I voted for “a new form of government that doesn’t involve 2 parties who are both the same”. Seriously, in this day and age there is no reason why people couldn’t decide what they want for themselves in mass form on the internet via secure voting. Then we just revision it like on wiki until we are happy with the results.
This is a mass oversimplification, but if we governed by wiki we would get a fair system that doesn’t involve 2 rich guys. Eventually the world will realize that everybody has their own truth and that no form of government will make everybody happy.
Well it depends on who you are scared of. If you are just cheating on your girlfriend, then you deserve to get caught but better to piss of a girl than a giant corporation. Take me for example, how screwed would I be:
Lets say the oil companies get wind of my new free energy device. First thing they would do is google my name. 13,300 results for James Lyngaas. Well everything on the first couple pages are mine. It found lyngaas.net, thesmartass.info, facebook.com/thesmartass. It found a linkedin profile, 2 of my blogs, an archive.org profile, a ted.com profile, google profile, a flickr profile, ancestry.com relatives, profiles of my friends and well going to a couple of those sites or profiles would indicate my username is normally trimidium. So I googled my username and found 4,690 results and well just about all of them are from me. It found my artwork, it found answers to questions I have given on yahoo, it found forum posts I have made, Well even if it didn’t find them on Google, you could go to popular sites and look up my profiles there.
Want to see what I was doing recently? Then you need only filter the google search results to show stuff in the last week. Want to know what my interests are? Then look for my wish list at amazon, or find what I subscribe to on twitter. Want to know my political status? Just search my blogs for keywords (of course, even if you didn’t know it you voted for Bush a few years ago). When was I online last, hmm, lets check with instant messenger profiles. Music status? I have 2 different last.fm accounts and a Pandora account. I haven’t used a dating site in several years, but there are still old profiles out there. Even if i Deleted them you could find them cached on archive.org and find out lots of personal info from it. Public tax info can fill in job, address, income, debt etc… You ever fill out a census (the most invasive survey ever)?
Delusions of privacy ~~~
I showed up to a job interview one day and the guy had a printout of my myspace profile which said James (AKA The Smartass) and I had to “explain” it to him. I thought it was none of his business and it certainly had nothing to do with how good I could fix computers, but it dawned on me. Privacy is just an illusion, so is truth, every single thing is just the perspective we spin it with. I believed having a website called thesmartass had nothing to do with fixing a computer, but the person who was interviewing did not believe this. I wanted to be his wage slave, so I had to smooth it over with him (I did end up getting that job).
Spin is everything. So much so in America that there is no reason to kill people these days. You just put them in terrible debt and discredit them. If they really start to step on your toes you just google them, see what bad shit they have been doing online and then setup a perfectly legal way to bust them for it. Having trouble thinking up something to bust me for? Well per the patriot act I have no freedoms. So for absolutely no reason one day I could disappear because Homeland Security declared me a terrorist.
In fact, this post will probably get flagged by some agency just because of the words I am using, since they can filter out keywords right through Google News (which generates feeds based on known blogs etc). Or a robot will come to this page, and read for other words, and if enough words are flagged a real person will check out the page and assess if I pose a threat.
Maybe my own site is secure, but perhaps one of the forums I post on is not, and perhaps somebody finds a backdoor into that forum and they determine one of my passwords. Well if I used this password on other sites, then they can go back to all those other sites and try to get in with that password. Or maybe they will just start sending me phishing emails (which a lot of people are dumb enough to fill out) and get me to try to login to sites that I am a member of, only the sites just look like that site.
I once had a job offer from a legitimate private investigator to hack into people’s myspace and facebook accounts to determine where people were and what they were doing. I flatly refused, as I am not ignorant and know that is highly illegal and unethical. However since I didn’t do it, I’m sure he just found somebody else who would.
I don’t even see the need to break into those since since you can find so much on google and then make your way back to other things. Then I don’t even need to pay somebody to analyze these things since most of these big public sites have beautiful API’s and they can extract your data, and mash it up with google maps, show your exact routine, dating preferences, twitter subscriptions, political affiliation, religious beliefs, friends, jobs, tax info, etc… You are being profiled and assessed right now.
These are things that anybody can do and I didn’t write this to scare you. Think about it though, if you are still a kid, then your parents are probably scared shitless of you getting hurt so they might be using a keylogger on your system and seeing everything you type. They do it out of fear and love, however jaded it is. But what if you scared the gov’t mule? Well if I had a gov’t agency at my disposal and you scared me I would develop my own meta search engine and have it cross reference every name with usernames and then auto mashup every profile site into nice TPS reports for me.
Despite these things I actually believe in open source and am thrilled shitless that these sites all offer public data. Even government is starting to look towards providing raw data online. I don’t mind the massive amount of information at all, because I have given up the extremely ignorant belief in personal privacy.
I still remember when I was in my Junior year of High school and my school switched from wonderful yellow tickets to a card that got read by the computer, which had our social security numbers printed right on the front of the card below the bar code. Parents threw a shitfit and the next year that was changed to a different number. The old system wasn’t broken, it even worked better and faster. However the old system didn’t harvest data. The new system did and data is the new gold standard.
The world we live in is going to increase available data exponentially and there is no such thing as being anonymous on the internet anymore. You post a comment on any page ever and it spits out an IP address. I can trace that IP address back to your ISP in a couple seconds if you aren’t using an anonymous proxy. If you ever did anything really bad on the internet somebody would subpoena the ISP for their logs, which would tie back to your name, and they would throw your real name and username all over the web until they found a bunch of other junk to charge you with.
So you now know that you are not anonymous anymore. Don’t be scared of it, as fear causes endless problems. I for one think I am going to start posting comments and things with my actual name. Because then I will be more conscious of what I say.
How screwed are you? You are 100% screwed if you use the internet more than once a week. So just get over it and break your illusions of privacy and security and just start being a nice person online. Try not to piss anybody off too badly, or else be prepared to change your name and start paying people to leave false clues on all your old sites through the tor network and even then if you land on the oil companies shitlist, you are probably still screwed. I have too many friends I don’t want to stop talking to. I have too many sites I visit that I don’t want to quit visiting, I don’t want to move to a new country and start all over as a farmer with no computer.
So fuck it, I am James Lyngaas, and I have no delusions of privacy.
Well, no. Because to be honest I have no idea what “chidren” is. I thought, perhaps if I knew what a chidren was then I might start to care. So I went to YouTube to see if I could find videos about them.
See The Full List
To my surprise there was a huge list of videos about chidren, but they all seemed to be on various things. One video on chidren was “chidren of bodom – silent night, bodom night”.
The most popular result was “T-Rex – Chidren of the Revolution“.
Best I could determine, chidren was another word for music video, and I do rather like music videos, though I don’t know if I care all that much.
I donno man, perhaps that life is too short. That there is no use holding back… Perhaps it was just a moment of weakness… Perhaps it was the best thing I ever did because I learned a true life lesson from it.
One thing for sure… I will never do that again… I mean what the fuck WAS I thinking???
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? OF COURSE IT DOES and this is an age old “deep question” that people still ask to this day, but it’s only truly debated on a metaphysical level when people are blitzed out of their minds. What does this mean in terms of the question that was asked of me… It means that I can easily stop being a smartass. I do it all the time. I am often a very nice guy who doesn’t make any waves.
The question you should have asked is “Can you stop thinking like a smartass?” to which I would have to answer no. Now granted, I don’t have to act on what I think. I do not have to respond sarcastically or with some with some witty comeback for everything I ever hear, but ultimately my mind is programmed to be a smartass.
Good thing it is, because without me in the world there would be one less quality website to visit. You would have to find entertainment in trolling forums and YouTube all day. There would be nobody to give you the answer to your question that you so rightfully deserve, because on a whole; people are politically correct.
Remember school? The place you go to learn to communicate, and all they do is tell you to shut up?
Oh please, you could figure out where I am with 2 minutes research on my site. To think I am from the bay because I said hella seems odd in this day and age. With the internet culture just kind of blends together. I mean anybody can upload to youtube, and I can download tv shows and movies from anywhere in the world. You pick up a word and it jives with your diction and it just sticks.
I tend to say Bloody a LOT more then I say Hella and I have never even been to England.
