The IHF issues a stinging report on human rights situation in the Republic of Mari El

Earlier this month the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) released a stinging report on the human rights situation in the Republic of Mari El.

The report starts with a good summary of the history of Mari El and its current socioeconomical situation.

The report accuses The Russian Federation of escalating harrassment of Mari national activists. The report cites a mountain of evidence of discrimination, harrassment and violence against anyone trying to advance the Mari national identity.

Specifically the report mentions all recent state elections of having been rigged in favor of politicians controlled by Moscow. The report also outlines the different ways the current presidential administration of Mari El is repressing the Mari language and culture by way of economical, political, cultural and violent repression.

As recently as August 27th 2005, yet another prominent Mari activist was beaten so severely that he suffered multiple fractured bones. As usual the assailants are "unknown" to the local police. It's amazing how many violent crimes in this small country are committed by people nobody knows about.

The report concludes with a number of recommendations to the Russian Federation and the Republic of Mari El and the international community. The recommendations to the Russian Federation and the Republic of Mari El encourage more dialogue with Mari activists, stopping of all forms of harrassment, introducing political reforms and such. None of those recommendations are going to get implemented as long as the Soviet era tyrants rule Mari El and Moscow.

The report asks the international community to hold the Russian Federation accountable to the numerous international obligations the Russian Federation in terms of freedom of expression, assembly and association as well as preserving living minority cultures and languages in any country. None of that is likely to also make it into the agendas of any visiting statesman, with the possible exception of the statesmen from Finland and Estonia, of course.

I've written about the human rights situation in Mari El before:
The people of Mari being systematically persecuted by Russians
Pro-Russian propaganda against ethnic minorities at its best

-TPP

A good day in the fight against spam

Wayne Mansfield, spamming scum of the most stereotypical kind from Australia, had his first day in court. He will be found guilty, and he will be bankrupt by the penalties imposed by the court.

The second featured spamming scum today is one Adam Vitale, who got his balls stepped on by the US Secret Service.

Up yours, spammer scum.

-TPP

Miller Light - tastes like spam

Miller Brewing hates losing customers from its spam lists. That's why they hired Equifax and their spam factory Naviant to do a little e-pending.

E-pending is a term used for a spammer technique of finding your Email address using other information, usually your name and mail address. A spammer, in this case Miller Brewing, has your other information, but not your email address. They'll trawl online databases for likely matches, and basically append their records of you with the Email address found with the search. E-pending is notoriously inaccurate and guaranteed to generate spam.

Naviant, which was bought by the credit report agency Equifax a few years back, is a well known spammer. It is run by Scott Hirsch, a long time career spammer. In his past he's partnered to spam with such great, honest people like Eddy Marin, a convicted cocaine dealer.

Here we have Miller Brewing partnering with Scott Hirsch to spam you. I think I'll have my football with Budweiser from now on (not really, since it tastes like water, too).

-TPP - drink imported, it's better

MPAA sues Google - well, not quite, but they might as well

MPAA is sueing a number of search engines that link to copyrighted content. What's interesting is that they're sueing search engines that comply with DMCA takedown requests.

-TPP

Up yours, spammer scum - for 8 years

Scott Levine, a career spammer and criminal, gets 8 years in the slammer for breaking into a data broker company Acxiom's servers and stealing their data for spamming.

Scott Levine was running a spamhaus called snipermail.com.

The difference between him and what Axciom is doing is, of course, purely academic, as Acxiom has already stolen your data and is abusing it in exactly the same way spammers are. They just happen to have the politicians in their pockets a little better than spammers do.

-TPP

What goes on in the mind of a father of a botnet operator

"I told my dad I had made an Internet worm that infected people, and then I used their computers to make money, and he just shook his head and was, like, 'I hope you don't go to jail for that . . .' and . . . 'I hope it wasn't underage porn you was doing.'"

That's what goes on in the mind of a father of one of FBI's most wanted cyber criminals. No wonder his son is a criminal. He just doesn't give a fuck his son is breaking several laws in multiple countries.

Nuke the double-wide they live in and all their other offspring, too. That'd solve the disease.

Update: The story on 0x80 in Washington Post had a photo. Before publishing the photo on the washingtonpost.com, they forgot to clean out the metadata on it. Here's the metadata:

SLUG: mag/hacker
DATE: 12/19/2005
PHOTOGRAPHER: Sarah L. Voisin/TWP
id#: LOCATION: Roland, OK
CAPTION:
PICTURED: Canon Canon EOS 20D
Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh 2006:02:16 15:44:49 Sarah L. Voisin

Roland, OK has a population of less than 3000 people. This guy is going to get caught. Bragging always gets these assholes in trouble.

Links related to the metadata revelation:

The Inquirer
Slashdot discussion

-TPP

The Dutch Post Office releases stamps with moving images

Flying cars can't be far behind!

-TPP

Finland changes its name to Conelandia

Go King Conan!

-TPP

The Bush Administration is improving communications

Just three hours to inform the President of a serious incident on American soil. This is certainly an improvement over the communications disasters during Katrina.

I wonder if Dick Cheney's vacation home was in New Orleans how fast the word about the levees breaking would've reached the White House.

-TPP

Dick Cheney is a dangerous man

Damn! If that's what he does to his friends, I'd be afraid to be his enemy.

-TPP

Why are people such asses on XBox Live?

Josh Smith, with entirely too much free time on his hands, decided to study the vulgarity on Halo 2 online matches.

These f***ing n00bs only said damn 0.53 times per hour.

-TPP