Reasons To Never Connect Microsoft Windows To The Internet
Fiona Price of F3ar 1s A Pr1s0n
Reason 1: To reboot into a command prompt on Windows 10 now requires a Hotmail account and password. This, in effect, amounts to requiring permission from Microsoft every time anyone wants to make an alteration to the workings of their own computer. Alterations can be made to the OS via the registry, however, by the time latest versions of Windows 10 have been first booted to the GUI, the user has already pegged their copy of Windows to a Hotmail account.
Reason 2: Windows Update. Microsoft now routinely backdoor Windows 10 and force the user to apply updates. Turning off the Windows Update service will not circumvent this as Microsoft will now aggressively re-enable Windows Update even after the user has disabled it. This would be bad enough at the best of times, but since 2018, recent Windows Updates do not actually work on a large percentage of PC’s, causing them to crash on restart and go into something like a perpetual booting up and shutting down Möbius loop. There are third party solutions, like the Sledgehammer script (link below), that will disable Windows Update, but even then Microsoft will backdoor your copy of Windows and install updates while you perform procedures like updating drivers. As of 2020, Microsoft aren’t even pretending not to be using back doors that allow any change whatsoever to made to a user’s system without their consent.
Reason 3: After buying new PC’s the user is forced to either use Linux to copy data from the old hard disk (Windows file permissions don’t cut much ice with Linux) or try to seize ownership of the files on the old hard drive. There is a useful registry hack on MajorGeeks (link below) that helps with this. Personally, I find it easier just to plug in a USB hard disk docker and use Linux to access the files. Why on Earth should anyone have to hack their way through the Windows file permissions system to obtain their own data?
Reason 4: Windows 11 will only support Intel 8th Gen and beyond CPU’s. I’m not sure whether this is perfidious (almost certainly), just plain stupid (most definitely) or both. Microsoft are seemingly now backtracking on this, coming up with “workarounds” that will allow users to install Windows 11 at their own risk, with no guarantee of driver compatibility, system stability or eligibility for updates, even security ones.
Reason 5: If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. Windows 10 collects “telemetry”, sensitive and not. This telemetry collection cannot be turned off. It includes stuff like diagnostic data, passwords, contacts, URL's, P2P-update sharing and unique ID tracking tokens. Windows monitors what features and applications are used, and how often. Cortana sends Microsoft data on the user’s location. If you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear? Why not write an Arsebook Post with all your bank and credit card details? Or how about a post about your partner’s sexual fetishes?
Links:
Sledgehammer:
https://m.majorgeeks.com/files/details/wumt_wrapper_script.html
Take ownership:
https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/take_full_ownership_of_files_folders_registry_hack.html
Fiona Price of F3ar_1s_A_Pr1s0n - Goth Nerd - Builder of Metaverse Cyberpunk Cities
A Call For Responsible Use of Technology
Fiona Price of F3ar 1s A Pr1s0n
The moment people start using a technology it becomes an immutable certainty that the technology will become politicized. There will be a price levied on anyone who wants access to the technology. Patents will be used to allow the owners of the technology to use it to concentrate massive amounts of wealth in a tiny number of hands. In the case of pharmaceuticals used to control illnesses, this can lead to many people paying vastly inflated sums for drugs that cost next to nothing to produce and lead to the deaths of those people who can’t afford them. These drugs are still charged for at exorbitant prices long after the research and development costs have been recouped.
Part of this is caused by creative misuse of the patents system. Using the example of insulin, Banting, Best and Collip, when they isolated Insulin in 1921, sold the patents for $1 US each, to make sure that cheap insulin became widely available as rapidly as possible. In 1977 Eli Lilly, the company that produced most of the world’s insulin, switched from harvesting insulin from foetal pig Langerhans islets to insulin production from recombinant DNA technology. As revealed by Mendosa (2015), Luo and Gelland (2020) and Hirsch (2016), this led to a considerable decrease in the cost of producing insulin, but the price of insulin rose dramatically after the new method of insulin production was patented and marketed as Humulin in 1982. When this patent was old enough for generic forms of Humulin to start being be produced another patent was applied for, this time for the first insulin analogue, Lispro, and another price hike. Lispro, incidentally, is Humulin with a single amino acid altered.
This, continuing with the insulin example, is also exacerbated by price-fixing. Mendosa noted that Sanofi increased the price insulin glargine 16.1 percent. “And literally the next day, Novo Nordisk increased the price of insulin detemir (Levemir) 16.1 percent. In fact, this pattern repeated six months later, and this has actually happened 13 times for these two products that have total U.S. sales of $11 billion.” Lawsuits have also been used to delay the production of biosimilar insulin products that could potentially drive down prices through competition. This is backed up by Luo and Gelland, who also noted synchronised price hiking with insulin producers matching each other's price rises precisely.
In another case, described by Mole (2018), Turing Pharmaceuticals, run by disgraced pharmaceutical executive and hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli, bought the rights to Darapim, an off patent drug used to treat toxoplasmosis, with no competition for its production and sale. They immediately raised the price of the drug from $13.50 to $750.00 per pill, $35,000 per prescription. This was not the only such case. In 2015 alone, more than 300 generic drugs saw prices increase by more than 100 percent.
The ability of the people who own technologies to lobby government officials with hard cash means that no meaningful regulation is brought in to control the price-fixing of technologies above the market value. In the case of the latest smart phone upgrade this is not a life-threatening problem and prices are controlled by market counter forces since people can either take or leave it. In the case of drugs, housing and energy supply, the market counterforce that would drive prices down ceases to exist since people do not have any choice over whether or not they buy the product. People tend to pay any amount of money for medical treatment if the alternative is a painful death, while the people who run the price-fixing drug cartels are quite content to put their desire for unlimited profit above other people’s right to live.
Technological advancement has led to vast economic growth that has only benefited a small percentage of the population. We have huge socialistic largesse for wealthy people who can lobby politicians, and capitalism red in tooth and claw for everyone else. Those of us who are not wealthy technocrats and oligarchs have seen decades of wage deflation and stagnation. This has seen the rise of Dickensian levels of poverty, depravity, violence, substance abuse and diseases thought to have been long consigned to the dustbin of history. The people who control information control the technology that propagates information. The people who control the technology control the politicians and lawmakers. Meanwhile the public are treated like mushrooms, fed shite and kept in the dark. Information must be free, or society will end up in chains.
References:
Hirsch, Irl B., 'Costs Associated With Using Different Insulin Preparations' (2015).
Hirsch, Irl B., 'Changing Cost of Insulin Therapy in the U.S.', (2016).
Luo, J., Gellad, W.F., 'Origins of the Crisis in Insulin Affordability and Practical Advice for Clinicians on Using Human Insulin.' Curr Diab Rep 20, 2, (2020).
Mendosa, D., 'Why Insulin Costs So Much' Based on an earlier article publish by Health Central, accessed at http://www.mendosa.com/blog/?p=3529, (2020).
Mole, B., 'The 5,000% price hike that made Martin Shkreli infamous is no longer paying off', (2018).
How Do Governments Make Their Money?
Fiona Price of F3ar 1s A Pr1s0n
The uses of phrases like "other people's money" by right wing neo-liberal politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May is not accidental, but a deliberate mischaracterization of social-democratic economic models as raiding members of the public's income. It could be imagined that many politicians use this language because they lack the intellectual prowess to understand basic economics, after all, our politicians are not, on the whole, a particularly impressive lot, being composed chiefly of intellectual lightweights and economic illiterates. That said, this is hardly likely in the case of Margaret Thatcher or a number of ex-Chancellors of the Exchequer.
As revealed by Pettifor (2018), Akram and Li (2020) and Murphy and Hines (2010), gilt bonds are used to finance the Government's net spending requirements and to refinance maturing debts. Most Treasury gilts are bought by pension funds and insurance companies, with the interest, or yield, on the gilts serving as an income source; maintaining its value until claims are made on the funds. Typically, the money will be returned to the taxpayer many years down the line when pensions are paid out or insurance is claimed, so in a circular process, the money paid in interest ultimately returns to taxpayers on their retirement.
In reality, as outlined by Murphy and Hines (2010), the gilts that the Bank of England are buying are not the same ones that the treasury is selling at any point in time. In the wake of the 2008 GFC, The Bank of England has pushed interest rates to their lowest in decades. The upshot of this is that banks and pension funds that have sold government gilts to the Bank of England as part of the 2009 quantitative easing measures are in profit since they would have bought these gilts previously at a lower price.
While it is impossible to know exactly how much profit, Murphy and Hines (2010), suggest that much of the £200 billion QE package in the wake of the 2008 crisis could have been turned to profit almost immediately, to the point where banks in 2009 were back in profit and bankers bonuses restored.
In the time of Theresa May's Government, the Debt Management Office held an auction that was overbid by £2 billion. The Government had hoped to raise £3 billion; investors were so keen to buy British gilts that they were willing to hand over more than £5 billion. As a result of this overbidding, the interest rate on the gilt was 1.3% at a time when inflation was 2.4%. This meant the interest the Government paid was negative and that investors are paying the Government to lend money to them, parking it in a safe treasury gilt, and still managing to profit.
The key issue here is that in financing for investment, borrowing comes first and taxation later. Taxation is generally a consequence of levies on income, property or transactions. We take a job and only at the end of the month are we paid and our tax deducted. It is only after buying and selling goods or services that taxes like VAT can be deducted. Only after money changes hands can capital gains tax be paid. This is why all governments finance activities by borrowing. The process of raising money from gilts in what's now the UK is as old as the Bank of England itself.
While this process is perfectly legitimate and transparent, using a financial crash to justify over a decade of austerity when the banking system at the heart of the crisis was returned to profit almost immediately is not, nor is the calumny of accusing any government that takes an interest in improving public services of tax raids on "other people's money".
References:
Akram, T., Huiqing L., 'The Empirics of UK Gilts’ Yields' , Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, (2020).
Murphy, R., Hines, C., 'Green quantitative easing: Paying for the economy we need.' Norfolk: Finance for the Future, (2010).
Pettifor, A., 'How Governments Finance Their Spending (and its not from taxation)', (2018).
Just For Fun - The Six Minimum Requirements For A Turing Complete Language
Fiona Price of F3ar 1s A Pr1s0n
Assignment Operator: The purpose of assignment operation is to assign a values to variables. The assignment operator causes the value of the right hand operand to be allocated to the variable named on the left hand side of the operator. The resulting assignment expression is the value assigned to the left hand operand.
For example, the following C code will assign the left hand variable x the value of the right hand operand, 10, and the printf will output the value of x to the console. The following line will then add one to value of x and then the printf will output the new value of x to the console. %d tells printf to take the next argument and print it as an integer. \n tells printf to start on a new line.
int main()
{
int x;
x = 10;
printf ("%d", x);
x = x + 1;
printf ("\n%d", x);
}
Comparison Operator: Comparison operators compare values and return a Boolean true or false. Comparison operators include less than < , more than > , less than or equal to < = , more than or equal to > = , strictly equal to = = = , and strictly not equal to ! = = = .
Jump Instruction: Changes the instruction pointer register. The jump instruction transfers the program sequence to the memory address specified in the operand.
Halt Instruction: The halt instruction suspends CPU operation until an interrupt or reset is received. While in the halted state, the processor will execute NOP (no operation) commands to maintain memory refresh logic.
Increment / Decrement Operator: Increment operators will add one to the value of an operand. Decrement operators will subtract one from the value of an operand. This is useful for increasing or decreasing the value of a pointer by an amount that makes it point to the element adjacent in memory.
Input / Output: Any programmable computer must have the ability to let the user read from and write to its memory.
"Fake science factories, twilight companies whose sole purpose is to give studies an air of scientific credibility while cashing in on millions of dollars in the process."
Excellent Presentation on Kernel and User Space Violation.
The Halloween Documents - Microsoft running scared from Linux
Early 80's
Back in the early 1980's there was no World Wide Web, virtually no one had email and telephone companies charged like the Light Brigade for internet access. In the home computer data was usually stored on audio cassette tapes, which was a cheap and highly reliable storage method. I had hundreds of tapes as a kid and I don't remember any of them ever breaking.
The ones and zeros in the computer memory were transferred to a voltage analogue on the tape by pulse width modulation. A wave with a low amplitude and short period was used to represent a zero. A wave with a higher amplitude and longer period was used to represent a one. This, when played on an audio system, would create a sound like an old dial up modem initializing, with a high and low frequency component corresponding to the zeros and ones. The computer would consider one bit of information to be the distance between zero point crossings.
The data on the tapes became very easy to copy to a second tape as twin cassette decks were becoming the norm in hi-fi systems. If you record the contents of an old Vic 20 or Spectrum computer game cassette tape into a digital multitrack recorder and magnify the waveform you can see the different wavelengths of the modulated ones and zeros. If this were recorded back out to another cassette tape there's no reason why it shouldn't load the program on a working Vic 20 or Spectrum.
Late 80's and Early 90's
Later in the 80's people wanted to copy games or programs from cassette tapes onto floppy disks so they didn't have to put up with long loading times. This became more complex than the tape to tape method as copy protection started to be applied by the software industry. By the end of the 80's with the change to sixteen bit computers like the Amiga and Atari ST the cassette drive was being done away with altogether.
In order to be able to copy from tape to disk or from disk to disk the software had to be cracked. This involved using an action replay freezer cartridge, or something similar, to load and then disassemble and make alterations to the loader. The freezer had to be used just at the moment before the game loaded, which required watching the counter on the tape and applying correct timing.
Since the code was already compiled this required knowledge of assembly language. It also needed an understanding of copy protection and how to work round it. Back in the late 80's and early 90's there were no search engines or youtube tutorials so this involved doing research. In order to get started the memory location of the game’s entry point had to be found. A good place to start looking for this was to use a machine code monitor like the Action Replay Cartridge one seen on the next page to look for the Assembly Language command “STA $01” (STore Accumulator). STA $01 was a common command found on many tape loaders and could turn up multiple times in the computer’s memory. The one the would-be cracker looked for would be accompanied by a Jump Command (JMP or JSR for example) that would cause the loader to jump into the code for the game. If there were multiple STA $01 commands near jump commands then some trial and error would be needed to find out which one was the entry point.
Once the loader was modified the memory could be dumped and then saved to a *.prg file with a cruncher program. Machine code programs in memory could be initialized from BASIC by entering the SYS command followed by the decimal number of the memory location of the entry point. To give an example that I can still remember after thirty odd years, on a Commodore Plus 4, which incidentally had a built in freezer and disassembler, the built in BASIC began at memory location #8000 on the Hex Dump of the Machine Code Monitor. 8000 in Hex is 32768 in decimal. If you type in SYS 32768 and RETURN from BASIC on the plus 4, it will reinitialise the BASIC and display:
COMMODORE BASIC V3.5 60671 BYTES FREE
3-PLUS-1 ON KEY F1
READY.
as you'd see when the computer was hard reset or switched on. Assuming you didn't want to learn how to program in assembly language, which is about as user-friendly as a cornered rattlesnake by the standards of modern, high level coding, you had to find other ways to get your hands on cracked disks. One source for us on the West Coast of Scotland was contacts in the Barras market in Glasgow. I haven't been up there in nearly thirty years so I've no idea what it's like now. Back in the late eighties it was dodgy as fuck and just about anything was available in it, legal or otherwise. This often included computer games that weren't due to be officially released for weeks.
Exploring a rabbits warren of dilapidated buildings, you'd eventually find a back room where people were blatantly churning out cracked Amiga software to order on computers with X-copy running on them. X-copy was a disk copying program that could replicate an 880K Amiga disk in around a minute.
When we got these disks home we'd start checking the cracktros for P.O. Box numbers that we'd send a letter to requesting trade. If we were very lucky we'd get a phone number. In that event I'd dial it and if it worked I'd very politely ask whomever picked up the phone whether there was anyone in the house who might be interested in trading Amiga software.
It was worth checking out the disk's contents with Disk-x as well. Disk-x was a sector editor, that is a program that could dump the contents of a disk into memory, modify them and then write them back to the disk. It could also search for AscII text that was hidden on the disk and could sometimes reveal P.O. Boxes or phone numbers that were placed on the disk in a more clandestine way. It could also be used to change text on disks with non standard bootblocks so we could leave a little message on the software that we traded rather than our usual AscII text-file on standard boot disks. The Disk-x modification had to be done very carefully, never on the original disk, as it would often corrupt the checksum of the sector being edited and leave the disk inoperable.
Two trading contacts I recall meeting in the above way were Ads of Innercity (who seemed to have no fear of the authorities whatsoever) and Paw of Crysis. Sending disks by modem back then wasn't much of an option. Modems were expensive and almost unimaginably slow by today's standards. 1200 baud at 4,800 bits per second, and that was a theoretical ideal, was about as good as it got back then. To put that in context, my current broadband connection, which is nothing particularly special, gets around 40 million bits per second. The call charges were eye watering back then with no special deals for internet use. The best way to trade the disks was to bubble-wrap them and put them in the capable hands of Royal Mail. It was then a case of waiting for the disks from the other end to be sent back the same way.
Hard disks were also prohibitively expensive in the 1980's. A ten gig hard disk back then cost thousands of pounds and none of the people in our local scene had one. That being the case we couldn't just set up a computer to download a pile of disks and go off and forget about it as can be done today. Things like instant messengers, drop box and peer to peer sharing networks were also things of the distant future.
All this mailing of disks was financed by the occasional copy party where a load of Amigas would be set up in one of our parents houses while they were out, churning out the latest cracked games on x-copy to be sold for a quid to our lamer school friends, a lamer being anyone who didn’t have their own sources of cracked software. We occasionally came by pieces of hardware (where they came from I was happy not knowing) that we traded for more new software.
1990's
By the middle of the 1990's the Amiga's glory days were over. Mismanagement at Commodore meant that the Amiga's development failed to compete with Intel's new Pentium Processor and the new breed of thirty two bit consoles that were emerging. The Amiga 1200 had no built in hard disk, still had an eight bit sound card, couldn’t read high density floppy disks and shipped with only two meg of RAM.
This was particularly perplexing because it flew in the face of Commodore’s approach in the 1980’s. Both the Commodore 64 and Amiga were by far the most advanced home computers when they were released. Commodore also had the support of several major software and games developers for a new Amiga and would have retained that support had it been built to a spec comparable to PC’s of the day.
With the Amiga’s market share decimated the Sony PlayStation was becoming the new gamer's medium of choice. On the PlayStation piracy became rampant in the late nineties because of the availability of cheap CD burners and the ease of obtaining open source mod-chips. These chips were built from readily available electronic parts. They could be installed by anyone with minimal soldering experience and they seamlessly bypassed the copy protection.
The increasingly ubiquitous CD ROM drives and the drastic reduction in the price of hard disk space also led to a paradigm shift in piracy on the PC. It was now impossible to sell software on floppy disks that were unable to be copied. The new generation of programs were sold on CD's and it was expected that they would be installed on a hard disk. Copy protection now centred around license numbers that were needed to install or unlock the full unlimited version of the software and with obfuscation, a process by which the code was rendered illegible to humans by including junk code that doesn't actually do anything apart from mislead the person reading it, naming variables in a meaningless way and making useful code look like comments or confusing syntax with data. The idea was to prevent tampering and deter reverse engineering.
In the beginning only talented coders could work their way round obfuscation. Now a number of programs are available that will deobfuscate code automatically. Run iteratively, the deobfuscator will enhance code readability using pattern recognition, result emulation and replacing useless code with assembly language NOP commands (No Operation). This leaves installers and programs open to being cracked in the same way that loaders and bootblocks were on the old eight and sixteen bit computers.
Now
Nowadays, there isn't much art, from the point of view of the end user, to getting hold of pirated software. All you have to do is download and install utorrent then log on to the Net and type “pirate proxy” into your search engine. When the Pirate Bay finds what you're looking for you just click the magnet and utorrent should automatically open and download your ill-gotten gains. If you're the anxious type you can even use a browser like Epic or TOR browser that hides your IP address. I haven't done any of the stuff I mentioned above for about twenty five years, but a quick google search and I found some pretty cool apps for the would-be software buccaneer. There's one called EXEinfo that can analyse an executable file, rip pictures and videos et cetera from it and tell you what decompiler to use on it.
There are decompilers that can disassemble executable files just like in the old days. Some, like ILSpy, can even decompile into languages like C# or Intermediate Language that can be read easily by humans who know how to handle modern code, which incidentally I don't. de4dot is a command line based program that will deobfuscate code. All these programs are easy to find on google, are small and easy to install and are freeware or shareware. After a program is decompiled and deobfuscated (if necessary) using these tools a clever coder can then create patches or keygens to run the program without paying for it, and in many cases put the software and crack on Pirate Bay for download.
Why Pirate?
The games on the Amiga were extortionate well beyond what was reasonable. Twenty five quid was outrageous compared to what people were used to paying on the Commodore 64 or Spectrum where Mastertronic were selling games for two quid. We were still running around in school uniforms at the time we were doing this stuff so there was absolutely no way we could fork out twenty five quid for a game in the days when a ten packet of fags and a pint gave you change out of two pounds. The copy protection on the legit games also meant they were on borrowed time since no backup could be made of them. While hard disks and USB storage pens can malfunction, they're paragons of stability compared to the old floppy disks that became corrupted all the time.
There is a lot of propaganda both for and against piracy, often with piracy advocates parodying the anti-piracy advertisements. The Pirate Bay logo, for example, is a pirate galleon with the “home taping is killing music” logo on its main sail. The anti piracy industry has it's own slogans equating software piracy to sponsoring terrorists. Of course for people like me it was about something more than money, not that I ever made any money out of it. There's something very satisfying about giving an absolute “fuck you” to the establishment. When I was young I saw it very much as a Robin Hood endeavour. Scotland back in the 1980's and 90's was falling apart. There were whole communities put out of work, the infrastructure in town and city centres was crumbling, leaving them dilapidated, sepia coloured, Dickensian shit-holes. A lot of young people didn't have much truck with the values of the British establishment and had no qualms whatsoever in living in open defiance of it.
I now realise that the Robin Hood band of brothers pretension was utterly delusional given the way some of the people in the milieu behaved towards each other, and towards everyone else for that matter. That said, it's hard to have much sympathy for the software industry. Now it's far worse than it was in the old Amiga days. There are software developers like Google, Facebook and Yahoo among many less well known others that are doing very naughty things. My Facebook app and Android phone, for example, managed to tell me whom I was sitting beside in the staff canteen at work within ten seconds of my planking my arse in a chair and asked me if I'd like to send them all friend requests. Of course I hurriedly switched off the GPS tracking after that.
Information in the last couple of years has overtaken oil as the World's most valuable commodity. Naughty apps are collating information on all of us and selling it on without our permission. Even AVG antivirus software is a glorified virus itself, installing toolbars that are unwanted and collecting information without permission.
To this day I keep a modern Intel computer with AROS running on it, which is an Amiga 3.1 compatible OS. This is not just for a nostalgic indulgence and love of all things Amiga. I actually do use it for archiving. It lets me keep a backup of all my stuff on a system that can't be tampered with from outside and is pretty much impervious to viruses and malware. The tiny size of AROS also means that I'm not wasting several gig of hard disk space on the OS footprint.
You wouldn't steal a car, say the Federation Against Copyright Theft in their advert. Let's be honest, if you could do a non invasive scan of your neighbour's Porsche and then have a perfect replica of it a few minutes later with no damage to the original, aye you would.
Overlord, March 2018. Now middle aged and long since happily retired. We were caught in the end by FAST and the police sent round to confiscate our equipment. Fortunately, it was just a local scene and we were nowhere near big enough names to be worth making an example of.
The Corporation - Documentary on The Effects of Modern Capitalism