cycling

Reflections on road rage

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I was involved in a road rage incident a few days ago. I can’t be fair, neutral or unbiased about this topic since I am usually a vulnerable road user riding a motorcycle or a bicycle far more often. I’ve also got experience of driving cars, vans and minibuses.

I’ve been riding a bicycle regularly for fifteen years or so. It keeps me fit and sexy and staves off arthritis and sciatica. I like a mountain bike without any suspension, frame size 53cm and slick tyres at about 80psi is ideal ;) Cromoly Treks from the 90s are nice. About being sexy, you’re welcome to approach me with do-you-fancy-trying suggestions and I’m not too fussy. I am keen on natural hair but whatever.

Back to road rage. I’ve had someone overtake me while I was riding a motorbike in the fast, overtaking lane of the motorway. The car touched me as he passed because there was no room of course. I can’t remember the exact details because it was so long ago but I was travelling at about 80mph. That episode didn’t actually result in a road-rage incident. I followed him for miles. He was manic and going to play golf.

I’ve been involved in a few road rage incidents. Typically a car driver has shown a total disregard for my safety as in the previous example. I get angry that the other driver is so dangerous – to me and not themselves of course – while I am concerned with driving safely being a vulnerable road user. I’ve had vans trying to deliberately hit me on a bicycle. I’ve had cars driving at me because the driver is on the phone or texting. I’ve narrowly missed potentially very serious accidents because the driver is on the phone.

In the most recent incident, I was riding defensively wide in the road stopping him from overtaking where it was dangerous. He overtook me fantastically dangerously to sit behind the bicycle in front. Then he made a rude gesture at me and I followed him. I got off worse. He climbed out of his window and got tangled in my bike. I had to protect myself using my bicycle while he came at me on three seperate occasions hitting my bleeding hand with my d-lock. He was less than half my age and fit.

My undertanding is that the police rarely prosecute in road-rage incidents. What this means is that violent people learn that they can be very violent with impunity in the driving realm. Driving is the one area of contemporary society that is not policed. Drunk drivers literally get away with it for decades, people drive terribly dangerously because they will not be prosecuted, using a mobile phone, texting … Why do some young people drive so badly?

may be extended

5/6/18 10.15am I should have referred to prosecuted instead of ‘policed’ above? Police do attent such incidents but they’re excused as being ‘road rage’.

I find car drivers huge urge to pass cyclists as soon as they possibly can very strange. Danger is the only thing that is acheived by driving dangerously in urban areas and cyclists catch up at the next junction. The way to travel quicker is to select a better route.

Continue ReadingReflections on road rage

Partial anatomy of a hack by GCHQ – It’s pwned

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[5/2/15 I may have been mistaken about the running inside virtualization and that is probably normal livecd messages. There is still something amiss with the different ps axu(s) – it does at least make me very suspicious since I can’t think of any reason why that would happen other than nasty. I’m also surprised that this system is so difficult to boot into OpenBSD. You can’t be too paranoid, or can you?]

I’ve got an AMD64 thin client as a gateway / router that also runs a tor relay. It usually runs dnsmasq but has been running the more conventional dhcpd and named recently. It uses a small camera-style flash card as a hard drive running current and patched OpenBSD. My internal network connects to this through a switch. I run firewalls on all machines – pf on this of course and usually arno-iptables-firewall on debian boxes. This box currently has an uptime of over 59 days.

Image of GCHQ donught building. Doesn't look like a doughnut. Look. Oh c'mon, can't you see - open your eye.

Just recently I’ve had a hard drive fail on my desktop debian machine. I was very surprised at this since it’s very low mileage and being debian linux it hardly ever gets powered down. It appeared to have many and increasing terrible errors that also seemed to jump about whenever I tried e2fscking them. I can’t help but suspect that GCHQ contributed to the apparent demise of this drive.

My new replacement drive arrived yesterday and I had decided to install an OpenBSD xfce desktop. None of the OpenBSD install cds were recognised. What’s going on here?

At the OpenBSD box:

# ps axu | grep bin
root         1  0.0  0.0   744   148 ??  Is    23Nov14    0:01.16 /sbin/init
_syslogd 12341  0.0  0.1   756   876 ??  I     23Nov14    0:08.61 /usr/sbin/sys
_iscsid  10832  0.0  0.1   624   548 ??  Is    23Nov14    0:00.00 /usr/sbin/isc
root     17049  0.0  0.1  1068  1100 ??  Is    23Nov14    0:00.04 /usr/sbin/ssh
_sndio    1059  0.0  0.0   712   344 ??  I<s   23Nov14    0:00.00 /usr/bin/sndi
root     25566  0.0  0.1   904  1092 ??  Ss    23Nov14    0:09.31 /usr/sbin/cro
< (xterm widened) >
# ps axu | grep bin 
root         1  0.0  0.0   744   148 ??  Is    23Nov14    0:01.16 /sbin/init
_syslogd 12341  0.0  0.1   756   876 ??  S     23Nov14    0:08.61/usr/sbin/syslogd
_iscsid  10832  0.0  0.1   624   548 ??  Is    23Nov14    0:00.00 /usr/sbin/iscsid
root     17049  0.0  0.1  1068  1100 ??  Is    23Nov14    0:00.04 /usr/sbin/sshd
_sndio    1059  0.0  0.0   712   344 ??  I<s   23Nov14    0:00.00 /usr/bin/sndiod
root     25566  0.0  0.1   904  1092 ??  Ss    23Nov14    0:09.31 /usr/sbin/cron
_tor     18528  0.0  2.8 21700 25344 ??  S<    23Nov14  1927:49.62 /usr/local/bin/tor

That can’t be right – that tor only appears in the second and subsequent ps axu(s). Having huge difficulty i.e. it is impossible, to install OpenBSD to my desktop machine. They’re pwned.

OpenBSD doesn’t install under a Linux  virualization ‘wrapper’. Linux runs under Linux virtualization, OpenBSD won’t – at least not under this virtualization.

“NET: Registered protocol family 17

mpls_gso: MPLS GSO support” it reads – it’s embedded Linux.

It appears to be a very small wrapper in IPv6 coming from the OpenBSD router / gateway. My laptop starts complaining that BIOS has been changed – not seen that message before. The tor router relay is stopped pretty sharpish.

GCHQ? Well my connection to my ISP is to their ‘audit’ machine. I guess that means GCHQ. My close friend’s car was hours late back from it’s first service – shouldn’t the first service only be oil and filter, a half hour job? After that it was clear that cops could hear everything said in that car and were often waiting for us to arrive. A friend who I was once close to had the ‘Water Board’ round to check his taps. He remarked that she was well-presented. I’ve noticed that local ‘Scientific Investigation’ policewomen are well-presented. Oh, and we had a deep cover spy at our anti-casualisation group meetings. He was also at a pre-G8 2005 meeting. I think that he was Met, very interested in me and an apparent dirty, hairy anarchist cop.

I was using a password 29 characters long. My guess is that they used my mobile to map my keyboard – different characters sound different and there are differences in the time I take to reach them. Or they could have watched (spied) through the window.

I don’t know if they wanted me to find this or not.  I met someone from GCHQ in the Bunch of Grapes one Friday afternoon many years ago. It’s their job, it’s what they do.

I watched this a few hours earlier. You may get lost after the first 10 minutes or so. 30 to 37 minutes or so is good for politicians.

Can’t copy embed code. Bloody GCHQ. Bruce Schneier at MIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXtS6UcdOMs

I’m listening to this at the moment

but while I’m listening to this I want to explain a far greater danger than terrorism that I face almost daily because you see, I am a cyclist.

Yesterday I was almost mown down by a motorist that was on the wrong side of the road and almost mowed me down. He had not seen me because he was texting.

Motorists on mobile phones are lethal to cyclists – a far greater danger than any supposed attacks by ‘terrorists’. I can attest that there is a far greater danger to people – pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists – than terrorism. We need a sense of proportion, to be measured and to asses issues. As a cyclist, I am telling you it is far more dangerous than any fake manufactured, terrorism nonsense. I accept that there are a very few terrorists – usually insane. How can they be anything other than insane? But, they are caught up in the terrorist narrative. Cycling and being a pedestrian is far more dangerous.

Where is the international campaign against motorists using mobile phones? Surely NASA, GCHQ can catch these ‘t*******ts’? Don’t they cause terror to ordinary people and kill indiscriminitely? Actually, yes they do. And far more than this terrorism BS.

There are very few terrorist. Yes they should be pursued. There is fake, manufactured terrorism which is still terrorism pursued by nation-states and criminal cabals. There are also a few poor sods caught up in the terrorism narrative but let’s get it in perspective.

Indiscriminite drones. Stop it.

Ok, er, cycling is nothing compared to rockets from a drone. It’s much the same that it’s totally undeserved but I reckon a drone is far more lethal

– he’s talking about speed limits now

struck by lightening

I suggest that you watch the Greenwald vid. still long to go – talking about inscenity now

Talking about terrorism defined as what Muslims do. We had this in Uk recently with the car driven into council offices up North which then exploded. Strangely enough that wasn’t a car bomb and was reported on the news as most definitely not terrorism …

Intermission: I take advantage of this intermission to point out out that I do magick: that I have converted water into wine with the assistance of fruit, sugar and yeast. I made Melomel for the first time this year and I think that it may have been the first medicine (Meddygon Myddfai). Untreated, unadulterated honey and currant fruits worked really well. It was like a universal medicine – anything that was wrong with you it cured. I believe that it is possible to keep bees without exploiting them.

OK, intermission over.

<snip>

22/1/15 2.40am At least they know that I’m not into CP. I wish that they would go for the ones that are (and more). Actually, I want them to go for the people that abuse children. My understanding of GCHQ’s purpose is that it’s outside their remit. I think that GCHQ is military and concerned with defence. Can we change that so that they catch paedos?

better now ;)

Continue ReadingPartial anatomy of a hack by GCHQ – It’s pwned

Commentary and analysis of recent political events

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Number of homeless in England has risen for 3 years in a row, report says

Homelessness has increased for three consecutive years, partly because of housing shortages and cuts to benefits, with an estimated 185,000 people a year now affected in England, a report says.

Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Crisis found almost one in 10 people experience homelessness at some point in their life, with one in 50 experiencing it in the last five years.

…

Responding to the report, Emma Reynolds, the shadow housing minister, accused David Cameron of breaking his promises to tackle homelessness and get Britain building.

“Homelessness has risen every year under this government, the number of families with children living in bed and breakfasts is at a 10-year high and house-building is at its lowest in peacetime since the 1920s,” she said.

Leslie Morphy, chief executive of Crisis, urged the government to address a chronic lack of affordable housing and consider the impact of its cuts to housing benefit, such as the bedroom tax, welfare cap and shared accommodation rate.

…

Image of Accident and emergencyA&E Winter Crisis: Patients Wait 12 Hours

Hundreds of patients are being forced to wait more than four hours to be seen by accident and emergency departments as the winter crisis begins.

It is the first time since April that emergency departments have struggled to hit their four-hour targets as admissions to A&E hit the highest level since data started being collected in November 2010.

According to NHS England figures, 3,678 patients across the country were forced to wait between four and 12 hours for treatment.

Five patients were not seen for more than 12 hours last week – the busiest week of the year with 415,000 people visiting A&E departments.

Waiting times were worst in major A&E wards where just 92.2% of patients were seen within four hours.

…

Free-Market Ideology: The Destruction of Lives

The over-policing of America

BoJo the bozo: Cycling safety campaigners slam Boris Johnson over lack of helmet and hi-viz 

Idiot Johnson is not the only one setting a poor example. As a cyclist, I advise you to wear a helmet as I was advised by my GP (doctor). If you fall from a bike, you’re falling six feet or so possibly with your head impacting the ground. Even presidents can have a ‘bicycle accident’.

Continue ReadingCommentary and analysis of recent political events

Politics news allsorts

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Commentary and analysis of recent UK politics events

Related: Over 1,000 cyclists stage die-in protest outside Transport for London HQ

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/12/george-osborne-becomes-first-senior-tory-criticise-boris-johnsons-iq-and-inequality

George Osborne has become the first senior Tory to distance himself from Boris Johnson’s remarks about IQ and inequality.

In a speech this week, the Mayor of London had said noted that 16 per cent of “our species” had an IQ of less than 85, and just two per cent of had an IQ of more than 130. Under such conditions, true equality was never possible, he said: “Indeed, some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.”

On the Andrew Marr Show, Osborne said: “I would not have put it like that. I don’t agree with everything he said. I think there is actually increasingly common agreement across the political spectrum you can’t achieve equality of outcome, but you should be able to achieve equality of opportunity. You should give everyone, wherever they come from, the best chance, and, actually, education is the key to this.”

…

I know someone who was cycling and ended up in the wheelarch of a London bus. The driver was very sorry and in shock. Luckily she wasn’t physically hurt.

It’s not all bad news. George Osborne’s family has a cute new puppy.

Continue ReadingPolitics news allsorts