Why I Hate “Common Sense”

Posted in Politics on 01/06/2013 09:28 pm by Daniel Hagan

With all the recent gun control discussions lately, I’ve seen a resurgence in use of “common sense” to justify various legal proposals. Let me outline a few reasons why I think “common sense” sucks.

It’s intellectually lazy

When you say something is “common sense”, you’re avoiding describing it in a cogent fashion. When you can’t elucidate your ideas in a clear form, it makes it harder for others to understand them, and harder for others to debate them. It turns a debate into a wrestling match w/ a blob of jelly, because you have not taken a definite position for your opposite to evaluate.

It’s demeaning

When you say something is “common sense”, you’re implying that anyone of equal intellect and knowledge would reach the same conclusions you have. In the real world, this is rarely true. More importantly, when you present that attitude during a conversation, it is insulting and demeaning to whomever disagrees with you.

It unfairly shifts the burden of proof

When you say something is “common sense”, you implicitly force your opposite to justify his disagreement without you first justifying your position. This is the opposite of good manners in a debate. If you are proposing an idea, it is your responsibility to present the evidence and logic to support that idea.

So, if you want to espouse your beliefs on what we should do to make this a better country, please do so. Just don’t justify it as “common sense”.

 

Putting Into Scituate Harbor

Posted in Uncategorized on 06/27/2012 11:01 pm by Daniel Hagan

 

FunnyJunk, The Oatmeal, Charles Carreon, and a Lesson in Civil Behavior

Posted in Funny, Society on 06/18/2012 10:43 pm by Daniel Hagan

In case you haven’t already heard about this, here’s the upshot:

In 2011, The Oatmeal posted a blog post complaining about his material being blatantly ripped off by FunnyJunk users. The most painful part is that while he can request the material be removed, due to the state of copyright law, it’s a huge pain in the ass and just not practical. So he posted his blog post, vented to the Internet and then FunnyJunk responded by stirring up it’s users and also taking down the specific links mentioned in The Oatmeal’s blog post.

Fast forward to a few days ago, when Charles Carreon sent a letter to The Oatmeal threatening a lawsuit for defamation of FunnyJunk. The Oatmeal did exactly what anyone who knows him expects – he posted it to his site and tore the whole thing apart for the blatant bullying hypocrisy it was. He also had a lawyer with excellent lawyering skills send a real legal response back to Carreon that differed in tone but not conclusion. But to put icing on the cake, The Oatmeal started a fundraiser for charity and instead of paying the $20,000 demanded by Carreon & FunnyJunk, he plans on giving all the money to the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society.

Carreon, having stirred the dark legions of the internet into a wrathful fury by picking on The Oatmeal, did what any rational person would do – he apologized and let the matter drop.

Haha, just kidding! Carreon apparently took this exposure of his bullying and hypocrisy as a personal affront, and not only sued The Oatmeal but doubled down by suing The National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society as well.

That’s right, Carreon decided, in arguably the biggest legal douche-bag maneuver this decade, to sue two charities because The Oatmeal wouldn’t cave to some craven bullshit legal threats.

I really don’t know what’s wrong with this ass-hat that he thinks this is appropriate behavior, but it’s hopefully only a matter of time until he gets his ass handed to him in court. In the mean time, you can read a humorous legal analysis of the situation over on Popehat.com (whenever his site comes back up) and LoweringTheBar.com (post1, post2, post3) (and donate to the charity fundraiser on Indiegogo here).

 

Migrating from Amazon Web Services to Linode

Posted in Technology on 06/09/2012 11:07 pm by Daniel Hagan

Well, I’m not sure what you did with your Friday night, but I’ve spent the last few hours migrating websites from my Amazon Web Services instance to a virtual server at Linode. I’ve experimented with AWS for just over a year now, but the simple fact is that running multiple sites in a micro instance was just not a good idea. My micro instance would hit CPU throttling after less than a minute of CPU use, and then would be cut back to 2% CPU usage. I knew this limitation going in to AWS, but it finally became too big a hassle.

Cindy and I run a total of seven sites. None of them are particularly high traffic, and I’m sure we would be fine in a small instance at AWS. Unfortunately, a small instance is a lot more money. A Linode node is about the same price, but the customer service at Linode is what really pushed me over the edge.

I run a Tor relay on Linode that I’ve secured fairly heavily. The few times I’ve noticed another Linode customer scanning my system or had some other technical issue, the Linode support staff have been extremely responsive. But best of all, not only are they timely, you actually talk to someone who knows what the fuck is going on. As much as I admire automation, I have to admit it’s very comforting to know that if I email Linode tonight, I’ll have an actual technical person replying to me by the morning (and they’re likely to have already fixed the issue).

Now, in the grand scheme of things, Linode is not really competing against AWS. AWS is all about automated provisioning and large scale rapid development. Linode doesn’t have anywhere near the provisioning and deployment features AWS has. But that’s ok. I’m not trying to rapidly scale up to handle millions of customers, I’m just trying to run a few blogs.

Another migration that I’m part way through is moving our systems into CloudFlare for security and acceleration. Unfortunately, getting self-signed SSL certificates and WordPress to play well with the free version of CloudFlare is proving to be tricky. Once I get the wrinkles ironed out, that’ll be another blog post.

If you’re looking for a server host, and want to support Cindy’s & my websites, use our Linode referal link!

 

Facebook Servers Pinging Home Users?

Posted in Security, Technology on 01/23/2012 10:17 pm by Daniel Hagan

I’ve been playing around with splunk lately, and one thing I’ve noticed is that I am getting a lot of pings from a certain range of IPs. I block inbound ping at my firewall, but this was so persistent I got a little curious. Here’s the log exerpt that piqued my interest:



Jan 23 2012 22:02:17 brt-fw-01 : %ASA-3-313001: Denied ICMP type=8, code=0 from 69.63.186.228 on interface outside
Jan 23 2012 22:02:17 brt-fw-01 : %ASA-3-313001: Denied ICMP type=8, code=0 from 69.63.186.228 on interface outside
Jan 23 2012 22:02:16 brt-fw-01 : %ASA-3-313001: Denied ICMP type=8, code=0 from 69.63.186.228 on interface outside
Jan 23 2012 21:55:05 brt-fw-01 : %ASA-3-313001: Denied ICMP type=8, code=0 from 69.171.228.232 on interface outside
Jan 23 2012 21:55:05 brt-fw-01 : %ASA-3-313001: Denied ICMP type=8, code=0 from 69.171.228.232 on interface outside
Jan 23 2012 21:55:04 brt-fw-01 : %ASA-3-313001: Denied ICMP type=8, code=0 from 69.171.228.232 on interface outside
Jan 23 2012 21:45:58 brt-fw-01 : %ASA-3-313001: Denied ICMP type=8, code=0 from 69.63.179.30 on interface outside

That’s the trimmed output, but you can see a bigger set of logs if you’re interested.

So just who are these persistent pingers?



whois 69.171.228.232
#
# Query terms are ambiguous.  The query is assumed to be:
#     "n 69.171.228.232"
#
# Use "?" to get help.
#

#
# The following results may also be obtained via:
# http://whois.arin.net/rest/nets;q=69.171.228.232?showDetails=true&showARIN=false&ext=netref2
#

NetRange:       69.171.224.0 - 69.171.255.255
CIDR:           69.171.224.0/19
OriginAS:       AS32934
NetName:        TFBNET3
NetHandle:      NET-69-171-224-0-1
Parent:         NET-69-0-0-0-0
NetType:        Direct Assignment
RegDate:        2010-08-05
Updated:        2010-10-15
Ref:            http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-69-171-224-0-1

OrgName:        Facebook, Inc.
OrgId:          THEFA-3
Address:        1601 S. California Ave
City:           Palo Alto
StateProv:      CA
PostalCode:     94304
Country:        US
RegDate:        2004-08-11
Updated:        2011-09-24
Ref:            http://whois.arin.net/rest/org/THEFA-3

OrgTechHandle: OPERA82-ARIN
OrgTechName:   Operations
OrgTechPhone:  +1-650-543-4800
OrgTechEmail:  [email protected]
OrgTechRef:    http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/OPERA82-ARIN

OrgAbuseHandle: OPERA82-ARIN
OrgAbuseName:   Operations
OrgAbusePhone:  +1-650-543-4800
OrgAbuseEmail:  [email protected]
OrgAbuseRef:    http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/OPERA82-ARIN

#
# ARIN WHOIS data and services are subject to the Terms of Use
# available at: https://www.arin.net/whois_tou.html
#




whois 69.63.186.228
#
# Query terms are ambiguous.  The query is assumed to be:
#     "n 69.63.186.228"
#
# Use "?" to get help.
#

#
# The following results may also be obtained via:
# http://whois.arin.net/rest/nets;q=69.63.186.228?showDetails=true&showARIN=false&ext=netref2
#

NetRange:       69.63.176.0 - 69.63.191.255
CIDR:           69.63.176.0/20
OriginAS:       AS32934
NetName:        TFBNET2
NetHandle:      NET-69-63-176-0-1
Parent:         NET-69-0-0-0-0
NetType:        Direct Assignment
Comment:        Contact [email protected] with issues.
RegDate:        2007-02-07
Updated:        2010-07-08
Ref:            http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-69-63-176-0-1

OrgName:        Facebook, Inc.
OrgId:          THEFA-3
Address:        1601 S. California Ave
City:           Palo Alto
StateProv:      CA
PostalCode:     94304
Country:        US
RegDate:        2004-08-11
Updated:        2011-09-24
Ref:            http://whois.arin.net/rest/org/THEFA-3

OrgTechHandle: OPERA82-ARIN
OrgTechName:   Operations
OrgTechPhone:  +1-650-543-4800
OrgTechEmail:  [email protected]
OrgTechRef:    http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/OPERA82-ARIN

OrgAbuseHandle: OPERA82-ARIN
OrgAbuseName:   Operations
OrgAbusePhone:  +1-650-543-4800
OrgAbuseEmail:  [email protected]
OrgAbuseRef:    http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/OPERA82-ARIN

RTechHandle: OPERA82-ARIN
RTechName:   Operations
RTechPhone:  +1-650-543-4800
RTechEmail:  [email protected]
RTechRef:    http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/OPERA82-ARIN

RAbuseHandle: OPERA82-ARIN
RAbuseName:   Operations
RAbusePhone:  +1-650-543-4800
RAbuseEmail:  [email protected]
RAbuseRef:    http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/OPERA82-ARIN

RNOCHandle: OPERA82-ARIN
RNOCName:   Operations
RNOCPhone:  +1-650-543-4800
RNOCEmail:  [email protected]
RNOCRef:    http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/OPERA82-ARIN

#
# ARIN WHOIS data and services are subject to the Terms of Use
# available at: https://www.arin.net/whois_tou.html
#

As you can see, both ranges are owned by Facebook. So the question of the day… Why is Facebook ping scanning me?!? Get your guesses in now, because I’m going to email their abuse address and see what they say. ;-)

 

Test 5

Posted in Uncategorized on 01/22/2012 02:26 pm by Daniel Hagan

Testing linkage via ifttt.com.

 

Online Automation – IfTTT

Posted in Links, Photography, Technology on 01/22/2012 11:23 am by Daniel Hagan

Just a quick note about a new service I think lots of my friends might find useful – If This Then That. It’s a service that let’s you drag-n-drop connections between events online. I’m testing it out right now with the following rules I added:

  1. If a new WordPress blog entry is posted, post a tweet to my Twitter account with the URL.
  2. If a new WordPress blog entry is posted, post a tweet to my Facebook with the URL.

Those two rules look like this in their simple, graphical, rule builder:

The IfTTT Dashboard

And in the detailed task editor:

IfTTT Task Editor

I’m hoping this really simplifies the growing web of online services I use to communicate online! You can see the list of services they support on their website under the list of Channels. If you try it out, let me know how it works for you and what creative uses you find for it!

 

EU – No to X-Ray Scanners

Posted in Politics, privacy, Security, Technology on 11/18/2011 08:46 am by Daniel Hagan

For those who don’t know, the European Union has much stronger safety and privacy laws than the US. The EU just announced their new official policy for the deployment of airport scanners. Two key quotes:

It is still for each Member State or airport to decide whether or not to deploy security scanners, but these new rules ensure that where this new technology is used it will be covered by EU wide standards on detection capability as well as strict safeguards to protect health and fundamental rights.

…

In order not to risk jeopardising citizens’ health and safety, only security scanners which do not use X-ray technology are added to the list of authorised methods for passenger screening at EU airports.

If only TSA would accept that dosing people with X-rays and taking nude pictures of them isn’t actually necessary for security! Hopefully the new EU regulations will spur Congress to pass similar laws that protect the health and privacy of Americans. As Scientific American reports, the TSA is planning on deploying over 1800 scanners in airports across the country. Write your Representative and Senators now to encourage them to follow the EU’s lead in protecting citizens!

 

The Madness of Crowds

Posted in Health, Society on 11/08/2011 06:53 pm by Daniel Hagan

So in the latest attempt to demonstrate that democracy can be hijacked, a group in Mississippi is attempting to pass a law defining “personhood” as starting at the “moment when sperm and egg meet“. While this is clearly aimed at preventing abortions, if it passes, it would criminalize hormonal birth control methods, which are used by roughly a third of the population. Quite frankly, I think we have bigger things to worry about right now than what people are doing with their own bodies…

 

Anti-Vaccine? Cool, Let’s Get Infected!

Posted in Health, Security on 11/07/2011 05:05 pm by Daniel Hagan

I’ve written before about the sometimes outrageous actions of folks opposed to vaccines. And now from Tennessee comes another story of anti-vaccine craziness. A few folks there have gotten the bright idea that instead of exposing their children to a weakened-virus chicken pox vaccine, it would be more natural to expose their kids to pox-laden spit from other kids they find on the Internet.

I hate to rain on their parade, but this is completely insane! If I came up to some parent and asked them “Hey, would you willingly let your kids put a biological fluid into their mouth if you saw someone offering to ship it to you on Craigslist?” I have to imagine they would say “NO!” (and probably call the cops on me). But as soon as you frame it as “do anything for the children!”, people’s brains turn off and crazy shit starts happening.

“Even in the best circumstances, exposing your children to a potentially serious or even fatal disease which is virtually, completely preventable by a really safe vaccine is inexcusable. Not even talking about the other accidental risks from shipping, other infections,” said the Tennessee Health Department’s Epidemiologist, Dr. Tim Jones.

Yeah, that’s a good point, Doctor. Not to mention the fact that shipping biological contaminants across state lines is kinda against federal law. Remember how popular the anthrax mailer was? Guess what Pox-Mom, you’re doing the same thing — I know, I know, it’s for the children. But you’re still breaking the law.

I hope it doesn’t happen in this case, but people can die of chicken pox (certainly not common, thank goodness). I would feel like a real ass if I mailed some parent a lolli-pox and then their kid (or their kid’s classmate) died of it. So good luck out there folks – maybe take some time out this holiday season to remember that just because something is “organic” and “natural” doesn’t mean it’s “safer” and “better”…

 
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