Staying Under The Radar In Vista x64 - Trickier Than You'd Think

Recently I've been trying to replicate some of the things that I felt made my XP system pretty secure onto my Vista x64 laptop, and I finally got around to (attempting) installing Peergaurdian 2 when I ran into a snag. For anyone who reads this blog (ha) and doesn't know what that is, basically it protects your computer from companies like Mediasentry, you know, one of those watchdog groups that work for the likes of the RIAA and the MPAA, effectively blocking them from seeing your internet traffic based on what IP addresses they use, which is stored in 'blacklists' which are (I think) ultimately updated by the BISS community, who as far as I can gather from their website/forums are just a bunch of people on the net trying to make it secure for those people who want/need it.

So, back to the Peergaurdian, I tried installing it and basically got an error message involving the driver for some reason. So, being inquisitive as I am, I did some web sluething and found out what the deal was. Basically Microsoft, in an attempt to make the OS more 'secure' requires that all of the drivers to have to have a special code signature that is provided by them so that, presumably, some malicious driver doesn't get installed or some such, but I doubt that it actually protects you from much. Normally this wouldn't bother me too much, but given the fact that it has a yearly fee attached to it, I can't say I'm a fan. This is a big reason that Peergaurdian 2 doesn't work on vista, they can't afford the yearly licensing fee. So given that, I wanted to find out how to disable whatever part of the OS checks for the driver signature. The Phoenix labs guys (Peergaurdian creators) have a method of doing this or you can apparently disable the check in the advanced boot menu if you press F8 before windows starts loading, but the latter method is only for the one session so you would have to do this everytime you wanted to boot up Vista and use Peergaurdian.

Enter ReadyDriver Plus. Apparently someone made a program, a mod of the program ReadyDriver, which installs itself onto your hard drive and, as far as I can gather, alters the windows vista bootloader to disable the check for your drivers by default. I haven't used it yet, but if do I'll post about any unwanted side effects I notice after the install. I'm probably just going to use the PeerGaurdian method posted on their RC1 download page, but I just wanted to make note of this program in case there's another program which uses unsigned drivers.

Now that I had found all of this out, I realized that if I wanted to dual boot operating systems that I couldn't use that program and boot from GRUB, since it wouldn't use the vista boot loader at all. That means I would need to find a way to boot linux through the windows boot loader, and luckily I found a way here.

So I suppose to sum up this whole post, vista is a freaking hassle.

Racism in Ohio, Political Style

Holy motherless son of a crap, apparently Al-Jazeera was at a Palin/McCain rally in Ohio and they did a piece about, I don't know, racism? Basically this is all tied to the comment Obama made during the third debate where he said how people at McCain's rallies have been heard shouting things like "terrorist" and "kill him" after his name is mentioned and the lack of addressing this by the McCain campaign, and this video kinda corroborates that claim. Actually, it really corroborates that claim. I'm not deluded enough to think that this is how all people in Ohio or all conservatives or whatever think, but it confirms the existence of some extremely nasty racism in parts of America, and it makes me cringe to think that people have clung to such backwards beliefs for so long.

McDonalds, Apparently Not Really Even Food

So I was wandering the web like I always do when I came across the picture above. It's a picture of a McDonald's Hamburger that's 12 years old. I never really knew how little food there was in McDonald's cooking, because even if you left that in the fridge for that long something would have started to grow on in, something from the air, something from the water, something from the meat or bread, ANYTHING. Bacteria is freaking everywhere, and yet here this burger is, clean and neat just like the day it was bought. I'm a little frightened by this burger, despite the fact that I don't even eat the stuff.

1996 McDonalds Hamburger

My Bloody Valentine, Only Shallow

Okay, so I know I'm a little late to the party but holy crap is My Bloody Valentine freaking amazing. I finally watched this video and read their wikipedia article, and man their story and last album (not for long though!) are so insanely beautiful, I can't even believe that I claimed to like shoegazey music before getting into this band as hard as I am right now. The noise and soft vocals are such a great contrast yet they compliment each other, it's so great to listen to. Watch the video, see for yourself how great this band is.



My Bloody Valentine

If Charles Darwin Were Alive, I'd Give Him A Big'ol High Five

Well well well, look who's got egg on their face 150 years later. Well, I shouldn't poke fun, but I have to admit this is a very satisfying article. Essentially the article says that the Catholic Church now acknowledges Darwin's theory of evolution is compatible with the Bible. Score one for Biologists and people who are educated properly everywhere! An excerpt from the article:

The Catholic Church teaches "theistic evolution," a stand that accepts evolution as a scientific theory and sees no reason why God could not have used a natural evolutionary process in the forming of the human species.

It objects to using evolution as the basis for an atheist philosophy that denies God's existence or any divine role in creation. It also objects to using Genesis as a scientific text.

As Ravasi put it, creationism belongs to the "strictly theological sphere" and could not be used "ideologically in science."

Well, now I suppose Creationists have even more opposition to their views. Yah know, other than most of the rest of the global Christian population that thinks Creationism and Intelligent Design being taught in schools is pretty ridiculous.

Vatican: Guess what, Darwin? Evolution is OK

NOW, Thanks for actually keeping women's Interests in mind and not bein' fools about it

NOW, the National Organization for Women, endorsed Senator Barack Obama for president recently. I... I'm just so happy right now, as, irrational as it may seem, this feels to me to be an omen of sorts, that McCain's 'Palin boost' is really all hype and when you line the two candidates beside one another, the most intelligent people I've met or heard endorse Barack. It offers hope that the Democrats, despite their terrible missteps in the better part of the past decade, may just win back the executive and just maybe we actually may see changes in how the government is run, since I really doubt that the man who has gone back on some of his most fierce beliefs is going to resist his party's influence if he were president.

National Organization for Women PAC Endorses Obama-Biden

'Hillary's women' reject McCain's VP choice

And just for fun, let's link to a 'why Obama's better' story:
Why Obama's Health Plan Is Better

Joe Rogan, now officially the motherfucking man

Oh lordy lord, have I got an amazing blog post for you. It's from Joe Rogan's blog, and it's called "Porno Party," and yes, it's as hilarious and interesting as it sounds. Basically Joe doesn't really like going to parties because he rarely finds people who are interesting to talk to at them, but likes them for the crazy crap that could possibly happen and the stories he could tell because of them. So when he gets invited to the "Porno Party" he can't resist, especially because a group of his friends are going with him. When he arrives, he sees an empty parking lot and forty chairs filled with dudes watching a porn flick, which doesn't seem too interesting until the movie stops and a director steps out. Apparently this is a screening, and the flick that was just on was just a warm up or some such. So the movie starts, and it seems fairly run of the mill, until the actress (yes, the one getting rammed on screen) shows up. What happens next is rediculous, and has already made my day. Read the post to find out what happened, and then immediately thereafter laugh your ass off. Obviously this one isn't for the kiddies, but do yourself a favor and don't scroll to the bottom of the page until you read the whole story. It's like the icing on the freaking glorious cake.

"Porno Party"