Ny blogg – Samma innehåll?

Jag har flyttat till kinkymal.se.

Det kommer vara där jag fortsätter blogga, precis som förut, kanske sker lite småförändringar. Men i det stora hela så kommer det fortfarande vara jag!

Trans: My day with Internet War pt. 1/?

This is the translation to English of Min dag med Internetkrig del 1/?. Just helping a friend.

My day with Internet War – Part 1/?

Friday morning began with a phone call, a phone sales person, nothing important. But I woke up and could not fall back to sleep, so I booted up my computer and connected to IRC. I found that most of the channels were dead and the people were sleeping. Some persons in US was active for a few minutes.

Then I started to notice something in the twitter feed, ”wikileaks.org are down”. So I started to dig into it, tried to resolve the server, and yes, the domain name was down. You could not reach wikileaks.org anylonger. We started to dig for their IP-Addresses. We found one, not exactly the one we were looking for but it was a lead to get the data out from wikileaks.org. We got the start page and a broken link to cablegate, being the site we wanted to get to. Someone accidentally tweeted it, and it started to be retweeted with the info that cablegates was there. Which wasn’t true at the moment, but it is now.

We got hold of another address from an entirely different network, and it had the same content as the previous one and now also cablegate. We tweeted out the info about it, that Wikileaks exists there and is still accessible. A lot of people retweeted it. Information is rapidly and widely spread, and in the channel we begin to realize that we were in epicenter of the information, we had the opportunity to spread the up-to-date information to thousands of readers. We were kept up to date with information from inside and outside our lines. Varifying as we went.

In the middle of this wikileaks hosting on Amazon was killed, without warning. They switched their primary host for the third time within a few hours during the morning. Telecomix topic kept up-to-date with the latest information and was not late to tweet the news.

We put up a mirror on a server that I share with a few friends. It quickly became popular, and it was probably one of the first 10 mirror sites of Wikileaks that was created for this purpose. We spread the link through Telecomix twitter, and again, it spread rapidly and widely. The first was merely a snapshot of wikileaks own server that we mirrored, but later in the evening we developed it a little. We named it http://cablegate.failar.nu

At this point it was time for me to head into town, a quite inconvenient day to have other things to do than keep a watchful eye on the flow and keep things in order. Thanks to my N900 I could keep a pretty good idea of what was going on and do some administrative work while I was out. Sveriges Radio (Swedish Radio) in the P3 News reported first that EveryDNS had taken down Wikileaks because of the attacks (referral to DDoS), which was a lie. I tweeted this through the Telecomix channel, right should be right. Next news report they had taken in some ”Computer Expert” that explained what actually was going on and the significance of it. The homepage was up and running and had always been, you just had to know where to look.

The Swiss Pirate Party made a good effort in buying wikileaks.ch and pointed it to wikileaks server, it worked well and became the new primary domain that people diligently used. It got its biggest impact after we ran it through Telecomix Twitter. The problem with wikileaks.ch was that it as well was hosted with EveryDNS and just as wikileaks.org it was removed by EveryDNS in an attempt to remove the only incentive to DDoS their name servers. Later that day all of EveryDNS’ name servers were down, completely. All four of them. Which is quite extreme for being such a huge host of DNS. The result being that wikileaks.ch was down and we had to fall back on IP-addresses again.

That evening when I got to the pub we realized that we should update our mirror of wikileaks in a better way than once in a while at random. So at the pub, with a cider i one hand and my N900 in the other I started to hack together a script that would re-mirror the whole site into a folder, put the files in order, add any new files in the repo and commit. Then have it rinse and repeat every 30 minutes. So I have a repo with changes on Cablegate from approximately 9pm and forward (add date), we can go back in revisions and always have intact data no matter what happens to the data on wikileaks servers.

More mirrors were being created, and in the evening we could count up to something like 84 of them in the mirror list, it was quite a lot to keep track of. To do this they, just as I would have, started a pad where you could help to list and sort all mirrors. It started in ietherpad but they only allow 16 people in a pad at the time, normally that’s a lot. In this case it was peanuts. It was moved over to Mozillas open pad, and from what I’ve read even they got a taste of the DDoS to kill Wikileaks. The list was moved over to Tumblr, and from what I’ve seen they have not had any problems with attacks yet.

In the evening things started to subside, the entire day had been one immense chaos of information flow. And I like it! The chaos left its marks with that it’s not the authority that rules the Internet, Internet is its own organism. That thanks to hacktivists live and thrive. To DDoS companies to make them remove names out of the name servers will not kill a homepage. At least not when if hacktivists wants it to stay, then it will spread even further. After having only been available from two sites at the beginning of the day, it’s now up on 84 servers. Distribution, huh? Not such an efficient take down after all.

It has been an eventful day on our Internet, I believe that I’m one of the few that’s really seen and has a good overview of what happened today. A lot of well spent hours is spent on checking sources, collecting facts, and filter data to be able to spread knowledge and information with powerful tools to them who have been interested.

Knowledge is power, this has been proven time and again today.

I’ve also been thinking about the release of the cables, that they are releasing a few documents at a time. This is incredibly clever if you want impact. When they released the War Diary it mainly got attention because it was so much, but none could actually digest all its content. It was too much in too short of a time span. After having thinking about it I find that I really like that they are doing it like they are now. It’s a good move.

I want to leave a great thanks to Telecomix, for their existence. For the people being there. For the fact that people work so well together in a group and help each other. During periods of the day when I had other things to do there was always someone else keeping track. We’ve been keeping a watchful eye all day. The Telecomix Twitter has been a very good channel to spread out the information about what has actually been going on. ”Telecomix News Agency – Reporting Live From the Internet.” And that is exactly what we’ve done today.

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For original text.


For translation.

I am a Winner! #NaNoWriMo

And there it was. After 30 days of hard work (on and off) I finished my first draft for a novel, ever. At 50573 words. I got met by applause and this message:

Author, on November 1 you accepted our challenge to write a novel in 30 days. Harnessed with a hard deadline, you persevered in the face of countless obstacles. You wrote with determination, you quieted that inner critic, and now you’ve reached the hallowed Winner’s Circle.

We couldn’t be more proud of your amazing accomplishment! Thank you for joining us on this outrageously creative adventure—we’ll see you next November for more. And we hope you’ll join us in April for Script Frenzy, too.

Before you go celebrate, we have some very special NaNoWriMo Winner Goodies for you. There are two paths to collecting them. We hope that NaNoWriMo meant enough to you that you will take a moment now and make a tax-deductible donation to help ensure that NaNoWriMo and the Young Writers Program are fully enabled for 2011! (If you’ve already donated, thank you so much for your contribution!)

When one defeat great challenges one always thank people, doesn’t one? Here goes.
First of all I have to thank the wonderful OlofB for his work on Devul that has helped me a whole deal while writing.
(if you have Flattr you can Flattr the application. Not, read this)
I also want to thank the Gothenburg cluster of Wrimos. Who I met up with for one coffee. Even though I did not get much writing done there it was still incredibly motivating!
Anyone that has cheered me on, be it random people on twitter, Wrimos and non Wrimos. People I know on Facebook. Or just people I know in real life, or wherever. Thank you!

I’ve learnt a lot about myself as a writer. But I think I’ll save that for another post I think. I know I can write a lot under pressure, if I put my mind into it. Which is something I can use.
I will definitely take part next year. If I got time.

Hope you all enjoyed this as much as I did!

AOL – TED Women, I’m Disappointed

So here I am, writing a last-minute idea for what I would love to present on a TED Women talk, for the AOL TED Women contest, my idea for the future.
I decided to use my 2022 text about a Flattring Future (in Swedish) and the basis for the idea, since it is something rooted deep in me, and it is something that I can, and love to talk about.

I’ve filled everything out, and it was time to read the rules and what not. I was already a little suspicious that there was no box to fill out which country you were from. So I read it, and come up with this:

1. Eligibility: The AOL & TEDWomen Big Idea Contest (the ”Contest”) is open only to legal residents of the 48 contiguous United States (including the District of Columbia) who are 18 years of age or older.

I realised that I would not be able to submit my application for the contest. Not a chance in hell for me to go to a TED Women in Washington DC. I would not be able to take one of the greatest steps in my own life with taking a chance on this competition.
This is what I had written.

To change the business model of today, where big companies hold copyrights for material made by artists, we need to look at it with new eyes. With a model that is about the love for sharing and showing appreciation the future will be built.
A future where we are more kind to Flattring people, the people behind the product. It is time to take a big step onto this.

I’m also well aware that I had not asked anyone of the Flattr-team, if it would be okay to submit to competition with the idea. For me it is an extension of theirs. A hope for what the future can become, thanks to it.

#NaNoWriMo blog post with #Devul

Now I’m going to try out Devul for writing a blog post. I will try and get is as correct as possible with my spelling and what not. But we’ll see where it leads me. HI want to tell my story about what a difference it has made ofr me while blogging, No i mean while doing the NaNoWriMo challange. Currently I’m behind on my writing, because I have been sick and there’s alot of other things going on in my Life, it happesn we all know it. And we can’t always get what we wont. So the things -s the THing is that I need to catch up. And I calculated that I ned 33333 by the 20th of November to catch up. Not wanting to spend ”too much” time writing each day I decided that 2, correction 3 days would be the sufficient amount to catch up in decent speed. I was about 10k, bedhind. Which is roughly 3k per day, a bit more, but let’s not get down to specifics. I realised I had 1 hour left untill a new day would start and that I jhad just set myself up to write 3k words, within that hour. Oh well Since I cam nheep up a word count of k4k / hour, I thought uit would be a nice challange. I donät put much effort into spelling correclty, I aim to get the thoughts out of my head and just wite. I do some ciorrection notes while writing, if I efeel it nessessary. So I sat down and wrote, for one hour. 61 minutes to be aexact. And I wrote a whole of 3210 words in that time. At a pace of 3154 words per hour. I will put the screen shot somewhere in this post when I’ve finished writing it. Writing for a whiole hour straight will let your characters get through alot of things you might hnot have had in your mind alreayd, since most wthings I write isnät set in my head nuntil a bit into it. I get alot of ideas as I go and carry on with it. I ended upwriting myself into a trap. Which decveloped nicely, but we will see where it ends. My Male Main Character, I have 3, ended up ona business date, with one of the Female main characters boyfriend. I gues my characters decided that theyr lifes would start to get involved with eachothers by now. I reached 25k, which is haflf way, and sort of the reason why I’m writing this post. Are you halfway I asked myself, and after finishing the one hour session, I actually think I mgith jsut be half way story wise.

I’ve noticed alot when writing, that I don’ät really have to think. What is going to happen just happends. And I love that. It’s surprising and I have never written in this way before ever in my life. I don’t get distracted, since I use Devil, and I can just carry on. I can decide to edit the session I’ve worked on when I’m done with it, or save it for a day when I want to go back and have minor inspiration. Because let it be said that editing your misspellings is a good idea, atleast if you’ve used Devil/Devul, I keep writing that wrong, ;). Oh and my random music list on Spotify managed to give me good dancing/club music just as my characters went into a club. Aint that just leovely?
There are quite a few blog posts related to NaNoWriMo that I would want to write about but I think I will just pinch them in, with what I have already written and we will see if it fits.
Hope you enjoyed this Devul/NanowriMo post of mine, and that you will try it out.

Do not Forget to check out Flattr as well!

Session: During 9 minutes, 647 words were added at a pace of 4000 words per hour.

#Devul for #NaNoWriMo

I went to FSCONS this weekend, whereupon I talked to a friend of mine about NaNoWriMo, since I had figured out that he was participating as well. We started talking about how it’s not supposed to be editable, and how awesome it would be if we could just have a nifty little program that let you see the word count when you write, but you wouldn’t be able to stop and edit what you were writing. And through that you would just keep the flow going.
At first glance the idea might seem really similar to Write or Die, which I guess it is. But the difference here is that you set the limit, and you push yourself only, and you will never have to pay for it, unless you want to (v0.01, v0.02,v0.03 and v0.04, read about why Flattr and NaNoWriMo)

That same evening he poked me when I got home, he had left the conference earlier than me, and said I got the program, try it out! I was exhausted from an awesome day (that I will write more about later) but said I would try it the morning after and so I did.
I immediately fell in love with it. I knew I would be able to use it to get my writing done, and I wouldn’t be able to look back! Yesterday I caught up writing 4k words!

He decided to name it Devul, The name “devul” is a combination of “/dev/null” and “devil”.

One of the reasons for why I felt this would be a good tool to use is the tip, that all of us keep getting over and over while writing our NaNo, Don’t look back!

Whatever you do, don’t read over what you’ve written until you are finished. That is an easy way to get distracted. Remember, you’ll have to edit the thing many times before your piece of art is perfected. Just write forward, don’t make corrections, don’t read over it, just push forward and write.

One thing that is quite important to remember though, is that in order to use this particular tool you basically have to be decently sure you can write without seeing anything of what you write, since it only offers you a box with the words you’ve written and the words per hour count.
Words per hour gives you a rough idea how much longer you’d have to write to catch up.

You will be wanting to edit it when you’re done with your session, or have catched up with the word count for the day, though. At least I’d say so from my personal experience, since you will do a lot of misspelling and might even totally screw up things and not have an idea of what you were trying to write unless you go back to it when you have a fairly rough idea of what you wrote and it is still fresh in your head. You can expect mistakes like ”klkiillikely”, which was supposed to be ”likely”.

The application now writes out how long you’ve been writing (started minute), how many words and at what pace, when you exit it.
Here are some examples of mine.

During 19 minutes, 1278 words were added at a pace of 3894 words per hour.
During 13 minutes, 633 words were added at a pace of 2900 words per hour.
During 20 minutes, 955 words were added at a pace of 2846 words per hour.
During 14 minutes, 948 words were added at a pace of 3896 words per hour.
During 14 minutes, 790 words were added at a pace of 3207 words per hour.

(please don’t be alarmed by the words per minute, or feel any pressure though, some people think I’m extreme in my writing without looking at my screen…)
It’s important to note that the program saves your text Every word you write/Everytime you press spacebar. So you don’t have to worry about loosing more than a word.
To take this project further we, well Olof mainly, need your input on what you want. It currently works best/easiest in Linux, or if you have python ready to set play on your OS of choice. If you don’t know what Python is, well… Let’s not go there.
You can comment either here, or on his post about the latest version, for added functionality. Current aims are to get it working for other OS’ and have it work without the command prompt. [Edit: OSX support]

I’m looking forward to how this develops, but right now we need you Linux users out there who want to help us develop it!

NaNoWriMo + Flattr = <3

It’s November, and all of us NaNoWriMo fans know exactly what that means. It’s time to chase that word count again. The aim is to write 50000 words in 30 days.
Myself forgot, even though I very well knew it was the first of November, to start writing the first day. I didn’t get going untill late that night, and it had already become a new day. I’ve still got some catching up to do, on 3k today, with todays goal to reach 6667, to stay on track. Added note: 9th Nov I caught up with 4k new words thanks to Devul

When I was writing last night I started to think about Flattr and that I really should inform more of them WriMos out there about this wonderful thing.
Flattr is a Social Micro Donation System, with Flat-rate. You can pay as little as €2 a month, and as much as €100 if you want to. This is shared between the items you decide to click during the month. You click around on things you like and maybe encourage others to use it as well.
I wish you guys to have a look at Flattr, and see if it’s something that you’d want to fit into your blog, or connect to your creative writings, or other kinds of creations.

Why do we write? Your aim might not be to earn money. But what if other people wish to give you a little something for your effort?

I’ve written quite a lot about Flattr before, and I have a strong love for it. WikiLeaks are even using it!
There are also some other NaNoWriMo writers I know of who use this service already, and people who publish their books[swe] online too. In my efforts to draw attention to Flattr I e-mailed a few people, which decent results.

I hope you’ll have a look and love Flattr as much as I do!

Åter på min blogg

Så där, nu är valet över. Jag har reflekterat kring det och lämnar nu min kampanjblogg. Dock kommer jag fortsätta finnas på Piratpartiets kampanjblogg, och här då.

Positiva budskap följs av rop och en återuppstående pheonix. Även ledsna och upprörda röster hörs.

Men alla verkar redo att köra en runda till!

Nu är det dags för mig att sätta Plan B i rörelse. Har redan sökt ett jobb, men fler ska sökas under denna veckan! :) CV – Marie Axelsson. På återseende!

Positive reinforcement

Sometimes you need support. I told a friend of mine about the result of the election, he’s been a supporter all the way and I met him way back when I wrote on the Blog Pirate.

i promise to make things better when i rule the world
wankers will be forced to walk the streets with a thumb in their arse
till then, i owe you a cupcake

This movement, the Pirate movement, wether it’s in a party or not, is really important to the world in its current development. We are needed, and we will all keep fighting this. Thank you everyone for your support. Now it’s time to rebuild!

Flash Fiction Friday: #1

Flash Fiction Friday, so I will be conducting a bit of fictional writing here on my blog, hopefully every friday. Partly to cut off from all the ordinary stuff, and partly to open up my creative thinking a little more. Here goes:

He looked around, waking up with yet again one them hazy feelings.
”Where am I?” he thought slowly, soon to realize that this time he was actually home in his own bed. It had been another crazy night lastnight, he guessed, since he didn’t remember anything. He had started to wonder why he kept getting these horrible blackouts with no recollection at all of where he’d been for more than a few days. Life used to be good, and he used to know who he was, where he’d been, who he’d met. Heck, if he’d even met anyone or just stayed at home.
”Good thing I work from home, with only deadlines to keep” He hadn’t missed any of them, yet, and no important meetings with any of his clients, so far so good.
He was strong headed and way too proud to go to the doctor. Even though he didn’t have anyone else insisting he should go, he had a nagging feeling that something might be worse than he could imagine.

He got out of bed and into the bathroom. He, as he always does in the morning, picked up his brush and brushed his long hair, getting out every last knot of it. Long well kept hair.
He looked himself in the mirror in the bathroom, looked closely at himself. Watching himself he could see that he’d been ageing, realizing he had not experienced even half of his life lately.
– ”What the fuck is wrong with you!” he screamed as he smashed his left fist into the mirror. Stunned he looked at the mirror, then looked at his knuckles, now bleeding. The rage had gone away, as soon as his fist had broken the mirror. It had nothing to do with having broken the mirror, nothing to do with having broken his skin on his knuckles and nothing to do with the blood now slowly finding its way out if the cuts.
It was the shock, that did it, the shock of having gotten violent. Gotten so enraged that he broke something. He had always been such a calm boy, never hurting himself or anyone else.

Looking at his knuckles, he didn’t feel the need to clean the cuts. He kept watching the blood drip from his hand down into the sink. The red color against the white, slowly running down the drain.
– ”You will be my war wounds, I will carry you as a memory of what I’m not.” he said out loud, like he was proclaiming it to the world, so that they would know.