90 Day Jane Blog

Pinny came across this weird blog somehow. The chick plans to kill herself in approximately 3 month's time. People as always, see the humorous side in this. The links below the original blog are the inevitable parodies that soon followed.

Original:
http://90dayjane.blogspot.com/

Parodies:
http://90daypoop.blogspot.com/
http://90dayjayne.blogspot.com/
http://90dayjohn.blogspot.com/

DefCon Notech Hacking

This video is just friggen awesome. It's from DefCon and deals with basic social engineering skills. =)

The whole video can be found here.

Benazir Bhutto is Dead

Note: This article needs to be cleaned up and re-edited; bear with me, I'm tired and I'm going to bed when I have something done.

Politics is not my favorite topic for this blog, not even my favorite topic to talk about anyway as people usually get really passionate about it, often not using logic and reason but their own emotions to come to their conclusions. However, I felt like talking about the assassination of the former Prime Minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto anyway.

It's really sad that someone had to die. There wee several casualties at the rally apart from Mrs. Bhutto herself. The saddest part to me is, that someone not only took the life of another human being, but also took away the mother of three children (I'm sure there were other people with kids who died at the rally as well).

The Western media is proclaiming this to be the end of democracy in Pakistan. Having lived in Pakistan through Mrs. Bhutto's previous two terms (and the terms of Nawaz Sharif and Musharraf), I find this comment rather funny. Most Pakistanis were totally fed up of Benazir and Nawaz Sharif a long time ago, especially the educated youth of the country.

Why did the United States support Mrs. Bhutto? There are quite a few reasons for this.

1. Firstly, Benazir Bhutto was educated at Harvard. She had an American and British education in some of the most prestigious institutions of the two countries. This apparently made her smarter than her political advisories.
2. As of late, Benazir Bhutto had been commenting on supporting the United States and giving them whatever they wanted. This meant compromising the sovereignty of Pakistan. This would not have necessarily been in the best interests of the Pakistani people. Instead this was a political move for Mrs. Bhutto in order to regain political power.
3. She's a woman. Women apparently make better leaders for foreign countries (but for some reason having a woman president for the US sounds like an absurd idea to most of the US public (yes, I'm referring to Hillary Clinton here)). What's even more hilarious is that women have usually been mistreated more in Pakistan during Benazir's tenures

Like my friend Pinny, has often suggested to me, the seat of the head of state of Pakistan is somewhat like the ring in The Lord of the Rings. Whoever holds the seat gets mesmerized by it and extermely power hungry. The last time Benazir and Nawaz Sharif were in office, they both tried to get rid of people they considered obstacles in their goal to achieve supreme power. President Musharraf appears to be doing the same thing. Take the removal of the Chief Justice of Pakistan, who had rightly judged some cases in the favor of the people, instead of corrupt individuals. The question is, is this democracy or is this just a civilian form of dictatorship which the West is too blind to see?

Why didn't the educated youth want her back in office? She's been tried and tested twice before, third time is not a charm in politics, it's down right stupid. The litany of corruption charges against Mrs. Bhutto and her spouse is another smart reason why most Pakistanis didn't want her in charge of their tax money. If they really wanted to invest in property overseas, people would have bought it on their own instead of funding Benazir's palace in Surrey, England.
There's way more to it and you can read up on it here.

It truely is a sad day for Pakistan and the rest of the world. However, Benazir would not have brought democracy to the country, as she had stated. That was just her excuse, I'm sure who ever assassinated her had theirs.

Huge Hamburger!

The picture says it all. I found it at Eric Goldman's blog. However, the direct link to the image can be found here.

Internet Sub-Cultures: Noob Talk

Games like "Command & Conquer: Generals" and most probably others have players from all over the world, most of them using the "noob talk" lingo, talk pronounced more like taak (think of torque without the R). Flaming is essential and in order to do so, the word noob (a way of saying newbie in a totally degrading manner) is supposed to be misspelled in one of absurd variations; some of them are as follows:

noob, noobs, newb, nub, nubs, boon, boons

There's usually an adverb or an adjective added to it. For example:

noob host
dc noob
scud noob
bunker noob (of course, one of my favorites)

There are always new varieties invented by the minute. It's a whole different linguistic culture of it's own. It's probably got to do something with the whole Green Revolution. In this case, preserving your keys, saving keystrokes for a rainy day or probably for extending the life of your keyboard and looking cool while you do so.

What bewilders me the most though is the improper conservation of keystrokes. For example, a couple of days ago, a noob posted:

[elf] u kik?
[elf] mannn

Keys conserved: y,o,c and the shift key
Keys excessively hammered: n and the Enter key

Okay, y and o is somewhat of an IM (instant messenger) standard these days (something I'm totally not into). However, the excessive use of n and conservation of the c is somewhat inappropriate. Firstly, if you're actually preserving your finger energy for some other subtle exercise that may not be appropriate to suggest here, then why excessively hit the n key? Secondly, in terms of preserving your keyboard strokes (for an ever long lasting keyboard), why would you save on a c and then go waste away the n; I mean, the n is used way more than the c. This internet subculture is both interesting, yet bewildering.