BLAST.famy volume 1 ish 6 Sept 1994 6666666666 666 66666666666 666 666 666 6 666666666666 66666666666 666 666 666 66 66 66 666 666 666 666 66 66 666 666 666666666 666 666666666666 6666 666 666 666 666 666 666 66666666666 666 666 666 666 666 666 6666 666 666 666 66666666666 666 666 6666 666 666 666666666666 66666666666 666 666 6666666666666 666 F _ A _ M _ Y A Private World E-zine. Publisher = P. W. Casual, pwcasual@io.org Editor-in-chief = Mark "I'll have you know I'M running this fucking `zine" Jeftovic, markjr@io.org +---------------------------------------------------+ | "the fact that [he] sees deeper makes him an | | Outsider; at the same time, he states that | | he has `no special genius, no message to | | bestow' ...he sees too deep and too much | | and what he sees is essentially chaos" | | -Colin Wilson | +---------------------------------------------------+ ----------------------------=======================-------------------------- ||||||||||||||||||||||||||| c o n t r i b u t o r s ||||||||||||||||||||||||| =============================----------------------========================== Eric Walker (Modemac) modemac@cambridge.village.com (finger `im for a free SubGenius pamplet) Engine (Chris Mountford) Elf elf@hollowtree.org Tony `The Interogator' Malone c/o exclaim@io.org -------------------------===============-------------------------- ||||||||||||||||||||||| c o n t e n t s |||||||||||||||||||||||| =========================---------------========================== DEBUT RANT: individualism by Engine !*@# INTERVIEW: anti-racist action by Tony `the Interogator' Malone AN OPEN LETTER TO ONE OF MY CREDITORS: by markjr NEW NEWSGROUP: alt.destroy.the.internet by Modemac FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY: Telnet-ing from a Freenet This is one of the first posts I have initiated, i.e. not a followup. All response welcome. Everyone needs a rant now and then. I N D I V I D U A L I S M By Engine. (Chris Mountford) So where are we now? This is the ever lasting question of a thinker. Many people have predicted a future which never seemed to come, or not quite. 1984 and Brave New World have been discussed here often and their inadequacies are clearly seen but not all fears have gone away. But as every paranoid conspiracy theorist knows, it's a silent war. None of the agents of our slow incarceration, skull as jail, are painted in the sinister schema we always imagined. The most terrifying torturer wears a menacingly accurate loving smile and enters your house almost welcome, through the geometric wire spiders on the rooftop and other wired ways. I have a postulate I want to throw at you: Knowledge precludes thought. Gradually we trade the faculties of the latter into the inflexible former. Ahhh time. The 60s will never come again. Never will such a small amount of clue be distributed to so many. And this is good. They were a generation all preaching individualism and now that it's come, the corprate citizens[???] of DollarSpace regret this marginalization. We have everything named to unknown, goths to ravers, rockers to hackers, newbies, barbies, ferals, grunge and deathmetalurgists. There are fucking thousands of generations now, of comparable age, yes, often. But fucked if I want to be pinned down. That's why I'd rather see us admit that cyberpunk is dead. If it's not dead then it should be dead, and I'll volunteer to help with this euthenasia. You must admit, Cyberpunk would have wanted it that way. Better to kill it while it's still limping than to have it too taken over to be another braindead zombie hip-concept for purposes of granting Black_Fizzy_Liquid PUSHERS another customized wedge in the corporate toolbox. If they keep driving that thin edge under us, we will wind up like our BIG BRO TOMORROW. The future *will* come and it's gonna be a lot bleaker if we crack like THEY did. Enough DOOM. (fuck I hate it when people call "son_of_into_the_eagle's_nest" a virtual reality exploration experience) But My buried point is that INDIVIDUALISM is a word that they never understood. There will never be another band as popular as The Beatles and all the rest of them. This is a good thing. These days it just isn't safe to be a generation. Now that things are looking like we are actually being the individuals they wished they were, along comes a new hip thing. They need a whole toolbox for us and that's a bonus. The flower children knew they were misunderstood, but they ended up with mobile phones anyway. We must be heading worse if we look out for the new Nike ad with whoever that funny old guy is.(!!!!!attention this is sarcasm!!!!!)^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ You see they were not covering all their bases because while the 80s kids wore, ate, drank, went to, watched, played, listened to, etc etc, all the Right Things (tm), and, you understand not ONE of them was even close to TheRealThing, they forgot Gestalt - the whole is more than the sum of the parts, and overlooked the unifying principal of what to BE. This is now ammended. It was a patch job and as a result the untethered masses of twentynothings became disenchanted, *again*, personally I like to be an optimist and suggest that this slight awareness would have come anyway through shunning the saccharine taste of a fully determined life. We have to use this to fight our newly deigned ID: You are Generation X, the hardest fucking market to crack of all time, but we will get this hip stick here and hit this tag with it and pretty soon you will be watching commercials like never before, ones called MTV and BAYWATCH. Free yourself right now. Don't be GenX, CyberPunk, Zippie , because once they know your name you are enslaved. Remember that the hippies fell, Remain without a name, Never be an easy sell, Or you'll end up the same. ====================== __ __ __ ---------------------------------------------- |_ |\| / _ | |\| |_ Chris Mountford |__ | | \_) | | | |__ ______________________________________________ ====================== !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# E X C L A I M M A G A Z I N E I N T E R V I E W !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# !*@# For those of you who were under the impression that !*@# magazine is reviews, reviews and nothin' but, think again. You can get more of !*@# from their WWW page at http://www.io.org/~pwcasual/exclaim.html. Comments or flames regarding the following interview can be directed to exclaim@io.org. Anti-Racist Action by Tony "The Interogator" Malone My first awareness of the ARA (Anti-Racist Action) came last summer when I read about a clash between skinheads and the ARA outside of Sneaky Dee s. The skins were going to make trouble and the ARA decided to be there to stomp it, and the confrontation moved down the street where some ARA members b roke into the office of Gary Shipper (of The Heritage Front white supremacist organization) and ransacked the place. I know someone who was involved, so I asked him about it. He felt that the love your neighbour policy that most Canadians seem to adopt was useless against violent uneducated peopl e who go out and stomp on the heads of immigrants and homos for their evening s pleasure. He said that the only message these racists will understand is one that deals on their level, specifically that if you are going to do violence against helpless people, we re going to show up and stop you an y way we see fit . Since the cops are never there when you need them, the ARA has decided to beat the racists down with their own hands, while spreading information about racist organizations in order to educate the public. I spoke to a founding member of the ARA to find out more about how they wo rk. His last name is omitted because the ARA aren t into publicity for their members, as they feel they can t be as effective if they become public figures. !@#: The thing I get from your literature is that you want me and whoever reads this stuff to know that racist problems that exist here (Toronto) are not just unrelated incidents perpetrated by individuals, but that there is a network supporting racism that can be traced back specifically to earlier racist organizations, and that they are growing even now. Tell me how many racist or white supremacist organizations there are in the city. Craig: Well, the main organizations of the far right in Toronto...of course the Heritage Front is still around, but to a certain extent they re crippled by the court cases that are going on. There s also still elements of the Church Of The Creator. !: What are the court cases about? C: The human rights hearing has ruled that they CAN run their hate-line [a phone number where you can call up and hear racist ranting] but now they re up on another charge because I believe there was a condition that they couldn t run another hot-line while these hearings were going on and they vio lated that, and they weren t supposed to talk to the media and they violated that too. There are also assault charges from the street clash June 11 (last year) which happened after a protest at Gary Shipper s house. Wolfgang Droeg is being charged. Ken Barker and some others are in trouble for robbing a donut store. !: When the ARA shows up for situations like that street clash you are into dealing with these people on a street level. If you hear they re going to be somewhere, you show up and outnumber them. How do you deal with cops? C: You can see if you look at our demonstrations, that the police seem to be there to protect the nazis. Now that s not 100% of the time but it happened at the courthouse demos. !: Why do you think they do that? C: For various reasons, I guess, I mean, I m not in the police so I don t know their mentality, but I know in the police force there is a lot of sympathy for far-right activities. A policeman, Const. Brad Coulbeck was actually charged with belonging to the Heritage Front and organizing for them. I n an affidavit from Elise Hategan, one of the people who defected from Heritage Front, she gave evidence about Coulbeck and about police working with Heritage Front to gain intelligence on Anti-Racist Action. There s an incident where they went to a Heritage Front organizer s home, handed out phot ographs of ARA people and traded intelligence on ARA organizers. They have said publicly that we re just as bad , we re a criminal organization... !: So they just see you as vigilantes. C: Exactly. You know, they keep saying we re not being political in this case, we ll charge the nazis but we ll also charge the anti-facists . !: So they re tying you both up. C: A lot of the court dates happen on the same days, or around the same times. Often on the same days at the same courthouse. !: Obviously that wouldn t happen by accident. Why would they do that? C: I think it s so that we can t hold a demonstration because we re too busy worrying about supporting our own people. !: Tell me more about the different factions of people in Toronto who are stirring up racism. I want to know what they do. Can I look at anything that s concrete? Proof that these people are behind any particular thing that happens in the city? Or are they more subtly stirring up shit and creating an environment where other people are going to go out and do the damage? C: There s a fine line there. If you go out and preach hatred and spread leaflets all over the place, and you organize nazi skinheads..to me that s the exact same thing, if you re organizing it.. A N O P E N L E T T E R T O A C R E D I T O R Sept. 9/94 Mr Morset, Rather then calling you on phone and risking losing my temper, I have opted to write this. I ask you to take the time to read it. My name is Mark Jeftovic. My account number is: xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx. Yes, my account is past due, I am aware of that. I would like to explain my situation to you in order to illuminate another fact, that being: I am not some form of scum, as one of your employees (Mrs. Gibson) obviously feels. I am a self-employed computer programmer/consultant. This means that in the eyes of the government I am never unemployed, and thus not eligible for unemployment insurance (however in spite of this U.I.C premiums are still deducted from my pay for nebulous reasons). I am currently between contracts, however I do manage to keep myself busy. Between doing odd freelance programming, hardware installations, and sporadic UNIX system administration, I get the rent paid (barely), try to put a dent in my student loans (for my worth-it's-weight-in-gold college diploma), pay some money I owe to my father (who's retired and could actually use it now), chip away at various other payables and try to keep the phone bills current. After this I have $10 a day to spend any way I want. If I have any work to do in the downtown core, I by a 2-way TTC fare for 3 dollars, use half the ticket, and walk home to St. Clair + Oakwood (about 1.5 hours, 2 if I stop in the bookstores on Harbord), so I'll have another ticket for next time. Once I get home I usually stay up until about 3am programming my next software release. You see for the past two years I have been developing various software companions for nationally distributed financial-planning textbooks. The deal with these is that I don't see a dime until the product ships, because I'm paid per unit. I am currently working on one that has me up until the wee hours of the morning, programming away, telling myself that it's all an investment in the future, hard work and toughing out these dismal times can be accomplished. I am also working as a partner in a fledgling internet information service. Once again, lot's of sweat, no money, it's called "paying your dues". In total the above activities add up to anywhere between 40 and 60 hours a week of what I consider "productive" activity. This doesn't include the time I spend writing articles about the internet for various alternative music magazines, playing in a band, and publishing an electronic newsletter (these are "creative" activities which yield no monetary rewards). On weekends I get to go to London and see my girlfriend for two days. (How do I afford to go to London every week? I get a ride down with a friend, and for the return trip I get a ride with someone else in exchange for helping him load his truck). Contrary to what Mrs. Gibson would think, I do not think of myself as "lazy". I do not "have a chip on my shoulder". As far as "getting off my butt and paying my bills" I'm working on it, however I resent that tone of dialogue. I do not think I'm the one with the "attitude problem". Mrs. Gibson has accomplished nothing more than to have Bank of Montreal MasterCard bumped to the bottom of my list of creditors. Your dept. now has lowest priority on my list of "bills I should pay now that I have some money". (I usually make it about three- quarters of the way down before I run out). In the future I wish all correspondence between our parties to take place via e-mail, REAL email, don't waste postage on those bogus "Electronic Letter" mailings. My email address is markjr@io.org -and if you don't have email, get with the times. (Furthermore, your department shall refer to me as Mr. Jeftovic in all future communications). Understand me clearly, I will accept no more 9am phone calls from your staff. It has been two days in row so far, (I sent in a payment last week), if one of your stultified zombies calls on Monday morning, I'm just going to screen them out. Have a nice day. DESTROYITKILLITBLOWTHEFUCKERUPERADICATEITSOMEHOWITMUSTBESTOPPEDNOWAAGGHHH!!!! alt.destroy.the.internet by Modemac Welcome to alt.destroy.the.internet! It's the Usenet group whose ultimate goal is nothing less than the destruction of the Internet, that menace to society whose very existence threatens the lives of countless millions of people...or at least countless millions of dollars. Why destroy the Internet? The answer to this can be found by looking at the users of the newsgroup. These users can be grouped into three (very) loose categories: 1) THE INTERNET IS A MENACE TO SOCIETY! These people are the ones who KNOW they're right, and they delight in dictating their opinions to others, secure in the knowledge that their opinions will be taken as gospel. The media barons, the politicians, the self-proclaimed Watchdogs of Society...these are the people whose existence is threatened by the Internet. The Internet actually dares to make all of its users EQUAL, and anyone can question anyone else's opinion. The Internet allows the transmission of uncensored news and information, free of the modifications made to it by newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. This concept of free thought and questioning of authority is a dangerous one! So to preserve the status quo, where the few tell the many what to think, THE INTERNET MUST BE DESTROYED! 2) THE INTERNET THREATENS BUSINESS! An entire industry has been built on the structure of society, where the mindless masses sit at home while messages are beamed at them twenty-four hours a day - on TV, on the radio, in newspapers and magazines, on billboards, in the mail, and in any other form that can be conceived. Billions and billions of dollars in profits are made from advertising in this manner...and best of all, the public doesn't even have much of an opportunity to speak out against it. But the Internet is largely opposed to mass, in-your-face advertising...look at what happens when those brave pioneers, Canter & Seigel and Skinny Dip Thigh Cream, actually dared to do an in-your-face ad on Usenet! People are actually able to speak out against advertising...what's more, they can question the content of advertising - so that messages can't be beamed directly into their heads the way they can on TV! And as the Internet becomes more popular, traditional advertising methods (the backbone of standard media) are being threatened! Billions of dollars in profits are are risk! So, to preserve the status quo and make sure that the advertising industry remains safe and secure, THE INTERNET MUST BE DESTROYED! But the largest group consists of users who say: 3) THE INTERNET IS A PAIN IN THE ASS! The terrible lag, the sudden dropped carriers, bandwidth-wasting, time-wasting utilities like IRC and MUDs, thousands and thousands of useless Usenet messages, mass Spammings, poorly-written sex stories...not to mention the urge to KILL you get when the message, or file that you've just spent the past SIX HOURS writing suddenly vanishes into the black hole of the Net because your system has just frozen...it's such a royal PAIN! People get so damn frustrated at the Net, and they just want to go somewhere to vent their frustrations at this so-called miracle of modern technology. The Internet? BAH! Who needs it?!? Let's just DESTROY THE INTERNET so that we never have to deal with the damn thing again!! AAARGH!!! The cries of outrage from the vast numbers of people who comprise these three groups of anti-Netters demanded the creaton of alt.destroy.the.internet. This newsgroup is here to serve a vital, sacred purpose: for people to discuss (and hopefully carry out) various wasy of destroying the Internet once and for all...and above all, to HAVE FUN while doing so! For the college student and office worker who has had a lousy day and just wants to let off steam, this is the place to go. Coinspiracy theorists, anarchists, and people with a SICK AND TWISTED SENSE OF HUMOR are all welcome here. So come one, come all! The masses CRY OUT for the destruction of that creeping, crawling DISEASE that is known by the Great Unwashed as THE INTERNET! Cross-post this message to your favorite weird and sick newsgroup, and pester your newsadmin to carry alt.destroy.the.internet! SMASH THE NET! ((((((((((((((((((( FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY ))))))))))))))))))))) After looking over BLAST.famy's subscription list (which now spans 7 countries, btw) and noticing a fair number of Freenet subscribers, I thought I'd include this post from alt.hackers, so they can, uh, report this to their system administrators. How to Hack a Telnet Session Off a Freenet by elf@hollowtree.org The following may be old news to the initiated, but I was delighted to find it. Several Freenets have undocumented open telnet available. This usually does not appear to be intentional. The following is one way to access telnet. Go to your Freenet's Gopher server and and do a Veronica search for "tools and surfing". The SUNET server seems to work best. Sometimes it takes several tries to find "Tools for Surfing the Internet". After you find "Tools for Surfing the Internet" at "service.more.net", work your way through the menus until you come to the "Open Telnet" item. You can now telnet *anywhere* (not just the sanitized menu which most freenets offer. This feature is disabled on some systems. It would not work on Erlangen Freenet. It did work on Ciao! (ciao.trail.bc), COIN (bigcat.missouri.edu) and the majority of others I tried. If you have a local freenet, this may provide free net access for you. P.S. Open FTP is available using the same method. ============================================================================== TO SUBSCRIBE TO THIS EZINE = email pwcasual@io.org and say "sign me up!" ==============================================================================