Wikileaks and Clarity

Posted on December 9, 2010 by ehurst

As a card-carrying member of the lunatic fringe, I just wanted to gibber a little more about Wikileaks.

Apparently Assange made a deal with Israel to let their government agents censor his document troves before publication. Whether they now keep their bargain and rescue him from this honeytrap business in Sweden remains to be seen, but it could happen without much notice. That is, the alternative press will make note of it, but only if Israel throws him under the bus will it make the mainstream news.

Still, we can see the whole thing remains mostly theatrics. As noted previously, it is painfully obvious Israel was not hurt or embarrassed in the least by this leak of cables. Nor was the US, actually:

US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn’t find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published.

So all this bluster about taking down someone who dares to threaten our troops is mindless idiocy, the trademark of the American public. Consider the logic of this noise: If the issue is a threat to our troops, then it’s the Presidents, Congress, Haliburton/KBR, and a the apathy of the US voters which are most at fault for killing our troops in senseless wars for lies. Punish them first, then you’ll have moral standing to go after Assange. Did I mention slaughtering over a million citizens of other countries?

Besides, Assange didn’t even break any of our laws.

But in the United States, generally publishing classified information is not a crime. The sort of information that a news organization can be prosecuted for publishing is limited to: nuclear secrets (Atomic Energy Act), the identities of covert agents (Intelligence Identities Protection Act), and certain forms of communications intelligence (Section 798 of the Espionage Act).

Perhaps lamenting that the U.S. does not have an Official Secrets Act like the United Kingdom, right wing columnists have consistently misinterpreted these Acts, or have cited other provisions of our espionage laws which almost surely do not apply to Wikileaks.

Purely on grounds of Aristotelian logic the US government has no right to even keep secrets:

In the case of a state in which the people are sovereign, (which is to say that the people are the state), the state cannot morally conceal its actions, intentions, and international communications from the people, which is to say itself…. In a state where the people are sovereign, state secrets are maintained for one reason and one reason only: to permit certain elements of the state to operate freely without taking into account the will of the other elements of the state. This is why state secrets are intrinsically authoritarian and invariably lead to the loss of human liberty over time.

Even the attempts by Anonymous and their Payback project is just noise. Blocking access to a few websites, and even some of the Mastercard operations, will not be very persuasive. Keep it up and it only justifies the planned draconian Internet controls. The only effective action, should Anonymous really intend to cost the bad guys money, is to crack the servers themselves, breach the security and take control over the data stored there. The real heavy here is not Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, et al. Evil as they may be, the real heavy is the US government. Tie up the official bureaucratic processes which transact over the Net, then you’ll be doing something which affects the bad guys. And you’ll also have the Internet security officials breathing down your necks, but this petty DDoS attacks on websites means nothing. It’s just more noise playing into the hands of the scripted propaganda.

Meanwhile, most of what you see and hear from conventional sources is propaganda theater. It’s true of everything they say. We have this “global warming” gathering in Mexico while the first taste of a new ice age hits Europe and parts of North America. It’s caused in part by the changes in the Gulf Stream resulting from BP’s oil leak. People in the Gulf of Mexico are sick and dying from unprecedented poisoning of the water by both raw petroleum and dispersants. The US government is helping to cover this up, as it does the banking mortgage frauds. Our manufacturing base continues off-shoring at a blistering pace, even as the government works as hard as possible to cripple the economy further. And the press talks about our “recovery.”

Yes, it is all intentionally, knowingly, attacking you and me and the whole world because it’s profitable for a select few.

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Settling in the Land Without Words

Posted on December 8, 2010 by ehurst

I am now a settled citizen of the Land Without Words, the higher plane of life and sanity. If you followed me here, and kept track of my explorations, you are now on your own. There’s not much more I can tell you or show you about the place. Either you belong or you don’t.

That’s not to say sanity won’t find a thousand events in this world to address. Unfortunately, for my regular readers it will begin to sound all too familiar. I’ll do my best to keep it fresh, but it won’t be new.

No doubt I’ll find more stories needing to be told, but only the most subtle stuff will be a surprise. Parables can only carry so much before they come apart. It’s time to put it to work, and make your own stories.

Thanks for struggling alongside me, keeping me company. Now let’s build together, and make ourselves at home.

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Making the Prison Tolerable

Posted on December 7, 2010 by ehurst

Yesterday I wrote you cannot package salvation. That’s not to say there is no useful guide to action in helping people get a hint of sanity. There most certainly is a defined course of action on this plane of existence which adequately demonstrates what sanity looks like. It’s called the Laws of God. The problem is, you have to understand them in their own mystical context, or you’ll end up using Laws to attack sanity, as happened with Jesus. His national government had completely lost all contact with their own mystical intellectual culture, and were utterly clueless about the Law of Moses.

We have no standing to enforce anything. This is not about activism to demand worldly governments follow the Covenant of Noah or Moses. It would sure make the world a better place if we could, but that’s been tried and failed repeatedly. Without that strong mystical route to understanding Law Covenants, enforcement becomes just another excuse for injustice. It’s impossible to legislate mysticism as a condition for holding office. It’s not impossible to teach it, nor impossible to make it the common approach across an entire national culture, but impossible in the sense no human gets to choose a mystical birth of the spirit. Only God can do that.

From where we stand now, the very first step is shredding Western Civilization completely. That’s a pretty tall order, and not something which any person or group can plan, much less execute. So far as we can know now, it’s not in the cards; God seems to have other plans. Our part in this is not to question the executive decisions, but to implement them. If we are going to make any headway at all, it requires a number of us simply living our own lives under God’s definition of justice.

God says sanity is justice. Exhibiting justice is exhibiting sanity. People will sense your sanity by your justice as defined by God’s Laws. Not in the letter of the Laws, because that’s just an example of justice. It’s in the justice which arises from a mystical approach to everything we do. You abstract the Laws as best you know and apply them in your personal context. It becomes the default of operations. At the same time, you remain open to some command coming down the pipe from your spirit which could countermand your current best understanding. That’s in part because you understand the definition of justice includes mercy. You willingly forgo enforcement of strict justice in the intellectual sense when mercy is a better expression of eternal justice in the mystical sense. You do the sane thing because justice makes no sense otherwise.

You don’t think in terms of rights, which is not a biblical concept, but in terms of opportunity.

At this point, we have placed ourselves so very far outside the mainstream, we would be labeled “freaks.” Once folks notice our unusual approach, we are in a good position to talk about it. That is, insofar as we can talk about it at all, since mystical truth defies words. We have to address it in parabolic terms. Sure, we can explain how what we do is our best understanding of God’s Laws, and even discuss those Laws. But the ultimate motivation is not in the Laws themselves, but in the other-worldly pull on us. Indeed, living justly is itself a parable of truth. You’ll have to work out your own approach, because it’s more an art form than a skill. It has to arise from your own character.

Perhaps at this point you are reminded we don’t sell mysticism. We want them to have it, but we can’t possibly deliver it to them. We can provoke it if they have a spiritual awareness, but you can’t poke what isn’t there. So if we say something incomprehensible to them, at least the obvious lesson of conduct is not lost. Frankly, our whole game plan, as it were, is packaging Laws as the symbol of sanity.

We can’t get people out of prison; it’s above our calling, above our pay grade. We can surely make prison saner, more tolerable and just. Even if we bumble and stumble, folks will know it didn’t come from the system which runs the prison. But then again, they may not understand they are in a prison. What they will understand is justice, if they understand anything at all. Not much we can do about their understanding. Even with an authoritative position over them, such as being their parent, for example, we cannot do more than shape the process of interaction from our end. There is a certain amount of the process forever beyond our reach, even on this plane of existence. By the same token, nothing any evil man can do will create a permanent disability against sanity, though it does raise barriers. The same power to get us free can touch anyone, but will not touch everyone, and disabilities arising from evil conditioning is not a deciding factor.

Thus, we learn to accept: Not only do we not have any way of getting folks to notice the higher plane of existence if it’s not already in them, we can’t even get them to accept the notion of justice on this plane of existence. All we can do is offer what’s in our hands, and that’s our own broken justice.

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Unpackaged Salvation

Posted on December 6, 2010 by ehurst

I’ve met quite a few folks who wanted to save the world. Some of them are family members. They offer beatific visions of Utopia, an answer to all the ills of world — but of course, only those ills they wish to consider. Sometimes it is as simple as marketing this one solution to a particular problem, a superior product or first on the market. It all springs from the same urge to be significant, to accomplish something and point to it as their laurels.

That same fantasy once chained me, as it does so much of the human race. It nearly killed more than once. Not that I feared death, nor do I now, but death on the wrong terms is truly sorrowful. It would have been an utterly pointless death, death under a delusion.

Sanity came when I let it all go.

You can’t package truth. The salvation of humanity is not available on this plane of existence. Sanity is leaving all this behind, in the sense you finally realize to the core of your being this is just a prison, a big lie, not the real deal. Then you spend what time you have left finding small ways to show it. Some of you, dear readers, probably grasp this.

You realize, I’m sure, your answers are not everyone else’s answers. We have no branding, and whatever label we could find has already been co-opted and abused so much, it’s almost meaningless. We are truth in plain brown wrappers. It’s not the contents which matter so much as the utter lack of labeling itself. That’s our emphatic denial there is any answer, any “better deal” to which we can pin our names, hopes and dreams, or anyone else’s.

Salvation is not taught, but caught. It’s not a product, but a process. We demonstrate how it works for us, and know somebody is going to ask. If they don’t ask, that doesn’t mean they won’t get their own sanity, but those we can possibly help in any other way must ask. Unless of course, the convictions within force you to act unilaterally. You’ll know when that moment comes. Or maybe you won’t, but you’ll know later, and sharpen your convictions for the next time. The development process is never done, so long as we breathe this air.

We few know there will always be more, yet never more than a few. Sure, the long view of human history notes it comes and goes in cycles. Numbers or percentages aren’t possible, but there has never been more than a few of us. Even among people whose spirits are awake and alive, it seems most of them never get sane enough to really break free from the prison. They are like the children which never grow up, all unrealized potential. So even when we make some progress, we lose a big chunk in the process.

It’s not futile. At least, it isn’t futile so long as you don’t cripple yourself with expectations. Our very existence on another plane itself is worth it all. Dismissing expectations, that disentangling pillar of Christian Mysticism, is critical to whatever we have which approaches the idea of “success.” When we embrace the fullness of no expectations, we are success personified. We are free to let powers beyond us steer things where they must go, and we grant that same freedom to anyone we encounter. That’s the essence of helping them see this prison and seeing where freedom can be found.

They have to find their own answers, because we don’t offer answers. The best we can offer is shining the light on the path where humanity must go to find all the answers. The path is not in this world, so it can’t be packaged, managed, quantified, explained or sold. If you know this, on whatever level it is humans know such things, you are saved. You are sane. It’s also called love, peace, compassion, grace, and a thousand other things, all words which never quite capture the essence.

You can’t package salvation.

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The State of the Revolution

Posted on December 5, 2010 by ehurst

I am conducting a revolution. I’m not leading one, because I am not aware of anyone following me. I understand I am influencing a handful of folks, but I’m a revolutionary individual, not a revolutionary leader.

That’s because the foundation of this revolution is individuality.

I know all too well the lessons of leadership, and also it’s limitations. The most important things in this life cannot be led. It works okay for things which require more than one person doing the same thing at the same time, but that’s just mundane mechanics of existence on this plane. It’s the other plane which matters. You could share some of my philosophy, my notions and plans, but you have to do it all on your own. Even when you get support or direct help, it’s still on you. Being utterly and wholly independent in your choices is the whole point; that is the revolution itself. The other word I use often is “sanity” — the only way to be sane is to learn just what is and is not your responsibility, and take hold of that.

So tell me: How is your individual revolution going? That’s the state of the revolution for you.

Meanwhile, I find often in the news tidbits of how this or that person or group is being put through the meat-grinder for this or that political reason. These are folks trying to change the political landscape, inevitably by getting others to go along with their ideas. Power in numbers and all that. And it follows they will always have some grand investment in the trappings of influencing large numbers of people.

Without fail, the ones I read about will have computers, documents, materials for distribution, lists and a significant amount of organization and funding. Such makes them a target for their opponents — burglaries, arrests and confiscation, harassment, confinement, beatings and assassination, etc. Crude, but too often effective. Sometimes it has the opposite effect of making the movement even more viable. Some manage to recover until they succeed.

The death of any revolution is not oppression and repression, but institutionalization. When the revolution becomes mainstream, it is, by definition, no longer a revolution.

Perhaps you know this. If you happen to share something in my revolution, you probably do understand these things. It’s taken for granted. We also know our revolutions — each of us in our own — are not vulnerable to these measures.

I have a couple of computers. The whole point of revolution is not to do what others do, but to experiment and push the envelope. Not for its own sake, but to make sure all options have been tested to see what best meets the needs of the revolution. It’s not a sin to accept some convention, or a lot of conventions; it’s a sin to refuse to examine them. Right now, the needs of my revolution happen to make my computer systems pretty secure from electronic attacks over the Internet wires.

But if someone were to enter my home and put their hands my computers, they could probably get what they wanted from them. What they would get they could easily find online in the first place, except for some boring private stuff. I suppose if you really insisted you had a good reason for prying into my personal rantings in a journal I keep, I would let you read them. It’s not a matter of having things to hide, but they aren’t likely to be of interest to you unless you are wacko and reject my revolution, find it threatening.

So that means maybe some enforcement goons would like to know. That’s fine; all they need do is ask and I’ll send so much of the journal as I have. Even I am not all the interested in what I’ve written, so over the years I’ve lost big chunks of it. Other than those journal entries, all I’ve kept is copies of stuff I published, stuff I found pertinent published by others, and some bits and pieces of entertaining media files freely available to everyone.

Raid my computers? Don’t waste your time. Even if you confiscate all my most important articles, I could probably rewrite them, perhaps even better. I suppose you could slow things down by making me use pencil and paper, since my arthritis makes that challenging after awhile. It might slow down distribution of new ideas and new writings, but it’s too late to remove the stuff already published online. You want a copy of my static website archive? I’ll send you a CD. As long as I’m alive, the revolution continues, and the explanation I have to offer is still in my head.

There’s a strong chance I’ll still face arrest sometime in the future as a direct response to my revolution. I’ve openly counseled resistance, and offered philosophical and theological justification for armed violence by some folks in some cases. Not that I am interested in violence myself, but a central thesis of my teaching is there are two levels of operation, and most of the world is under God’s Laws. Those Laws do encourage well considered bloodshed in certain cases as the best way to prevent even worse bloodshed and injustice. On the spiritual level, we are required to honestly note such things, even as we eschew violence ourselves. It’s not as if there could be no violence justified for me, but it’s highly unlikely. So if they come to arrest me, they aren’t likely to have much trouble, at least not from me.

On the other hand, I openly admit in advance I’m likely to be difficult to find and catch if I suspect it’s coming. That’s the plan, for now, barring a move by the Spirit to choose some other response. He’s in charge of my revolution.

That’s the whole point. He’s in charge, not any of us. We revolutionaries are just the feet and hands on the ground. Insofar as there are any activists, we are it, each of us in our own way. There are no concerted plans, mass movements or rallies. There are no campaigns to influence opinion and politics. There is some effort to endorse change, publicly and even vociferously. But that’s just so folks have no excuse when they face God. It’s more about doing than talking, anyway. So while I offer copies of my version of the message, I discourage folks depending on me for their words. Words aren’t the point. Sanity is the point.

That’s the state of the revolution. It’s your own search for sanity. There aren’t likely that many of us, so we aren’t much of threat in that sense. The likelihood of being specifically targeted is pretty small. More likely we will get in trouble along the way, mistaken by the oppressors as something else entirely. Those who really understand just how much of a threat we constitute are probably too intelligent and important to be in a position to notice us.

Funny, eh?

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Stumbling Around RHEL 6.0: Printing (Updated)

Posted on December 4, 2010 by ehurst

Way back in the old days of Red Hat, printing was no more difficult than using the supplied RedHat config tool for setting up your LPRng queue. Since the arrival of CUPS, I’ve often felt it continues to be one of the most hateful things anyone has ever done to Linux users. I’m sure the developers and technicians love it, but only a precious few distros make it simple. Users of BSD generally learned long ago not to run unneeded LAN servers like CUPS, when you only plan to print from your own system. Thus, BSD still clings to Apsfilter. Given the presumption of most distros (“Why would anyone not love CUPS?”) you might have a real struggle on your hands switching to Apsfilter. For now, let’s concentrate on the shortest path, and note the RHEL series has been particularly painful.

Part of the problem remains the default kernel modules. For example, given how many articles are posted telling you it is necessary to blacklist usblp, I am puzzled why so many distros don’t make it the default, or at least don’t script it. This obscure fact has caused the filling of many forums over why printing doesn’t just happen, as it could and should. Even more disturbing is the large number of “helpful hints” which never seem to bother with that kernel module. Apparently this is both obscure, yet a near universal problem.

So to get my Brother HL-2140 to work, it wasn’t enough the kernel recognized it immediately. It insisted on loading that blasted useless kernel module. Does that work with any printer in the known universe? Not where I’ve tried it. On your RHEL machine, before you bother to plug in any USB printer, always remove that module (as root: rmmod usblp) and blacklist it. Edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf by adding this line at the end of the file: blacklist usblp.

(Update: This problem appears less an issue in the full release of RHEL 6.0. Test your USB printer without changing the modprobe blacklist first. If it doesn’t work, then let that be your first check in diagnosing the problem.)

Now it’s okay to plug in your USB printer. It should be auto-configured immediately, if CUPS knows what it is. If you are using some model from HP, you are in for a rough ride, because Red Hat insists on using the oldest possible working version of HPLIP — 3.9.8. Aside from those nice, durable Lasterjets, almost any HP printer you can get today needs the current 3.10 series to even think of working with RHEL 6.

For RHEL 5/CentOS 5, you’ll have your hands full, but I’ve made it work once; see this page. For RHEL 6, you have two different ways to get there. I recommend you go to this helpful page and follow the instructions. Since I don’t plan to ever trust HP again, I can’t vouch for how it works on RHEL 6, but I’ll bet it’s close. The other option is simply upgrading using this SRPM and building it yourself for upgrade. It’s not precisely up to date, but closer than the bundled version.

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Radical Honesty

Posted on December 3, 2010 by ehurst

The world isn’t ready for honesty. Sure, we like to think we prefer it, but the issue depends on our own internal willingness to be honest with ourselves.

One of the pillars of Christian Mysticism is a radical commitment to the Truth. Truth is always defined as the Person of God, and most assertively is not some disembodied objective entity out there. Ultimate truth depends entirely from the Person of God, and all truth is God’s truth. Truth is mystical; only facts can be handled objectively, and even then with severe limitations. When you commit to truth, you commit to embracing and upholding whatever God reveals, particularly truth as He reveals it. Truth is whatever God says it is.

Most people reject all that, even most Christians (sadly) at some level in their minds. We should hardly be surprised when people easily believe propaganda. It requires a holy cynicism about humanity — we are all born fallen — to question inputs from humans. The ultimate test of truth for a Christian Mystic is whether it meets the demands of the spirit, whether it is consistent with the bedrock of conviction. All else is merely intellectual speculation. The intellect was never designed to rule our decisions; that was the original issue involved in the Fall. When Eve and Adam chose to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, that was the choice to put reason on the throne, and displace God’s Spirit. If you miss that point, you don’t understand the Creation narrative.

The choice to let reason rule is death, it is what ties us to this prison world, this fallen plane of existence. You can debate all day long on the human level whether this or that is true (meaning consistent with the facts), but it won’t change anything eternal, which is the only thing that matters. Still, it requires only good critical thinking about facts to realize, for example, the Wikileaks hullabaloo is sly propaganda. But we have this weakness in our damaged ability to discern lying:

Despite the decades of research that have demonstrated that people cannot reliably tell who’s lying and who isn’t, most people believe they can. There is something so fundamentally threatening about the notion that we cannot really know whether or not to trust someone that it is very difficult to get anyone — clinicians, citizens, even police — to take such results seriously.

Self-honesty it not a concrete goal, but an emphasis for life, a path and direction. If you realize you can’t really trust yourself at times, you realize you can’t trust anyone else. You should certainly care (another pillar of Christian Mysticism), but don’t let your sense of peace depend on people (the other pillar), including yourself. Your sense of peace comes from seeking to make your life consistent with God’s revelation, and at that, it only requires you commit to what revelation you have already received, even while you seek more.

One of the most critical facts we so easily forget is most every political leader is at least partly psychopath. The ambition and desire to rule over the lives of others does not arise from good morals. A good moral person tries to avoid such a burden, though they will take it up as a wise parent does for their children. Without that familial piety, the power to decide for others is inherently evil. We are badly damaged enough by the Fall; without a living, breathing sacrificial love for those affected by your decisions, you can’t hope to do them any good. Otherwise, the best we can hope for is a defender who is determined to tear down government political power.

I’m willing to bet you don’t know of any political leader who isn’t a psychopath on some level.

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Stumbling Around RHEL 6.0: Kernel Update

Posted on December 2, 2010 by ehurst

I keep two harddrives in my system so I can test different OSes while keeping one I can trust. After playing awhile with RHEL 6.0 Beta, I let it go and went back to using Ubuntu Lucid. I had some projects to work on and didn’t want to spend a lot of time building everything from scratch. Today there was some sort of botched update which killed the DNS resolution in Ubuntu. I suppose by tonight or tomorrow I could find others with similar complaints, but I didn’t have time to wait or try to diagnose it myself. After a few attempts, I gave up and rebooted back into RHEL 6.0 Beta.

After the article was posted, I had time to check and see if the full release of RHEL 6.0 was significantly different in package version numbers. I noticed a kernel update, among other things. I decided to try it with the SRPM, since I can’t yet afford the RHN fee.

It took awhile, but some of the packages didn’t build. After some quality time with my favorite search engine, I learned there were some non-default switches necessary to get a default kernel. In this case, you have to run the rpmbuild command so:

rpmbuild -bb --with firmware --with perf kernel.spec

Otherwise, when you try to install the product of this long hard build, you’ll get an error demanding the unbuilt kernel-firmware package. And I don’t really understand what perf does, but the RHSA message indicated it needed updating, so I worked out how to get that, too. I’m sure it’s possible to edit the SPEC file to activate those switches, but I can’t parse the code.

Having so much fun, and now more time to play with it, I’ll be adding a few favorite packages over the next few days, along with catching up on the rest of the RHSA listed replacements. This will be good practice until CentOS 6.0 is released. I’ll be installing that on my laptop and using the experience as the basis for a series of articles on using it as a stable replacement for Windows.

Update: Well, pref didn’t build. I don’t know how the fix that, and I don’t know what difference it makes. Since things are working fine with the new kernel otherwise, I’m not going to worry about it right now.

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Decentralized versus Centralized DNS: Why?

Posted on December 1, 2010 by ehurst

In a discussion on a private mailing list, the issue of decentralized DNS was raised, in light of the recent battles between the corporate media working through government versus the pirate industry. Why would a bunch of Christian Open Source geeks be interested? It’s not just the technology angle.

At the risk of oversimplifying, we can describe DNS as the system behind the scenes by which computers pass information across the wires of the Internet. You think in terms of the name of a website, and maybe you know enough to type in “someplace” you want to visit, and it has to end in something like “.com” — you have to have the dot and an ending. Some may even realize you’ll have more than one dot in the name of the place. That we think of it as names, and in our minds as geographic places, is foreign to the computers doing all the work. To them, it’s a matter of passing ones and zeros in streams to other computers based on purely numerical addressing. It’s not places and names.

And all of this assumes a certain amount of trust. Given all the wires are owned almost exclusively by governments and large corporations, you’d naturally assume those entities have some interest in making this stuff work to their satisfaction. It has to be reliable so they can make money or maintain control, or whatever justifies the expense of running those wires and the computers. Your computer does not likely connect directly to the Net, but goes through several other computers first, typically owned by your ISP. All those governments and companies get together and set up a central means of sharing control among themselves, and trade some highly protected certifications between each other to make sure the mutual trust system works.

In times past, it was otherwise pretty much hands-off what computers passed across the wires. Then some smart-alecks started passing stuff annoying, then actually harmful to computers and to the business of folks who were paying to keep the whole thing alive. So it required some sort of protections. We all know about anti-virus and so forth, so that means protection distributed among the systems — decentralized. Except, the viruses are detected and stopped based on some centralized provider of information. It’s always been that way, a hybrid maintaining tension between centralized and decentralized. Somebody will always be displeased by the current balance, seeking ways to push things in one direction or another. For the most part, it works. Right now we are passing through a rough patch, where the tension is high and balance is wobbly.

Decentralized DNS has been tried on various scales since long ago. Indeed, in some ways it has always been in use, but restricted to a select few participants. It hasn’t worked that well, so there has to be a compelling reason for keeping it alive. Mostly it has been in the form of piggy-backing onto the regular system, by encrypting the traffic so that those passing the information have no idea what it is, only where it is going. Trying to come up with private wires running the same routes as the common wires used by everyone else is pretty hard to justify, so it’s easier to hide your stuff in the vast streams of everybody else’s stuff. And now we have increasing use of wireless transmissions (basically radio waves), which only complicates things, because wireless currently has to re-enter the wired system sooner or later. Yet it has the potential of working entirely without the wires, so long as your radio signal can reach the desired destination, or be passed along by other wireless connections. That’s another thing entirely.

If the only thing we can get from all this debate and technology warfare is Hollywood filth, cookie cutter music and porn, I could care less. I have TV and movies, and vastly prefer live performance of any music over commercially controlled, canned and poorly engineered noise any day. But I believe popular garbage entertainment is merely the reason money and effort will go into something I can use for other purposes.

While I certainly enjoy playing with computers, testing software and learning how to fix stuff, and surfing the Net, the whole thing is merely a tool. Not only do I have a purely spiritual motive for wanting to play in cyberspace, but it appears my message appeals to a rather narrow slice of humanity, thinly scattered. To share anything useful at all, it has to be accessible to as many humans as possible, as cheaply as possible. Right now, the Internet is the only route of exposure. Having suffered at the hands of the centralizers who objected to some of my gospel motivated behavior, I am quite sensitive to the whole issue of centralized versus decentralized. This isn’t simply one tool of many, but the single most important tool I have right now.

The current balance of power between the centralizers and decentralizers makes the former a bigger threat to my mission. Favoring the corporate run government oppression most certainly won’t help me, any more than it helped the Apostle John, who called it “Babylon.” But I am also in no position to fight pirates, porn addicts and other filth in their use of the Net. My mission gains nothing by trying anything beyond the usual verbal appeal for sanity and repentance. That’s how the Kingdom works. If some new technology idea helps the pirates and hinders government controls, it will likely bless me, too.

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Underground Internet and Global Patterns

Posted on December 1, 2010 by ehurst

Global patterns: It’s not about ultimate truth and reality, any more than a single model of human behavior can explain everything we observe. Detecting a global pattern is simply a way of modeling human behavior on a broad scope.

I’m not the only one who has noticed the Internet is fitting into a known pattern. Something revolutionary splashes on the scene. First it’s the domain of specialists, but their need for convenience means dumbing it down enough for others to use their simplified tools. Then it gets simpler by degrees and suddenly everyone has it and uses it, until even government becomes dependent on it. We had that with other means of communication, starting as far back as the printing press. It’s not just information. The same applies in varying degrees to just about anything people want, where the demand outruns supply significantly. At some point there is a war between government and some non-government force over control of this thing. In the case of the Internet, it’s between corporations using government laws and freebooters.

Right now, the conflict is getting pretty hot. The US grabbed a bunch of domain names so that pirates can’t easily find their favorite suppliers of digital merchandise. But the P2P gang have struck back. I confess I don’t understand DNS that well, so I can’t explain in layman’s terms what this business of decentralized DNS is really all about. I’m thinking most of the P2P users know even less about it. Not every casual user of pirated digital goods will be able to adjust, but there is a broad stripe between geeks and dummies who will pick this up quickly enough to keep the traffic going. How quickly government responds with a more effective measure is anybody’s guess.

What I do understand is the pattern. We’ve had some golden years of relative peace on the Net. At some point the demand outstrips the supply, particularly with heavy multimedia files. As long as technology keeps up, things are okay. But a heavy conflict between supply and demand sides is unstable, and ripe for abuses. So the old media corporations refuse to play ball with the new market realities, such that prices are artificially high. That’s begging for efforts to break outside the official channels. So we have “piracy” and the corporations prod government into action, and a great many innocent bystanders are hurt. The system changes repeatedly in a short time, and that in itself is an open invitation for more government regulation. Regulation under this context will always come loaded with unintended consequences, to which the underground will react. We have hit the point where the whole thing wobbles like a top, which is actually a ton of concrete, spinning along a putt-putt course.

It’s not going to crash all at once, but it will get very messy and folks will flee to some other market. The cellphone industry is trying to capture that, but it’s just not the same, yet simultaneously, too much the same. Given the nature of things, there will have to be a new “drug” to marginalize the whole thing, a whole new way of transmitting information. Then the Internet will fade back into its proper place in terms of market size, but it will never recover the freedom it once offered until most of the world just does not care.

I can’t guess whether this new trick of decentralized DNS is going to result in a real game-changer. I can promise I won’t miss the unwashed masses which currently soil the Internet. The problem is, their passing from the scene will leave the whole thing utterly broken. It’s possible this thing has become so completely essential to a certain class of folks able to rescue it for their own use, but the global pattern can’t account for that. There’s something about information as traffic and market which seems to offer its own twist on the pattern.

But for today, it looks like the Net Pirates win one.

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