I didn't finish "Javantea's Guide for Technophobes". Oh well. I did do two mini murals for wrapping of two other presents. Christmas isn't about presents in case you didn't hear that ten thousand times before now. I'm getting along with my dad this Christmas. We argue, but that's cool. If we didn't, we'd be lying to ourselves and each other. We disagree on many issues. He is intelligent, so his arguments are interesting. He doesn't swallow what he hears on the TV hook, line, and sinker. Certainly that's a sign of hope.
I might catch flak for this rant, but I feel that it is necessary. I heard Bill O'Reilly talking for a few minutes during the vacation and he was talking to a woman who was trying to get hotels to discontinue selling pay-per-view pornography. Her cause obviously had problems. The first was that the porn makes money for hotels. It would be like selling a cash cow for beans (the non-magical type, I might add). The second is that the porn is completely optionally chosen by the viewer. It's not hurting anyone who isn't asking for it and paying for it. However, it's not a big issue with me right now. We have a war imminent, constitution being violated by two mega-fascist laws, and hackers being persecuted by the FBI unjustly. I'm not going to spend any more time than I already have on fighting for the right to hotel porn. But Mr. O'Reilly did make this rant possible by mentioning that the woman ought to be fighting the virtual child pornography ruling made by the Supreme Court. WTF is that? Well, by now you know what this picture is, right? It is ultra-softcore virtual child pornography. So what is the definition of pornography? It depends who you ask. Many folk back in the 1800s up to 1950s believed that the show of an ankle is pornography. In Afghanistan, a girl showing an ankle is still (even after the Taliban were ousted by the US military invasion) sometimes considered grounds for stoning. So I probably shouldn't show this in Afghanistan, but there are two worse crimes here according to what I know of Muslim religion: using the internet (the tool of evil) and making a sculpture of a person (idoltry). But enough with the bs, this is not pornography enough to produce a case that would get me put in jail here in the US. But it makes a point which I will be explaining in this essay: exactly what is pornography and what is bad about it?
The PNG version of this is absolutely huge. 1700 pixels or so. If it crashes your computer, send me the bill. Wait, don't. Send the bill to the maker of the software that didn't allow for large pictures (likely Microsoft if it's IE or KDE if it's KPaint or Konqueror). They'll probably send it back to you saying that you agreed in the EULA that the damage resulting in using their product is to be paid by you. A malicious hacker who wants to crash someone's computer quickly can simply make a huge blank image compressed with PNG and social engineer it to you. Since most programs allocate the uncompressed amount of data, you'll lose all your physical memory and a lot of your swap. If you don't have a Gig of swap, lots of physical memory, and a fast computer, you're a gonner. Why do programmers give the malicious ones all the power and denies it to the benevolent hacker? Because the benevolent hacker exploits the computer to everyone's mutual benefit (a tough task) while the malevolent hacker uses his/her knowledge to benefit only him/herself at the cost of others (an easy task). That, my hacker-in-training friends, is your lesson for tonight. Use your knowledge for the benefit of everyone or keep it inside your walls. I am living proof: people that come here will see my hacking and benefit. If they do not benefit, they will not come here.
