Month: November 2012

DALLAS–Wednesday, Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove was found dead in his home. The Dallas Police Department reported acute asphyxiation as the cause of death but do not suspect foul play. Known to George W. Bush as the “Architect,” Rove was Senior Advisor to the Bush Administration. He was 61 years old.

Rove is known for inventing the newest enhancement to democracy, micro-targeting. Squads of specially trained arguers use cold reading techniques taken from phone psychics and latch on to the issues that the person cares about most. After locating the wedge-issue, they launch into one of several dozen specially-designed speeches said to convert nine out of ten voters to the Republican Party.

Former Governor Mitt Romney’s campaign spent nearly three hundred billion dollars on a micro-targeting campaign directed by Rove. Speaking angrily of Rove, Romney barked at the reporter from the Internet Chronicle, “The president’s campaign, if you will, focused on giving targeted groups a big gift. [Rove] made a big effort on small things.”

Rove’s legacy as a political consultant, the truest kind of free-market democrat, will live on through his latest book “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight,” which is available now at a discounted rate from Lebal Drocer, Inc.

 

 

Why no MetaTorrents?

BitTorrent is a protocol which allows for the efficient, decentralized sharing of huge amounts of information among large groups of small, personal computers. Originally, torrents required a centralized “tracker” to organize specific information dispersal, but that function has been successfully decentralized with the creation of Decentralized Hash Tables.

Why are .torrent files, the references and keys to the BitTorrent parties, distributed with centralized sources like the Pirate Bay? How hard would it be to contain many millions of living .torrent files within a completely decentralized MetaTorrent? Essentially, all you’d need is a very robust client that could sift through many millions of .torrent files referenced from a single .torrent, a MetaTorrent. This means adding a simple filing system and search to the innards of the client, like the one provided externally by Pirate Bay. One magnet link to a MetaTorrent, and the whole project is forever cut loose from big, vulnerable, centralized servers and domains.

Seedbanks

Seedbanks are crucial because without them MetaTorrents would be populated with dead .torrents, much like the centralized .torrent sources are now. A Seedbank is just a very robust kind of BitTorrent node with many Terabytes of data to draw from. Whereas the Pirate Bay hosts only references and keys to the torrent party, the .torrents, the Seedbank is all of that as well as a source for the data itself. Instead of torrenting information piecemeal, one might copy an entire Seedbank, a process that would pay off not only with further decentralization, but also with greatly liquefied access to libraries of data.

has the nightmare paranoia done set in? am i gone mad. i feel like I’m just seconds away from a tidal storm that’s about to destroy the very fabric of my existence. I am the hyperglade, and I spin the universe.

 

I’m Barrett Brown.