Congresscare: How Good We Will NEVER Have It If Their “Reform” Goes Through

A Reprint of My Recent Post at the Say Anything Reader Blogs

Congress’ own healthcare benefits: Membership has its privileges

Too much, too fast, too expensive. Those are some of the objections lawmakers have voiced against the healthcare overhaul Democrats are attempting on Capitol Hill.

Yes, just SOME. Many more are also laid out and more to come.

But many Americans think Congress is out of touch. How, they wonder, can lawmakers empathize with the underinsured or those lacking insurance when they receive a benefits package—heavily subsidized by taxpayers—that most of us can only envy?

THINK congress is out of touch? We KNOW it.

Empathize? Since when do they care about a population they steal money from at will with glee and joy? I don’t think a congress that votes itself perpetual pay and pay increases at will is going to give a rat’s butt.

Among the advantages: a choice of 10 healthcare plans that provide access to a national network of doctors, as well as several HMOs that serve each member’s home state. By contrast, 85% of private companies offering health coverage provide their employees one type of plan—take it or leave it.

Lawmakers also get special treatment at Washington’s federal medical facilities and, for a few hundred dollars a month, access to their own pharmacy and doctors, nurses and medical technicians standing by in an office conveniently located between the House and Senate chambers.

In all, taxpayers spent about $15 billion last year to insure 8.5 million federal workers and their dependents, including postal service employees, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

If the average company tried to replicate this, not only would there be no profits, and not only abysmal debt, but the company would economically turn inside out and cease to exist. Only government which can use its police powers to expropriate our money at will and lay on debt that we and unborn generations are indentured to can do this.

Favorite Quote:

“For the average worker, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan would probably look quite attractive,” said Pete Sepp, a spokesman for the National Taxpayers Union, a pinch-penny advocacy group.

DO YA THINK?

Elitist scumbags who have theirs, and will tell us, “sorry, but we don’t think your mother’s cancer treatment would serve the public interest very well and we cannot approve of it.”

Remember, the libtard troll roaches who infest this blog (Say Anything’s Rob Port in a naive stab at egalitarianism or something tolerates a plethora of trolls who can make the place very annoying and depressing some days), every last one of them, are for exactly this inequity. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, don’t it?

ADDENDUM: If the congress which has all these perks were to try to vote business to give us the common folks just a tenth of them, our economy would collapse overnight and civil war would result. What do they do instead? Throw us into the hands of the arrogant population control is good and humans are evil crowd who would decide whose life is worth saving and whose is worth letting go. Out of touch is an understatement.

The Symbol of Our Generation... Under National Health Care

From here, noted then here.

Elegant, simple, truthful.

What constitutes proof of existence?

http://sayanythingblog.com/entry/national_review_birthers_are_an_embarrassment_to_the_right/#c499262

wilzyk:

Obamas own paternal Grandmother stated unequivocally that she was present at his birth in Mombasa Kenya in the summer of 1961. No other living human has claimed to be present at his birth.

This one point is continuously studiously ignored.

While the terms of the stand alone complex that caused this election to go this way generally lend themselves to total unknowns taking the fore due to having the least amount of likelihood to generate cognitive dissonance and disrupt the phenomenon, there’s something else.

Obama has precious little record of anything prior to 2007. There are the usual papers and paperwork, the usual legal records and filings, but they’re just paper. Artifacts that signify nothing. Does the pipe I own and smoke mean I was here? Does the chair under your butt have some special power proving you existed? No. They’re no more meaningful than the cars rusting in your nearby auto yard or the remnant calcium compounds where the bones of a caveman have finally gone. Something happened but it’s all a matter of your interpretation.

I have a birth certificate from the US Navy that the US Govt. itself will not accept as proof of my citizenship for a security clearance… but will take any given state’s from an era when $100 was enough to convince an overworked clerk to falsify any number of documents. What’s the likelihood of getting a false document from a major military hospital staffer who carries a rank? Strange that don’t you think?

He’s supposed to be a lawyer and their entire claim to fame is oratory before other people, their ability to spin a convincing tale that gets a jury to give them what they want which is to justify their billed hours. I live in a court town and you cannot throw a rock and not generate a lawsuit. I know no lawyer so incompetent at speaking without a prepared speech, and one prepared by someone else I might add, as Obama.

That doesn’t track.

He’s probably among the whitest black men ever to grace Washington, D.C. but he’s still black and in a nation obsessed with skin color he practically rode a Segway into office without a peep about it. African-Americans seemed to pay no attention whatsoever as if this was every day and nothing out of the ordinary. Whites and the rest paid no attention either.

What gives our lives meaning and says we were here is what is formed in others when we reflect off of each other by our presence, our actions, what we communicate and show.

There’s next to no sign that Obama existed before just a few years ago and while some people slouch through their lives leaving no ripple in them, utterly irrelevant to their own lives, so much so they could die and they wouldn’t even notice their own passing, he’s achieved a rare thing certainly. One so rare as it has never happened before. He’s managed to leave so little a mark on his own existence as to not exist and yet managed to get his hands on the executive control of the most powerful nation ever to exist as if he’s just the latest in a long line of clerks hitting aisle 7 at Safeway.

I’ve also noticed that other people don’t seem to think he exists either. Or that his existence if he has one has any significance. Haven’t you noticed the distinct lack of leadership from the White House? Almost as if he’s just some shmoe hired to play housekeeper and face on the TV and the policy is made elsewhere? The Democrats aren’t lining up behind him at all. They’re lining up behind a big blank space with Obama’s face, but not lining up behind him. There’s a difference between getting with someone and merely standing behind the concept of them, like a cardboard cutout.

If that doesn’t strike you as a bit odd, then maybe you’re just the sort the story was written for. We’ll see how well the editing takes, but this is not the way it went.

That which we would do

we do not do if it is what we said we should do but rather that which we would do which we do not say we would do.

That which we say we should do we say we would do but do not do what we say we should do but instead do what we would do.

If what we would do is not what we should do then...

Roundup of Minor Notices

Hillary Clinton on North Korea:

Clinton said that "what we've seen is this constant demand for attention." She added that "maybe it's the mother in me, the experience I've had with small childeren and teen-agers and people who are demanding attention: Don't give it to them."

Of course. Don’t give them attention and they’ll just go away. That worked sooooo well in Columbine didn’t it?

Iraqis Show Who's Boss

Fadhil told The Associated Press about two occasions in which Iraqi troops turned down U.S. requests to move around the capital until they had Iraqi escorts, and one instance to conduct a raid, which the Iraqis carried out themselves.

"They are now more passive than before," he said of U.S. troops. "I also feel that the Americans soldiers are frustrated because they used to have many patrols, but now they cannot. Now, the American soldiers are in prison-like bases as if they are under house-arrest."

According to the libtards, wasn’t Bush supposed to have conquered Iraq for oil and Halliburton contracts or some such and put us completely in charge of a puppet government? Some puppets, telling us what we can and can’t do in… oh yeah, their country which we handed right back to them in the aftermath of the removal of Saddam Hussein.

Curiously, BET co-founder makes a Republican pick...

A billionaire co-founder of the Black Entertainment Television network who is also a key Democratic donor has endorsed Republican Bob McDonnell for Virginia governor.

Sheila Johnson joined McDonnell at a Monday appearance in Richmond. She says she thinks the Republican can turn around the state's sluggish economy and prefers him over his Democratic opponent, R. Creigh Deeds.

A woman yet… Hmmmm…

Methinks that a black woman going with the Republicans will be met with a mixture of silence and laughable condemnation largely centering on absurd notions of authenticity.

April 1st Arrives Many Months Early

The meat a little more than half way through the article is in this single bit:

In an interview for an upcoming SCMagazine article, Jonathan Lamy, chief spokesperson for the RIAA comments, "DRM is dead, isn’t it?"

Wow. That truly equates to the RIAA officially declaring DRM dead.

NOT.

Keep your powder dry people. The *AA are not gone and we are not safe.

Kelly Hildebrandt Marries Kelly Hildebrandt

Kelly Katrina Hildebrandt, 20, and Kelly Carl Hildebrandt, 24

The amazing thing for me is that he’s walking loose and not doing time in prison for assaulting his parents for naming him Kelly. Maybe they were fans of “A Boy Named Sue”, but really… Kelly?

Spot the Lie Time

I’ll even help you:

Conservative Leaders Deplore Proposed Health-Care Reform Takeover

Easy as that.

You’re welcome.

World Continues to Call Lawful Honduran Removal of Unlawful President a Coup

Sensationalism up front:

Honduras' de facto leader came under increased pressure on Monday to hand power back to the ousted president with Europe halting economic aid and top Latin American officials warning of bloodshed if he does not back down.

Kernel of truth wrapped in deception bit of fact at the rear:

He had upset his political rivals by trying to lift presidential term limits and the army toppled him after the Supreme ordered his arrest.

Would it upset Obama’s political rivals if he tried to lift presidential term limits illegally? The correct answer is that it is beside the fact. The point is that the former president of Honduras tried to lift presidential term limits illegally, which would constitute a coup by the sitting president as he’d hold the office illegally instead of legally. Recognizing this, the Supreme Court of Honduras gave Zelaya the boot.

That Zelaya was himself attempting a coup and that forcing his return to power is to take part in that coup, seems to be studiously ignored by the media and the world.

Belated Notice of an Excellent Article

John Hawkins : 5 Character Flaws That Are Destroying America's Future - Townhall.com

READ THIS.

The Steps of Human Cognition With Respect to Emotion

These I have corralled into four steps, each of which impart their own separate yet interconnected experience.

Passionate Emotionality
This is the first step of human cognition where something sufficiently provocative to be noticed consciously and not absorbed unconsciously is dealt with. At this stage, emotionality provides the drive and thus I call it passionate in that it has an emotionally based force to it and not a simple rules matching, following, and deducing sort of motivation.

In this step, human experience is framed in and largely formed from jumps of assumption, leaps of faith, instinctive reactions, rapid escalations of feedback reaction, and the like.

This is the step known for women stomping out after a man says the wrong thing, men throwing a punch in a bar, children screaming that they never get their way, and so on.

Dispassionate Emotionality
This is the second step where the human mind tries to get an ordered logical grasp on what for it is still an emotionally based scene. The drive of emotion which is poorly understood and functions on its own without intellectual understanding more often than not now fades and the vacuum demands to be filled, and the mind fills it with tab A slot B reasoning, but applying it to emotion, trying to both use emotion to solve or understand a problem and at the same time refine the understanding of emotion itself.

This stage is the stage of cagey shrewd behavior in social situations, the part that thinks it over as to whether to take someone home from the singles bar, and the part that covers what to tell your boss during a review.

Passionate Intellectuality
Next up comes the return of emotional drive as in the last stage the emotion was given an overly large sense of itself by the overt focus from the start, the seeming aegis of logic and order in the second step, and commits itself to being the drive behind actual logical though. It's as if the emotion somehow thinks it can conquer that simple logic stuff and avoids its own emotional aspects of leaps of faith and intuition, or that the human begins to tire of fruitless leaps and instead in an emotional fit decides to try actual facts on the ground as it sees them.

This is the stage of long talks with oneself, the stage of trying to make a doghouse without planning, the stage of diving into your math homework.

Dispassionate Intellectuality
Finally the emotion burns out and a sort of resolve to not be resolved is reached and the brain's eternal attempt at finding reason and meaning has to play by itself without emotional drive or interest, and so goes on repeating times tables and thinking of how many screws will be required to affix a plaque to a wall.

This last step starts out with a push out the door goodbye from emotion and goes on with analytical thinking of various subjects step by step without much passing interest from emotion, more or less, until emotion suddenly feels a need to intervene, usually because something piqued its interest. In the meantime the brain doodles along 5+5=10/2=5*3=15+5=20...

This is also the part that creates works like Kant's while it is the preceding stage which keeps shoving this one along to get it done.

All this will be dressed up and refined as I go along but it is what I've noticed so far. As I've said elsewhere, there are multiply re-entrant lines of logic, and crossovers of logic between that of emotion and that of pure intellect and while they sometimes conspire without discrepancy they more often act as sneering contentious rivals. Nevertheless, they compliment each other and somehow human cognition functions despite emotion's rowdiness and intellect's seeming unconsciousness. One is all smell the flowers, the other doesn't see the cell structures for the flowers, and between them...

Double Digit Unemployment Is Here!

Unemployment tops 10% in 15 states, D.C. - USATODAY.com

WASHINGTON — Unemployment topped 10% in 15 states and the District of Columbia last month, according to federal data released Friday. The rate in Michigan surpassed 15%, the first time any state hit that mark since 1984.

Home to the nation's struggling automakers, Michigan has been clobbered by lost factory jobs. Its jobless rate of 15.2% in June was the highest in the country, but the record-high for the state was 16.9% in November 1982.

Still, the Labor Department said it's the first time in 25 years that any state has suffered an unemployment rate of at least 15%. In 1984, it was West Virginia.

The national unemployment rate is 9.5%, a 26-year high, and is expected to hit 10% by year-end. In May, the jobless rate topped 10% in 13 states and the District of Columbia.

I strongly suggest clicking that link to see the chart. It is not pretty. I bolded the most relevant line above.

Charles Krauthammer Reminds Us of the Moon and a Future We Abandoned

Charles Krauthammer : The Moon We Forgot - Townhall.com

After countless millennia of gazing and dreaming, we finally got off the ground at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Within 66 years, a nanosecond in human history, we'd landed on the moon. Then five more landings, 10 more moonwalkers, and, in the decades since, nothing.

To be more precise: almost 40 years spent in low Earth orbit studying, well, zero-G nausea and sundry cosmic mysteries. We've done it with the most beautiful, intricate, complicated -- and ultimately, hopelessly impractical -- machine ever built by man: the space shuttle. We turned this magnificent bird into a truck for hauling goods and people to a tinkertoy we call the International Space Station, itself created in a fit of post-Cold War internationalist absentmindedness as a place where people of differing nationality can sing "Kumbaya" while weightless.

Krauthammer’s usual style of massively understated and nearly emotionless devastation of his target of rebuke comes through again.

We turned away from the future we watched on Star Trek and turned inward to letting the political class run this nation and world into the ground by comparison. In the name of solving poverty we made it worse. In the name of solving racism we made it worse. In the name of saving the environment we made it worse. We are now in the USA under the boot heels of people whose idea of how to save the planet is not to get humanity off of it into space where we can make environments from scratch that we are compatible with but instead to cull the herd as it were and cut the numbers of humans down to whatever in their arrogance is viewed as “sustainable”.

Remember when you were told you’d one day cruise space on some sort of liner to the moon? To Mars?

We’re moving father and farther from your great grandkids ever doing that never mind you.

ADDENDUM:

Voice of America Reminds Us of Apollo 11
VOA News - US Remembers 40-Year Anniversary of Moon Landing

PC World Misses the Point and Engages in Leg Tingling over the Internet
Apollo's 40th Anniversary Shows True Wonder of the Internet

It's one of the few times I can truly say that what I'm watching online is absolutely incredible. It's the difference between fluff and real emotion. This is a weekend where watching the unfolding recreations and simulcast coverage is not to be missed. Even as I'm writing this right now on my modern desktop PC, which has far more computing power in its single AMD Athlon chip than was available to mission controllers for Apollo 11 back in 1969 on their complex mission computers, I'm listening in the background to the audio tracks of the mission being replayed in real time. Absolutely amazing.

By now he should be writing that article on the moon from his room at the Sea of Tranquility Hilton.

Apple Begs Microsoft to Stop Making Fun of Them (It’s Apple’s Shtick)

UPDATE: Apple Asks Microsoft To Stop Running Ad Campaign>MSFT

SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)--Apple Inc. (AAPL) recently asked Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) to stop running television commercials that suggest its Macintosh computers are expensive, the latest indication that the rivalry between the companies is heating up.

I agree. They should flat out SAY IT, not suggest it. It’s true.

The interaction, which happened about two weeks ago, has emboldened Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft to continue its "Laptop Hunter" campaign, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner said on Wednesday at the software giant's partner conference.

Wow, it only took that to embolden them. They should have had an “interaction” years ago.

"We're just going to keep running them and running them and running them," Turner said at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference 2009.

Funniest line in the entire article. They should keep on running anything that makes Apple cry and whine like the elitist snobby self centered bastards they are.

The television spots feature shoppers looking for laptop computers and dismissing Macintosh models because they are too pricey. Apple complained because the Cupertino, Calif.-based company has lowered prices on some of its machines, Turner said.

Let us know when you lower the price of all machines, MacOS licenses, and attendant bundled software to the same range as the PC world. You won’t because you’re control freaks over at Apple and have never grasped that Microsoft’s win was IBM’s release of the platform into the wild, no matter what led to that.

News of the exchange comes amid growing rivalry between the two companies. Apple has been tweaking Microsoft for several months in a television and Internet campaign that portrays computers running its Windows operating system as out-of-date and its users as fuddy duddies.

Apple has smugly implied and let their user base do the direct claiming of the idea that Windows is too complex for the average person. The adoption rate of Windows Vista despite all the complaints, as well as Linux, clearly show the average person can handle more complexity than Apple believes.

If anything it is more evidence of Apple’s patronizing attitude towards others. I am not surprised however as they are the odds on favorite platform of elitist snob liberals everywhere who evidently don’t mind being dictated to and told what they can run on their machines from a central authority as long as they can believe otherwise no matter how false that belief is.

Apple declined to comment on the recent exchange.

Nothing to say people? Come on Apple. You used to know what open approachable platforms were. You fielded the Apple ][ platform, the single most open platform ever in the history of personal computing as far as hardware goes. Were Linux to have happened back then, Apple ][ might still be the way of things.

Steve Jobs is the single biggest reason for the decline of the Apple brand from a bright and wonderful and inviting brand to a brand known far and wide as the favorite of liberal leftists, elitist snobs, and the self-satisfied and smug. I’ve been saying it since the late eighties but the Mac crowd won the day and us hackers were told to get lost.

Well, we did and now we rule the PC world with a dominant Microsoft that gives us all the development info anyone could want, and a Linux world of disparate distros enough to satisfy anyone and guess who is the ruler of the business desktop and all that income from it?

It’s not Apple.

Addendum:

Microsoft: Apple wanted 'Laptop Hunters' ads pulled

Soon to come, some thoughts on self, other, one, etc.

I don't follow one school as might be clear by now. I believe that Jung, Freud and others all have made important points. For instance I believe logically that if you conceive that there is you, then there must be not you. If there is something that defines you, something else must not define you. There is you and then there is not you. There is self and there is other.

I also believe in archetypes, but no so simplistically as Jung did, rather I think that archetypes are implied through experience and reaction to experience in the multiply re-entrant logical paths of experience and cognition that we have, and that the archetypes are not only those inherent to our existence as two legged animals but also those we create in society and culture.

So I'll be writing about those as time goes by. I will not flatter myself as Kant would have put it, to think I am mounting a critique of pure existence, but I do hope to put down some ideas of value that cut to the central logical matters of existence and implication.

That by the way is another theme I note in the world: implication and assumption. I'll write of that as well.

European Parliament Elects Former Polish Prime Minister as President – Insert Polish Jokes Here

Milestone for Eastern Europe: European Parliament Elects Former Polish Prime Minister as President - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News – International

Predictably, he’s all politician and says this gem:

“The biggest crisis¹ that we must overcome² is the crisis³ of the lack of trust⁴ from our citizens⁵,” he said. “Our citizens often do not understand us⁶ -- we must do everything to change this⁷.”

Okay…

1. Right off the bat we start off with the instinctive appeal point of all politicians, the appeal to fear. Everything is a crisis, so act now!
2. “we” who? Who has to overcome? What are we overcoming? He has yet to state it yet, but he is setting us up for it…
3. Yes, we’re being told twice that this is a crisis, once through inference and once directly. We must be stupid or he must be a politician.
4. We the people not trusting you the politician is a crisis? To you politicians maybe.
5. At least he got the word right and he even used the collective ownership implication through the word “our”. The force is strong with this one.
6. And so we veer right off the road into the nether regions of stupid. We are being told through implication that the alleged crisis, this lack of trust in politicians by the citizenry, is a matter of us not understanding them. On the contrary, we don’t trust you because we understand you perfectly well.
7. “We” who? You politicians? Us citizens?

Truly the EU has chosen a solid politician for this largely ceremonial and mostly irrelevant position at the head of the largely ceremonial and mostly irrelevant European Union. Unfortunately, that might be all he is.

Well to you. He’s the spitting image of my grandfather. So this is just sad for me.

Head desk head desk head desk…

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Tyrannosaurus Debt

Courtesy of Rodney Graves @ Say Anything...

Technorati Sucks

h9zjb4qnxy

Well after researching this issue all over the Internet, and sending support tickets, all I get from Technorati is total silence and my opinion of them is that as an aggregator and traffic driver, their methodology and support absolutely blow.

The quote below is all I ever get and the support forums? There's not even a single link or button to make my own post there about this problem and every single post thread there is marked solved/closed/whatever and are dated months old.

I get the feeling that Technorati has no interest in doing what they do correctly. Given unequal application of their system, it gives the appearance of at the very least stupidity and laziness if not selective listing choices.

This is exactly why I never bothered with Technorati before.

We have identified a problem with the URL submitted for claiming:

http://suitepotato.blogspot.com

This may be for a number of reasons. Please review possible reasons below.

1.

Please check and make sure the URL you are trying to claim is the front page of your blog as a browser would link to it. If the URL submitted was different, please try updating the URL and submitting the claim again.
2.

If you\'ve verified the claim URL is correct and your blog is reachable by browser, it may be that the URL has been flagged by Technorati as matching a pattern for spam blogs, or the blog software being used is not recognized by Technorati\'s web crawler. In this case we ask you contact technorati support and supply the following info:
* Please include the following error code: 402
* URL you are claiming
* The name of your blog
* Your contact info
* What blog software you are using (if known, e.g. Wordpress, Drupal, Movable Type, etc.)
* A short description of your blog and the type of content you like to write about.
* Does your blog have a RSS feed? Please see if you can supply us with an example URL of your feed.

That text snippet at the top? Their vaunted scripts can't fucking detect it no matter how it is posted here, and if they do, they can't use it. I could write better code to search text in Applesoft Basic over twenty-five years ago. I could write better in Python within a week of starting to learn it. I could do better work with regex a week after using Linux the first time.

The word?

FAIL

Thanks for nothing Technorati.

Drool… Network Techie Heaven…

Now all I need is this, a good superhardened tough laptop, docking station, and I’m ready to go… and a lot of money.

Stupid Network Tricks: GMail via Tor

While the accessing of the GMail web interface via Tor in Firefox with Torbutton installed seems simple enough, you might prefer to use an email application with GMail, in which case it might seem a bit harder.

Here’s how.

Install Stunnel which you get here. Once you have, find in Start | All Programs | stunnel | Edit stunnel.conf which on selection opens Notepad with the stunnel.conf file ready.

Insert these lines:

[SMTP Gmail]
accept = 127.0.0.1:25
connect = smtp.gmail.com:465

[POP3 Gmail]
accept = 127.0.0.1:110
connect = pop.gmail.com:995

and then File | Save and you’re done there. DO NOT run Stunnel from the Start Menu or it is going out straight from your IP.

Instead, using SocksCap which you already downloaded and installed earlier, you start that and go to File | New… and here’s the values:

Profile Name: Stunnel by Tor (or whatever you prefer)

Command Line: "C:\Program Files\stunnel\stunnel.exe"

Working Directory: "C:\Program Files\stunnel\"

and click OK.

From within SocksCap you now run Stunnel AFTER starting Tor from the Vidalia Control Panel. I suggest letting it run a few minutes to build a few circuits before starting Stunnel.

Now simply aim your email application at Stunnel. Where you enter your POP3 server, user 127.0.0.1 and the same IP address for your SMTP server. Enter your GMail account user and pass information and save everything.

What this does is to cause your email application to send standard POP3 and SMTP traffic at Stunnel which receives it and relays it to GMail’s servers which only use SSL but many email applications don’t, and does it via SocksCap's redirection towards Tor.

This saves you from trying to get SSL functioning on the email application, which while it might work almost certainly won’t be SOCKS aware and thus will be unable to be directed at Tor. IF your email application IS SSL aware, then theoretically you could start it within SocksCap and cut out Stunnel. Of course, many aren’t and for those who don’t want to dick around with the SSL stuff and just insert the easiest values to use, then this method works.

Also, it helps familiarize yourself with using Stunnel to use SSL with non-SSL-aware applications AND do it with Tor.

Stupid Network Tricks: Freenet over Tor

UPDATE: THE PROBLEM IS THAT FREENET IS JAVA BASED AND IS CALLED BY A PROGRAM THAT INVOKES THE JAVA VM. ON INVOCATION THE SPAWNED JVM IS WITHIN SOCKSCAP'S WORLD AND CANNOT COMMUNICATE PROPERLY AND DIES ALMOST IMMEDIATELY.

STILL WORKING ON WHICH PART CAN BE SOCKSIFIED AND WHICH CANNOT.

WILL UPDATE THIS IF/WHEN I FIGURE IT OUT.

IGNORE THIS FOR NOW...
FREENET SERVICE IS DYING WITHOUT NOTICE IN LOGS AND RESTARTING ITSELF OUTSIDE OF SOCKSCAP'S NOTICE
THEREFORE THE NEW SPAWN IS COMMUNICATING DIRECTLY
AM WORKING ON THIS RIGHT NOW

Yes, you can.

First, you will need SocksCap. You can get SocksCap by doing a search for it on Google. Permeo’s site is down and they may be moribund but you can get it online still.

Second, I assume you’ve already got Tor. The easiest place to get it is right here.

Okay, once Tor/Vidalia/Privoxy are running, and Tor has connections built (wait about ten minutes after starting it to make sure it has solid connections) you want to get Freenet operating over it. You get Freenet here of course.

Okay, with all three installed, making sure Tor is up and connected solidly, start SocksCap and go to File | Settings… and set up the proxy with the SOCKS server at 127.0.0.1 and port 9050 which is where Tor/Privoxy are listening by default. Select SOCKS Version 5 and click on Resolve all names remotely. There’s no username and password so selecting that is not needed.

Now in SocksCap select File | New… and for the Profile Name, select whatever you wish but Freenet would be an obvious good choice. For the Command Line, use this:

"C:\Program Files\Freenet\bin\wrapper-windows-x86-32.exe" -t "C:\Program Files\Freenet\wrapper.conf"

all on one line and use:

"C:\Program Files\Freenet\"

for the Working Directory and that INCLUDES the quotation marks as Windows’ DOS doesn’t understand spaces and long filenames and so needs quotes for them to work.

Where did I get them? I got them from the service that Freenet installs. The executable entry for the Freenet service gives that Command Line with the minor variation that it invokes the command switch –s but that switch does not exist. If you execute that wrapper-windows-x86-32.exe file in DOS, it tells you the –t switch is the service creator. DON’T try to run it as a console app by using –c as it will instead try to spawn it unsuccessfully over and over.

Once you click OK you merely have to select it and click the Run button and now Freenet will be operating via SocksCap’s magic across the Tor network.

Why do this? Obfuscation and misdirection have their uses in maintaining privacy.

Important Addendum: Go to Control Panel | Services and find the Freenet service. Open it up and change from Automatic to Disabled. If you don't do this, it will start up on system start and Freenet connections will be coming direct from your IP instead of over the Tor network.

Stupid Network Tricks: Smoothwall, SSH and the Smoothwall Proxy

So maybe you’re behind a firewall at work that stops your web browsing freedom and yet has not locked down your machines so much that you cannot change proxy settings. Or maybe you can’t on Windows/MSIE but you can use Firefox on a thumb drive. If you can set a browser to use a proxy, maybe you can’t get to it on the public Internet. Maybe you wouldn’t want to because of a lack of user control.

Here’s how to do it.

First, you need to be using Smoothwall. I prefer the current version 3.

Smoothwall has the capability of being interacted with via SSH. Even better, it defaults to a port other than 22 so it may not be blocked where you are at the time you want to reach it.

You need to remember to allow open access to the port it uses so at the web based admin screens you want Networking | External Access and there you create a rule for TCP protocol, the SSH port you’re using, and source can be all unless you’re only connecting from very specific networks. Make sure to enable the rule and save it.

Now then, when you ssh to your external IP address, which may be dynamic and I highly recommend dyndns.org to get a dynamic DNS entry as Smoothwall has a client that can keep it update when your ISP changes your IP, you need to be able to redirect traffic through Putty.

Yes, Putty is the easiest to use. Connection | SSH | Tunnels is the place in the Putty session set-up. There you need not check either of the top boxes. Just enter your tunnels.

Now then Smoothwall has a web proxy that when on and not in transparent mode answers on port 800 by default. So you create a tunnel by entering 800 in the Source port field or whatever number you want your local machine to listen on for proxy incoming, and then enter the IP address of the LAN SIDE Ethernet port of the Smoothwall and NOT the public IP or anything like that and you make it with a colon and 800 as in 192.168.1.1:800 in that field.

When you get the SSH session going, you are going to be doing SSH from wherever you are to the WAN side Ethernet port, and the SSH server will be taking in your tunnel from Putty and aiming your proxy traffic at port 800 on the Ethernet interface and as far as Smoothwall is concerned, it is as if it came from your home LAN.

You will now appear to be communicating from home even while at work or a friend’s house. The IP seen will be that of your home connection, so keep your nose clean and play nice, but have fun.

Stupid Network Tricks: SSH on Windows

Go here to find out about installing SSH on Windows in the first place.

Now go here to find my reply on getting “strictmodes yes” in ssh’s conf to work on Windows or read my copy below. After all, I did write it.

I found that in order for StrictModes yes to work on Windows XP Home edition, there is a simpler way of making the permissions correct than rebooting to safe mode.

First, the account you're doing the set-up from must be an admin acct if it isn't the one you're setting up for, and second, the acct you're setting up for must be an admin. For instance, let's call the acct we're setting up for "spike".

As you said, spaces are not well handled by this code. I found putting the home directory just off of c:\ was the best thing. I also decided to go with the .ssh notation so frequently used and so:

c:\spike\.ssh

Which is where the authorized_keys file must go. BUT, and here is the EXTREMELY HUGE ROSEANNE BARR SIZED BUT, you MUST NOT do it willy-nilly. I tried Windows Explorer AND at the command prompt. Both times it failed. Rebooting to safe mode was no help despite hours of messing with the permissions. What I found worked was much much simpler.

Once password based authentication is working for that acct, you log in to the server as that acct. Once at the prompt in Putty, you change directory to c:\ and then mkdir spike and cd spike and then mkdir .ssh. Now you've made those folders SOLELY as the userid in question and NOT as the system acct or the admin acct you may have been logged into Windows with.

Next trick, you take advantage of inheritance and change your directory in the Putty session window to wherever you made the authorized_keys file. Then copy authorized_keys c:\spike\.ssh\ and it copies to it. Now, thanks to inheritance that defaults on file and folder permissions under XP Home on NTFS, the folders AND the authorized_keys file will have the appropriate permissions.

DO NOT BY ANY MEANS modify those folders or that file from anywhere but within Putty, logged in as the userid in question. ANY other userid modification can cause it to change permissions and break StrictModes yes. At least, that's the way it has been behaving so far.
To test, I run Putty against the OpenSSH service running on the same machine by pointing at localhost.
Of course, having NTFS as the filesystem is also a must for this to work at all.

Also, to make it look in the home directory, edit the registry to make home c:\ and then use:
AuthorizedKeysFile /home/%u/.ssh/authorized_keys
Which in the example I gave would cause it to look in c:\spike\.ssh\authorized_keys. StrictModes yes should now work.

I also added this follow-on.

I forgot that you should also try using CACLS.EXE from c:\ and then you should get something like the following using my "spike" userid example.

C:\>cacls spike
C:\spike BUILTIN\Administrators:F
BUILTIN\Administrators:(OI)(CI)(IO)F
NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:F
NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:(OI)(CI)(IO)F
NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:F
CREATOR OWNER:(OI)(CI)(IO)F
BUILTIN\Users:R
BUILTIN\Users:(OI)(CI)(IO)(special access:)
GENERIC_READ
GENERIC_EXECUTE
BUILTIN\Users:(CI)(special access:)
FILE_APPEND_DATA
BUILTIN\Users:(CI)(special access:)
FILE_WRITE_DATA

This is the state of permissions on my home directory with my current setup and StrictModes yes is working fine with it.

Not that most people see a need to get SSH to a Windows machine running such that they can do at a command prompt everything they could do at a DOS prompt, but you never know.

This way, you can set your config on that machine to require a key and not allow passwords.

If you want, farther down is this:

So you want to use SFTP with Ipswich WS_FTP Pro... (well, you might...)
(This is for version 9.01 btw...)
First, go into WS_FTP Pro.
Options...
SSH
Client Keys
Create...
Then, Export and name your key how you like and then go into WordPad and look at the .pub file you exported.
This is how the Ipswitch WS_FTP Pro key will look when exported and viewed in WordPad:
---- BEGIN SSH2 PUBLIC KEY ----
Comment: "Created by Ipswitch WS_FTP Pro"
(key gibberish)
(more key gibberish)
(yet more key gibberish)
(even more key gibberish)==
---- END SSH2 PUBLIC KEY ----
This is the correct format for a Unix box running OpenSSH. It isn't correct for OSSHfW.
Note the "==" at the end of the key. That is EXTREMELY important to have. Actually, you only really need the one “=” near as I can tell but why take chances I figure.
This is how it should look in the authorized_keys file for OpenSSH for Windows:

ssh-rsa (all the key gibberish in one line)== wsftp

You need the entire thing on ONE line, ONE return at the end, ONE key per line. The space and then the wsftp is my choice to identify the line as being my remote WS_FTP key. You could call it “susan” if you wanted.
So go to the copy of authorized_keys you left where you built it before copying within the SSH session and then edit it, putting in the key in the above format. When done, you should have something like this:

ssh-rsa (all the first key gibberish in one line)== spike
ssh-rsa (all the sftp key gibberish in one line)== wsftp

Once the editing is done, SSH in as before and go to the directory where your proper authorized_keys file is sitting and issue the command “rename authorized_keys authorized_keys.bak”, without using the quotes of course. Go to the directory where the edited authorized_keys is and copy it to the directory you were just in and then get out of the SSH session and go to Services in Windows and restart the OSSHfW service. Now restarted, it should have that key in its config.
Now you can go to WS_FTP and set up the site. This is what you need in addition to the address of the site and account information.

Site Options
Advanced
Server Type SFTP/SSH
Remote Port (the one you run OSSHfW on)
SSH
SSH Keypair (the key you created)

Try it out now and you should be able to SFTP using the key login. I generated the keys at work, e-mailed the public key to myself and when I got it at home, edited it and added it to my file and restarted the service. Next day it worked like a dream.

I use it to transfer files downloaded at work to my home machine and it works fine. The most important thing to remember is that the key generated by with the Export function to the .pub file must be correctly edited. “ssh-rsa”(space)”key gibberish here”==(space)”your identifier here” is the format and it goes ALL ON ONE LINE, each key on a separate line.

Well, there you go. Next up, Tor, Stunnel, SocksCap, and Freenet among other stuff.