loss project has been a big part of my life lately, and I figured I might as well share it. Especially since it might actually help some of my fellow geeks with similar sedentary lifestyles.

This is also why Terminally Incoherent did not go black on Jan 18. It’s not that I wasn’t supporting the cause. If you follow me on Twitter you know I have been very vocal about my hate for SOPA and PIPA bills. In fact, I did have an anti SOPA overlay script up on the page for one day sometime in December and I don’t think anyone noticed, because no one has ever mentioned it. My audience is just too smart – between the RSS feed readers and add blockers it’s a wonder my AdSense account is getting any money at all.

I thought about participating in the blackout long and hard and decided there was just no point to do it. The entire purpose of the Jan 18 blackout was to spread awareness. Before, the anti-SOPA rhetoric was mostly contained withing tech-savvy communities. Places like Reddit or Hacker News were the vocal hot spots, boiling with seething rage, but mainstream news outlets mostly ignored SOPA leaving the mainstream clueless and ignorant. Blacking out popular websites not only delivered the message straight to the previously oblivious end users, but also forced mass media to finally start covering the controversial bills (often in disingenuous damage control mode). And as such it was an overwhelming success.

We have won. We geeks have put our foot down and turned the tide. We have reached out to the general public, shook them out of their usual lethargic ambivalence and made them think. We managed to scare the living shit out of the bunch of greedy politico’s who have previously been motivated only by cold hard cash:

SOPA support before and after the blackout

Never before have I seen such a display of solidarity out on the World Wild Web and it made me proud to be a Netizen and an Internaut. I almost felt guilty not blacking out my site. But then again, whom would it convince? Was there anyone I have not reached with my Twitter ramblings and my other SOPA post? Were there any Terminalists out there that really needed to be made aware of the problem? I don’t think so. So while blacking out Terminally Incoherent would have been a nice gesture, it would also have been a completely empty one. Now, if I was running any kind of mainstream popular site I would have shut it down.

The point is that we have won. SOPA and PIPA got shelved, and the politicians were taught a lesson that the the internet has simply too much of an impact on all facets of modern life – from online commerce, to freedom of expression – to be “patched” with some rushed legislation written by their paymasters from the entertainment industry. Whether or not they will remember this lesson when they are up for another round of campaign funding remains to be seen. But we have won an important battle last week, and that is something to be celebrated.

While we were still drunk with our victory, the feds exacted a terrible revenge and took down Megaupload – the biggest “cyber locker” on the internet, and the prime target of SOPA and PIPA. They just took it the fuck down. It did not matter that it was a foreign rogue site that was previously untouchable. It did not matter that the servers and the employees of the company were scattered throughout New Zealand, Europe and Asia. The long arm of US law reach over, across the international borders, over the oceans and brought down the ban-hammer upon it.

All we could do was watch, slack jawed and bewildered. The entertainment industry and their hand-puppet senators claimed that SOPA and PIPA were necessary because of sites like Megaupload. They needed these laws passed to effectively deal with such threats to their intellectual property. And then, just as we repelled their legislation on the grounds of allowing for overbearing censorship, the government turned around and winked one of entertainment industry’s to-ten enemies out of existence. And it did it without any draconian laws, proving that we have been correct fighting against it. It invalidated one of the key arguments for SOPA.

But they did it at the cost of shutting down a pretty cool website. Now, I can’t really say I have used Megaupload much, or for legit purposes, but I think the nuclear strike against them was a bit much. Especially since the company was taking steps to clean up it’s image, and limit the rampant piracy using automated take down tools.

Ars Technica published pretty good overview of the charges levied against the company, and some of them are legitimate. It seems that the founders were a little bit too cocky, and a little bit too forward in their internal communications giving the feds ample proof that they purposefully dragged their feet on copyright issues, and bragged about profits made on pirated content. They purposefully configured their system in such a way that would make complete removal of an offending file difficult, and re-upping it easy. So while Megaupload was guilty of profiting from piracy, the take down sets up a nasty precedence.

It clearly shows that there is no such thing as safe harbors and that even foreign sites can be taken down if the user-submitted content you host is found infringing on US copyright and the entertainment industry is not happy with your take-down performance. This does not bode well for social media and information exchange hubs that allow user submitted content. Most user driven sites have to deal with a fair share of infringement perpetuated by their users, and now having lost their precious censorship bills the MPAA and RIAA will be bearing down on the fed to “pull off megaupload” on all kinds of other services.

What is going to be the next target? Rapidshare maybe? Or perhaps Youtube. After all, Youtube is full of potential IP infractions. Other than spoiled and corrupt management, what makes Youtube different from Megapload? Mostly their compliance to the unreasonable demands of the entertainment industry. Google, often to the chagrin of it’s users, promptly removes all videos that are reported to be infringing, without checking whether the report is legit or not. They also use automated filters to match and detect copyrighted material. They have spent quite a bit of money and resources to build these reporting and filtering systems, and yet the copyright holders still whine and cry that it’s not enough. Google has deep pockets, but constantly diverting resources to keep entertainment industry lawyers at bay must be a financial drain even on them. Imagine how taxing this must be on new social startups.

In the post megaupload world, all smaller user-submitted media sites can be vulnerable to legal actions against them if they do not not perform to the entertainment industry’s expectations. The brutal take down of the world’s largest cyber locker proves that show of good will, and having anti-piracy systems in place is not enough. These systems must also be efficient, otherwise you may be accused of conspiracy to profit on infringement.

The problem with that is that no one has ever created such a system that works. Google, with all it’s resources and brain power is only able to filter a small fraction of infringing files, and it can only take down videos as fast as the copyright holders can report them. Blocking all infringing content is just something that we do not know how to do – at least not with our current technology. But now, your performance at attempting to do the impossible may be what determines whether or not your site is found to be engaging in criminal activity. And this is disconcerting.

So while we won on SOPA, there might still be hard times ahead. Especially since the entertainment industry is not going to give up that easily. The politicians might have been reminded who they really work for on the 18’th but I doubt they will be able to resist campaign contributions next time they are up for re-election. We know it, and the copyright moguls know it. In fact, the MPAA director was so bold, as to issue a public statement threatening to withdraw financial support from the politicians who don’t do as they are told.

It’s like they are not even playing coy anymore. MPAA is boldly asserting their ownership of US government, PR be damned. The sudden reversal of SOPA support in congress has really pissed them off and they are itching for round two. And I guess you can’t blame them – the whole SOPA fiasco have probably just cost them few million dollars in bribes political campaign contributions and now they have nothing to show for that money. I’m not sure what their next move is going to be, but it may involve the rather obscure bill named H.R.1981 or “Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011”. They will push hard to tuck most, if not all SOPA and PIPA provisions into that bill, knowing full well no one in their right mind will want to vote against it. Publicly opposing such legislation is virtually a political suicide, and if MPAA manages to get their censorship language added into it, we will have a very, very hard battle ahead of us.

If PCIP becomes the new SOPA, a blackout may not be enough. So we must remain vigilant, and keep tabs on our congress critters like we never have before. The war is far from over, and despite our recent triumph the cards may be stacked against us.

Best Video Game of 2011

This is a bit of a tough call – I don’t think I can name just one game that was the absolute best. There were at least three games that I feel earned this distinction:

1. Portal 2 was more or less a perfect game. It had excellent writing, awesome game play, memes and a barrel load of fun. Personally I didn’t really care much for the multiplayer segments, and would have preferred if that work went into the single player campaign instead, but I was still very impressed with it. While short, it delivered a concentrated does of solid entertainment that was worth every penny.

2. Deux Ex: Human Revolution was a very solid, linear RPG. I have never played the original game so the fact that it did not live up to the original did not mar my enjoyment. The things that did mar it were the stupid outsourced boss fights (I wish that all “boss encounters” in Deus Ex HR were like the Hugh Darrow conversation in Panchea) and the contrived push-button ending. Was it flawed?

   Yes, of course. But this is definitely the kind of game I want to see more off on the market. Not an endless parade of Modern Warfare clones, but thoughtful, interesting, decently written PPG’s. Bonus points for it not being a fantasy RPG which we have plenty of.

3. You have probably surmised that Skyrim will be on this list, by the sheer amount of posts I devoted to it in the last month or so. I have a soft spot for Elder Scrolls games, and while Bethesda writing has always been a bit week, their expansive worlds, and the degree of freedom they give you to create your own stories more than makes up for that. It is not as large or as complex as it’s predecessors, but I loved it nonetheless.

If I had to summarize 2011 in one sentence, I would say it was a year of good, but flawed games. Portal 2 was a bit short, and had a lot of content that did not interest me (hats, multi-player, etc..). Deus Ex had outsourced boss fights and cop out ending. Skyrim was small, limited and dumbed down compared to Oblivion or Morrowind. I think that the “consolization” of the gaming industry is progressing almost exponentially now, and the fact that PC is no longer even remotely relevant as a release platform for the big hitters in the industry has been especially relevant this year. I no longer dare to hope this trend can be reversed. Now I simply hope that in the next decade or so, the erudite PC gaming connoisseurs who will be forced to migrate to consoles, will create a critical mass of demanding consumers who are not easily pleased by shitty shovelware like Modern Warfare. That console market will no longer be a domain of bros, and that publishers will make more games like the ones I mentioned above. In the meantime I will keep clinging to my gaming PC for as long as I can.

Best Book of 2011

Choosing the best book is much easier, because majority of the things I have read in 2011 was older than a year. In fact, I think that Embassytown by China Miéville was the only new book I have purchased this year. And you know what? I think it deserves the nomination. It is easily one of the best books I have read this year and I highly recommend picking it up.

Perhaps I should make it a point to read a few more “current” releases this coming year. But then again, there are so many older books I need to catch up on.

Best TV Show of 2011

In the TV land, the year was essentially 0wned by Game of Thrones. This show came completely out of the left field, and blinded me with it’s awesomeness. A solid medieval fantasy with excellent character driven plot, great acting and hell of a cliffhanger. I am impatiently anticipating second season in the summer.

I ought to also mention the second season of The Walking Dead which kept the form, and the spirit of the first one. I enjoyed it toughly – much more for example than the latest season of Dexter which I found a bit lacking.

Best Movie of 2011

I had a long list of good movies I wanted to put here, but I realized none of them was made in 2011. Inception would without a doubt be on this list, if it wasn’t for the small detail that it was made in 2010. Same goes for the excellent Social Network, dark and amusing Super, charmingly awesome Scott Pilgrim or the ass kicking Kick-Ass. All of these were 2010 movies.

In comparison, 2011 absolutely sucked. While I enjoyed Captain America or X-Men First Class they are not even close to being in the same class as the 2010 films listed above. To be honest I can’t think of a single good 2011 movie right now. I’m sure there had to be something worth while released in the last 12 months but clearly I must have missed it.

What was the best movie of 2011 for you? How about books and video games or TV shows? Do you agree with my picks? If not, let me know what would you pick instead.

Just about every year I make a Robot Santa joke on Christmas Eve, but I realized I have never properly explained the reference to those readers who might have been living under a rock for the last century or two and never experienced that splendid show. I figured I might as well show a clip or two to you before SOPA makes posting snippets of copyrighted material on the internet impossible.

So here is an abridged version of the Robot Santa story – at least as much of it as Comedy Central will allow me to show.

Have a safe and awesome holidays, whichever ones you happen to celebrate this December.