posted by perkiset on Dec 26

This brilliant piece of artwork was done by someone named “Alex Roberts” but I cannot find that person. It was presented to me in a thread at the Syndk8. I am posting it here in hopes that A) it will inspire people to think and B) if someone knows who this artist is, I feel pretty certain that I’d like to see more of their work and link to them from here.

Thanks and Happy Holidays!

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posted by perkiset on Dec 19

OK, so that’s the fashionable thing to say. “Any Dem over a ::shudder:: Republican. I am not so sure. In fact, I’m downright creeped out.

First, let me piss Pinkhat off, who is pro-Hillary. I am not, and getting more so everyday. Pinkhat would love to see a woman President and frankly, so would I. I am of the opinion that there would be much more caring and less war in our country, except every 28 days when we’d go bomb some little country for not picking up their shoes beside the bed. But I digress. Women are just more level headed, yes? More rational. More considerate and less hawkish.

Um, that is unless you’re the Iron Lady of the Realm, Madge “Mad Dog” Thatcher herself. Perhaps Evita Peron was another example of a female that just wasn’t quite of the same cut as Mother Theresa. Given Hillary’s tough talk about torture, her support of the war thus far and her unwillingness to even talk about when the troops will come home makes me question her progressive qualifications and her Democratic orientation. Perhaps shes sort of an Auntie Tom.

Another fine example is Bill “Can’t we all just be friends” Richardson. I really liked the policies he put forth in New Mexico. He was a solid executive. He’s got the resume, let me tell you. And asked direct questions about virtually anything of substance in a debate he’s like a deer in the headlights or and old man fumbling for the keys in his pocket. Disoriented and disjointed, that is NOT that man I want at the helm when it’s time to decide if we need to push the big red button.

I could go on about what pisses me off about some of the Democrats and why I wouldn’t vote for them, but let’s take just a moment and reflect on the thinking of some of our Dumbercrats. Consider, for example, the Progressive and Democratic credentials of our own political Uncle Tom, Joe Lieberman. Who is a proponent of the war in Iraq. Who thinks we can “win over there.” Who is now endorsing John McCain for President. Endorsing John McCain for President. Who slipped him a glass of Koolaide? Is he freaking kidding? I mean, he pissed me off with his whiney just-on-the-edge-of-crying kind of voice during the Gore campaign, but I never thought he’d be so blatantly obtuse. If this is what Democrats look like today I’m REALLY frightened.

So what’s a thinking progressive to do? Well, some of my friends think that Ron Paul is the answer. It is true that he holds some interesting ideas about protecting American people before other countries. I like that. It’s also true that he wants to eliminate almost all federal programs and world organizations that we participate in and allow a corporatacracy to consume our country. A Ron Paul Revolution in many ways is like a duck making a lateral move to ala Range (Thanks, Donald Sutherland).

It is unfortunate that Frodo whoops, I mean Kucinich, will not get many votes because he, in many ways, is to the Dems what Ron Paul is to the Repubs. And I don’t know that I’d be unhappy with a President Dodd or Biden – although my father would be pissed off at that.

Then again, if the Repubs put up “Yuck Yuck Yuckabee” or perhaps John “The Terminator” McCain, or the Stepfordesque Romney or … oh can I even say it… that greaseball wad of horsepoop Ewlianni, Then I’d probably vote for just about anyone else.

Even Hillary.

posted by perkiset on Dec 19

I realize that posting a technology trademark piece on a political blog is not necessarily on topic, but I’ve got another piece coming up right behind this one, so there.

I am posting this here and now, because I want to set the record straight before anyone else goes off and tries to poach the term. I’ve been talking about mosaic cloaking in the abstract for a while, but the term was actually coined by the Fantomaster himself in September of 2007 when we were having a discussion about it at the Syndk8.

Mosaic Cloaking is essentially componentized IP-Delivery. In other words, you do not cloak the whole page, you cloak portions of it dynamically. In the simplest example, you have a page where you have a blank space. Based on the IP address of the inbound surfer, you may provide keyword rich text, or Adsense, or an affiliate ad – based on the IP address of the surfer. If you do not want Google, for example, to see that you are affiliating for then you might push the code for AdSense out if you sense that it is a Google spider – otherwise you send the affiliate ad.

More interesting mosaic cloaking is sending different javascript, CSS files, or even slightly different components of each that might be used to enhance the “experience” of the surfer, be it a search engine spider or human. Using comments and other tricks, your source files could be exactly the same byte-size as cloaked files, look the same, and only be available in the “spider version” if they came from a validated IP address. It would be extremely difficult to ascertain exactly what was happening, if you were trying to reverse engineer someone’s SEO strategy. Combine that with Google’s Multivariate Testing notions (ie., sending different pages to regular surfers under the guise of market testing) and you have a cloak that is extraordinarily difficult to pierce.

The best mosaics are a combination of surfer experience abstraction, with differing chunks of obfuscated Javascript that has been byte-size balanced, differing CSS external files and IP delivered from the same place dynamically based on a proven spider database such as the Fantomas spiderSpy product.