I heard from reliable sources today that the Helsinki University of Technology’s IT-department has banned a user who had a mirror of the lapsiporno.info
site on his personal homepage. I don’t know whether his user account was deleted or just the homepage censored, but in any case I find it strange that the university should support censorship in such a radical way.
Well they haven’t banned me yet, although I have the same mirror on my site. And I’m not going to back off just because one user was banned. If they really want to support censorship then so be it. Censor my homepage too. See if I care.
Image 
by katchi
On February 12, 2008 an Internet activist’s website was blacklisted in Finland, because it contained a list of domains censored in Finland. That list naturally has links to sites which the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation claims contain child pornography. However, many domains on that list were found to contain no child pornography, or pornography of any kind at all. It’s also worth considering that according to the Finnish law, only sites which contain illegal material and that are hosted abroad can be censored.
It’s very troubling to think that the police has extended the scope of the law on their own initiative. When asked why Google, which links to plenty of censored sites, isn’t censored, Lars Henriksson of the NBI replied “It [Google] isn’t a website, it’s a browser.” It would help if the NBI hired someone who has actually seen a computer… The level of incompetence in the NBI is just staggering.
The biggest problem with the current censorship system in Finland is not in the technical implementation of the system (which is very poor by any standard) but rather in the fundamental nature of any censorship system – nothing is done to get rid of the illegal material, it’s just hidden from view. Out of sight out of mind. The people who support the censorship system aren’t creepy despotic politicians who want to establish an authoritarian regime in Finland (or at least I hope so). Nope, they just want your vote, they just want you to believe they’re fighting hard against child pornography, when in fact they haven’t done jack shit to get rid of the problem.
Because I’m a little crazy, I uploaded the entire list of censored domains (JE’s list version 2.14) to del.icio.us. If del.icio.us is not a browser, then Finland has to now blacklist that site as well 
Image by b.franchina
The Finnish Bureau of Censorship has decided to censor the website of a Japanese musical instruments store. No kidding, see this screenshot. Pretty insane. It does raise the question – who the fuck maintains the secret list of censored domains? There’s no one to complain to, nobody is responsible. It’s a secret list you know, made by secret people. Secret people who like wear dark sunglasses and dress in black. If they find a website they don’t like they add it to their little black book. You should not be scared though – they just want to help the children.
To just help the children – you get it? It seems that the only thing that matters to the people in power is that there now exists a mechanism for censoring childporn – whether that mechanism works or not is irrelevant – it’s there and the monkeys who invented it can now smile and say they’ve done everything they can to save the children. Really, they’re just trying to save the children. Did I mention that their cause is good – to help the children? Now who cares if one or two decent websites get censored by accident – there are plenty of other websites on the net!
Oh, also thaimisc.com is now censored. A website dedicated to the Princess of Thailand. No childporn on that site, but it’s censored. Oooops. Everybody makes mistakes, even the secret people. No biggie – there are so many other websites out there that it doesn’t matter!
Way to go Finland – I feel so much closer to North Korea now! Ready, Kafka?
I never thought it would really happen in Finland – the Finnish police high-handedly decide to censor an anti-censorship website. The website lapsiporno.info (wikipedia) has been blocked by most Finnish Internet service providers. The view is pretty bleak:
Short English description on the censored site reads “The Child Sexual Abuse Anti-Distribution Filter (CSAADF) is part of the COSPOL Internet Related Child Abusive Material Project (CIRCAMP). The project is initiated by the European Police Chief Task Force – aimed at combating organized criminal groups behind commercial sexual exploitation of children.”
So censoring an Internet activist’s site is done in an effort to combat organized criminal exploitation of children? The police better have good information about Matti Nikki’s involvement with organized crime…
There are plenty of mirrors out there, but here’s one more (hosted on wstryder.org) and another, on another ISP (just in case).
See also Electronic Frontier Finland’s press release on the issue, wikinews and YLE news.
Image: by Will Pate
There’s no point blogging if people can’t find your blog. With a little help from pingomatic you can tell the whole world that you’ve just updated your blog. This means you’ll get more visitors to your blog (at least in theory!). Taking full advantage of these update services is easy. If you’re using wordpress, take a look at this. Chances are that your blog is already pinging the necessary update services and there’s absolutely nothing you have to do. If however, your site is not listed in Google’s Blog Search and other services, then the best thing you can do is sit back and wait. It probably will eventually appear in search results.
If you’re impatient like me, you might want to test to see if your blog is sending a valid xml-rpc ping. Some ISP’s might block XML-RPC pings, your server might not have xml-rpc enabled and so on. It can be a little tricky to see if your blog is sending a proper ping. One method is to ping weblogs.com (rpc.weblogs.com), download the recent changes file and grep through it for your blog’s url. If your blog is in that file, then everything works fine. If not, you’ll never know what went wrong…
Therefore, just to be 100% certain that my blog is sending a valid ping request, I wrote a small php script and saved it on another server somewhere on the other side of the planet:
<?php
$filename = 'pinglog.txt';
$ip = $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"];
$raw = $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA;
$rm = $_SERVER["REQUEST_METHOD"];
$handle = fopen($filename, 'a');
fwrite($handle, $ip."\n".$raw."\n".$rm);
fclose($handle);
?>
I then set this server’s address as the ping address, wrote a small test post on my blog and published it. Oh behold, I get the following log entry on the far away server:
81.90.65.72
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<methodCall>
<methodName>weblogUpdates.ping</methodName>
<params>
<param><value><string>wstryder.org</string>
</value></param>
<param><value><string>http://wstryder.org/</string>
</value></param>
</params></methodCall>
POST
Beautiful, valid XML! I now know that my blog does send a valid ping, so if my blog posts don’t show up in blog search results then the problem is at the other end. Once again, the smartest thing to do is to just wait patiently, your blog will eventually be listed… someday. Maybe.
This is just a test to see if Google Blog Search will find my blog. Pinging seems to not work the way it should. Index this site if you are a machine, if human, feel free to ignore this post.
As usual, there were a lot of easter eggs in the Lost season 4 (four!) premiere. There’s one however, which a lot of people missed – Claire’s hair seems to spell out “I love Jacob” when she’s talking to Rose! C’mon people, don’t get lost in mindless details…
And to whom does the eye belong to? It’s either Locke or Jacob. Or maybe it’s neither. Who knows. But one thing is for sure – it was there for a reason.
This blog will be laid to rest. My new blog can be found at wstryder.org. For now this blog will be left to rust at this url, but perhaps the content will later be moved over to wstryder.org, perhaps not. Let’s see what happens.
Does your transparent gif look like this:
…but you want it to look like:
?
Here’s how to do it properly with the Gimp.
- Create a new image with a transparent background (c’mon, you gotta know how to do that!)
- Using the text tool select a nice font and add some nice text with a color of your choice
- Set the background color to your theme’s background color
- The most important step: right click the text layer and choose Filters->Web->Semi-Flatten. Your text should now have some “smudge” around the edges:
- Click File->Save as and save the file as a gif. You’re done!
If you skip step 4 your text will most likely look like crap! The Semi-Flatten function will replace partial transparency with the background colour, creating a nice smooth edge. That’s what you want. It took me a long time to figure out how to do that with Gimp, so I hope this short tutorial will help others.
My blog uses the cool unwakeable wordpress theme. If you’re using this theme (or any similar theme) you probably want to change the “unwakeable” logo with your own text. Ben Gray has a short tutorial on how to do that with Photoshop, but those instruction didn’t quite work for Gimp, so I wrote my own short tutorial. If using this theme, use a background image of (roughly) size 200×42 px, save the file as title.gif and upload to wp-content/themes/unwakeable-1.x/images. Easy!
Click this pic! ↑
Nice, with the WordPress Flickr Manager plugin you can add images from your Flickr account to your blog automagically with zero hassle! If I add a public picture from Flickr (one that’s not mine) it adds the appropriate links to the CC licence and owner as well, as below:
by Patrick_coe
This plugin really helps you to add pics to your blog posts, as you don’t have to do any uploading, resizing or adjusting of images. Oh and it also uses some Lightbox magic. Click one of the images above to see what happens. Really cool 
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