His Nose Was Too Big

As some of you may know, one of the "masterminds" behind the September 11th attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, went to military tribunal yesterday. He may be charged with war crimes, for which his penalty would be the death sentence.

Now, I realize this man most likely had an involvement in an attack that resulted in the death of some three thousand plus Americans (if you're not counting the war in Iraq that somehow resulted from the attack). However, I think in this particular case we should consider staying the death penalty, and should do the same in any cases where a terrorist is convicted. Death is the last thing you want to give someone who believes they are fighting in the name of God, Allah, or whoever else may have a following of extremists. When you give a man like this death, his death will be celebrated as a victory by his brothers-in-arms, and he will welcome his death with open arms, as Mohammed has stated. To give these men the martyrdom they seek will not be a victory for America, but just another reason to give their comrades a reason not to fear any punishment they may meet an American hands. To give them a life sentence would be to make their efforts more in vain. If they can't even die for their god, what's the bother in trying? Maybe this would just cause an increase in suicide attacks. Maybe it would result in less attacks overall. How could we measure the effect of letting these men live a life that's wasted by rotting away in prison? Who knows. The point is, we can't just send these men to their deaths if that's what they're asking for, it's not a punishment for them.

Also, I have to bring up the fact that Mohammed made a comment about his nose being drawn too big by a courtroom artist. Are you fucking kidding me? Why are we reporting on that?! We're prosecuting a "terrorist mastermind" and you're reporting on a comment about a courtroom drawing?

You people are hacks.

Good Tuesday

Here we are, finally down to the end of the Primary elections. We have Clinton down by more than 100 delegates with only 48 left up for grabs, and about half of those are likely to go to Obama. We're nearing the end, my friends, of a long circus of an election. We knew who would be winning this election from the day that Obama won 11 straight primaries. We knew who would be winning this election when Obama over took Clinton in pledged delegates. We knew who would be winning this election when Clinton started losing super delegates to Obama. We've seen this coming for a long time now. Because of this, I just can't help but ask the question: Why didn't Clinton see this coming? Why is Clinton still fighting for this? The actions Clinton has been taking have hurt our chances of dodging another four to eight years of having a Republican president. McCain has been able to start on his general election campaign without the distractions of the Republican primary while we've got Clinton trying to grasp at straws claiming that the super delegates will tell the voters that she's the only real choice for the Democrat presidential candidate. We knew in April that she would lose the election, and her insistence on staying in the election has allowed McCain to run unopposed for the three months to define himself to the voters of the nation. It's only been very recently that Obama has started his general election campaign by shifting the focus from his campaign against Clinton to his campaign against McCain. How long ago could we have shifted this focus if we didn't have a fly buzzing in our ear? How long ago could we have begun the fight to drive the Republicans out of the White House and give ourselves a chance for some change in the way politics work?

At this point, Clinton's aides have let us know that she is not planning on ceding the election to Obama, that she is not going to withdraw from the race. She may have headed back to New York, Bill Clinton may have said that this was the last race he would campaign in, but she is still not giving up her fight to be back in the White House. Will we have to wait until the Democratic National Convention in August before we can start the campaign against McCain? Clinton needs to realize the damage that she's causing her party by staying in the race, and that McCain is going to use that to his advantage. Let's get this over with before we have troops going into Iran. Let's get this over with before we're bombing Syria. Let's end this primary election and move on to defeating the greatest threat currently posed against American freedom: Four more years of Republicans in the White House.

Who Are The Real Defenders?

Recently a company called Media Defender launched a SYN attack on a legitimate website called Revision3. This company runs a private torrent tracker which it uses to distribute its own media on the net. Their administrators noticed that someone was trying to exploit a security hole in their system, and when they locked down that hole the attackers retaliated with a SYN attack shutting down the site for the weekend going into Tuesday. They didn't just shut down their Bit Torrent setup, the shut down their FTP and their e-mail when the attack spilled over into the other servers. They caused a measurable amount of damage to an innocent site because the may have been exploited by someone else as well.

Media Defender is trying to say that this was all unintentional (well, at least the part where they hit a legit company). Of course, they did mean to run a SYN attack against the host, and they were loading fake torrents onto the host. They're just saying they didn't realize the host was legit. Rather than calling up Revision3 and saying "Hey guys, we found this back door on your site, we think pirates might be using it for their illegal downloading" they decided they'd just walk right in as well and start trying to catch those pirates with a large amount of fake torrents.

Whether this attack was intentional or not this attack doesn't matter. What does matter is that it brings something into the open which the pirate community has been claiming for a long time now: Media Defender will and has launched Denial of Service attacks at people it believes are pirates, something that is illegal in the United States. This is something they've been specifically hired to do by organizations like the RIAA and MPAA, as well as individual studios. This is a Wild West mentality where we are no longer innocent until proven guilty. This is people being deliberately attacked on a suspicion of illegal activity. This is an action that is counter to our nation's ideals of freedom, and if we could bring them to their knees before, we can kill them this time.