Tag: china

And you thought they were Communist

~ Inquisitor

When China’s design for the opening ceremony comes straight from the same chauvinist impulse that brought us Paris Hilton, Zoo and Nuts, My Super Sweet 16 and The Swan:

A pretty girl who won national fame after singing at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games was only miming.

[…]

But the singer was Yang Peiyi, who was not allowed to appear because she is not as “flawless” as nine-year-old Lin.

The show’s musical director said Lin was used because it was in the best interests of the country.

— BBC News, “China Olympic ceremony star mimed” (12th August 2008)

Now, if this had happened at an opening ceremony in a less authoritarian country, they’d have said “the best interests of the Games”, but it would otherwise have been an identical reaction. We can’t have anything imperfect, after all; bad for the sponsors. Could be embarrassing.

Wouldn’t it have been so much better if it was imperfect? That’s what we should have for 2012; we shouldn’t try to do an outrageously expensive media spectacle that’s likely to go wrong and fall flat, we should do something from the heart that if it goes wrong it just seems more endearing. The Eddie the Eagle of opening ceremonies, rather than the Terminal 5.

Why not, anyway? It would be better than telling a nine year-old that she can’t sing for the country because she’s apparently got crooked teeth, and that she’ll have to go without the credit for her own skill while the front gets all the headlines. It is a disgusting attitude, isn’t it?

If this actually happens…

~ Inquisitor ~ 2 Comments

Virgin Media can get fucked. I am not having every web site I visit sent to China so some server can send back ‘targeted’ advertising, “anonymous” or no. It’s effectively unavoidable, ISP level spyware with a crap “anti-phishing” (read DNS hijacking) justification. The first thing I will be doing if this happens is getting a BT phone line installed and any non-BT ADSL ISP that doesn’t subscribe to this shit, probably Be.

This is of course assuming that this is even legal, and if it is it shouldn’t be. Who the hell thought this was a good idea, and why the hell haven’t they been fired already?

Edit: See here, here, here and here (the latter two contain a lot of great detective work about how dodgy Phorm actually are.) Let’s hope resistance isn’t futile on this one.

Amusing wannabe

~ Inquisitor

Looking at today’s security run output that FreeBSD likes to send to me by default, I find an interesting hack run amongst the several I usually get a day:

Nov 27 14:03:16 [anonymised] sshd[48794]: Invalid user ryback from 218.1.65.241
Nov 27 14:03:49 [anonymised] sshd[48810]: Invalid user ryback from 218.1.65.241
Nov 27 14:04:44 [anonymised] sshd[48844]: Invalid user ryback from 218.1.65.241
Nov 27 14:07:41 [anonymised] sshd[48979]: Invalid user ryback from 218.1.65.241

The script kiddie in question is trying to use the username ryback to get into my machine. Casey Ryback, of course, is Steven Seagal’s ex-Navy SEAL character in the Under Siege series, kicking large amounts of terrorist arse with kung-fu, knives and in Under Siege 2 a Newton MessagePad. This “ryback”, however, is just hitting against a sshd which has password access disabled completely and as such will have no success whatsoever to anyone who doesn’t have my private key – that is, everyone but me.

The IP address is in (sigh) China Telecom space, Shanghai province; no chance of tracing that then. Wonder where they got the name from.