manchicken here…

I owe a debt to a terrible demon, and he intends to collect.

My whole life I have spent taking gladly what this demon had to offer, all the while knowing it was wrong.

Still early in my years, the demon appears and says that the debt is due, but he intends to collect slowly, methodically, painfully.

In an effort to increase my suffering more still, he gives me a seemingly-impossible way out, and a tiny window of control.

In cruel irony, I must make a daily blood sacrifice in order to exercise control.

If I can wean myself from the excesses I have enjoyed, the demon will wait.

If I cannot, the demon comes in and takes me painfully, piece by piece, arms, legs, eyes, heart.

My neighbors also know this demon, for they owe him, too.

The demon will never leave me, he will take my life one way or another, he will collect his debt.

To the outside world, I appear an average husband, father, worker, but inside I know the truth.

I am not okay, and I haven’t been for a long time.

Popularity: 9%

Congratulations on your position and your new blog. I find it refreshing that you have taken the time out of your busy schedule to share with students and community members what you believe to be in the interest of our community and our young people. This is, of course, not without some sense of irony… I have a hard time grasping how a man making $620,000 in the days of budget cuts, tuition hikes, and unpaid furloughs could possibly have any clue as to what would be best for either our students or our community. That said, it does seem like you have quite a knack for looking out for what’s best for you and the other wealthy elites and blue-bloods in our community, so maybe its not your ability to act in the best interest of a population or organization that should be in question, but perhaps your ability to do so for people other than the rich, connected, and yourself.

I would like to extend my sincerest congratulations for managing to land such a lucrative position on the backs of working-class Illinois residents. I don’t know how you did it, but I suppose at least I must concede that you’ve displayed an ability to succeed in an endeavor we all had hoped was impossible: fooling the whole of the State of Illinois into making another rich, connected person even more rich and connected at tax-payer expense.

I look forward to seeing how you will spin what is best for yourself and your connections into what is best for students, the Champaign-Urbana community, and the state of Illinois as a whole. I wish you the best, but in all reality I do hope you are ashamed of yourself.

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I got this response from Mediacom today when I got home, it is dated June 2nd.

Dear Ms. Bowers,

This letter is in response to a follow-up letter that we received from Michael David Stemle, Jr., which your office was copies on, involving the high-speed data service that Mr. Stemle receives from Mediacom. While the complaint involves facets of Internet access service not currently regulated by the Commission, I would like to inform the Commission of Mediacom’s response.

In the complaint the customer classifies Mediacom’s practices as involving deep packet inspection, and makes a moral argument against such a practice.

Mediacom must inspect packets of information to some degree in order to send customers to the web pages that they request. Mediacom operates in accordance with applicable laws and operates its service in a way that works well for the Internet-using community that it serves.

I will now consider the matter closed. Should you or Mr. Stemle need any further information, please contact me using the information below.

Sincerely, James McKnight

I find it interesting that this guy goes out of his way repeatedly to remind the FCC of how impotent they are in this matter. I am currently considering my response, and will likely post it here upon putting it in the mail.

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On May 2nd I found evidence that Mediacom was sniffing my internet traffic. I filed a complaint with the FCC once I was certain I wasn’t going to get cooperation from Mediacom. Today, I received a response from Mediacom.

Dear Ms. Bowers (the FCC representative who followed up with Mediacom)

This letter is in response to a letter that we receved from your office regarding a complaint from Michael David Stemle, Jr. that involves the high-speed data service that he receives from Mediacom. While the complaint involves facets of Internet access service not currently regulated by the Commission, I would like to inform the Commission of the results of my investigation of the complaint.

In the complaint, the customer states that Mediacom filters the customer’s requests and responses when he tries to access websites, and redirects the customer to Mediacom’s search results page.

Mediacom does not do what the customer is claiming. If a customer types a non-existent web page address into the address bar, such as www.foxskorts.com (instead of the popular www.foxsports.com), then the customer will be directed to a page that lists choices of websites that the customer may have intended, and some choices on there may be advertised spaces and would be identified as such. This is done because Mediacom’s search page is the default browser for incorrect addresses. This setting can be changed to whatever browser the customer would like to use. If Mr. Stemle would like to contact me, I will have a representative call him and walk him through these steps at his convenience.

Then this guy goes into some Internet Explorer tutorial on how to change my default search engine. He concludes with the following:

I will now consider the matter closed. Should you or Mr. Stemle need any further information, please contact me using the information below.

There are obviously some holes in this guy’s story. First, he claims this is a browser setting, when this is actually something coming from the ether. Neither my computer–which is a Mac running Safari, not a Windows box running Internet Explorer–nor the third party website has directed me to the assist.mediacom.com webpage.

Dear Ms. Bowers,

I have reviewed the letter from Mr. McKnight (Mediacom attorney) and found it to be inaccurate. I would like to take this opportunity to clarify my complaint and to provide some evidence which I hope will make this matter clear for both the FCC and for Mediacom’s representative.

My complaint is not that Mediacom filters all traffic, but rather that Mediacom engages in what is known as “deep packet inspection.” In addition to a telephone call where Mediacom customer support disclosed that such techniques were being used, I discovered that these techniques were being used when on the night of May 2nd at 11:17PM (US-Central time) I did make the HTTP request of the following URL: [http://sva.notsosoft.net/fdhkasjhfsd.htm]

Upon making this request I received a “HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found” response from the server, which is correct. What I noticed was that while the HTTP headers remained unmodified, the body of the HTTP response included this code which Mediacom did in fact deceptively inject (bold added to highligh executing client-side JavaScript code):

<HTML><script>window.location=’http://assist.mediacomcable.com/mediacomassist_pnf/dnsassist/main/?domain=’+escape(window.location);</script><body>The Search Guide redirection service has been enabled to provide helpful searches from browser queries. You entered a non-existent url and your browser attempted to redirect you with Javascript. To enable this please update your browser preferences. <a href=’http://search.mediacomcable.com/prefs.php’>To turn off this feature please click this here</a></body></HTML>

The effect of this code is to instantly cause the browser to redirect to the page http://assist.mediacomcable.com/mediacomassist_pnf/dnsassist/main/ with the query string parameter of the domain equalling the URL from the request which resulted in the 404 message. While this seems like a benign action, it has some potentially far-reaching consequences including unsolicited advertisements, sale of user data, bogus claims of intellectual property infringement, and a complete trashing of the fourth amendment rights of users.

It has been frightful this last decade to watch as internet service providers have engaged in warrantless wiretapping, packet spoofing, and disclosure of traffic data to the RIAA and MPAA. We all watched in horror as courts ruled that by virtue of users knowing that Gmail service was provided with advertising that they had no reasonable expectation of privacy, and therefore no Fourth Amendment protection with regard to email in their Gmail account. In addition, this robs me of my ability to enter into any new non-disclosure agreements with any third party while using my internet connection as I have no way of knowing what Mediacom looks for and collects, and with whom they disclose what they collect.

Contrary to Mr. McKnight’s claim, this is not a preference within my browser–I am not using Internet Explorer, I am not using Windows, I am using Safari on a Mac which does not redirect 404 errors to search engines in any way. While Mediacom does have what they call an “opt-out” option, this does not actually solve the problem. The opt-out option likely does not disengage the deep packet inspection, it likely only disengages the redirect. The problem is the deep packet inspection, not the redirection. The redirection is merely a symptom of this unethical practice. I have asked Mediacom to have technical personnel explain to me in detail as to the nature of the opt-out mechanism in place, but to date Mediacom has chosen not to fulfil this request.

On the phone call with Mediacom technical support, more than one technician did disclose that Mediacom inspects packets of users for several reasons including (and likely not limited to) virus detection, traffic-shaping, as well as the detection of copyright infringement for the purposes of disclosure to recording industry professionals and disconnection of consumer connections.

While I understand that the FCC is not currently regulating internet carrier behavior like this, I view this as highly unethical, especially when it is a practice which is not disclosed to consumers. Furthermore, I am greatly concerned that I was able to find technical people within Mediacom who were informed and did disclose this information, yet Mr. McKnight failed to even do such basic research as I had. More than one technician within Mediacom–both in the call center and technicians which respond to service calls–have told me they understand this unethical packet inspection to be a common practice within Mediacom, yet senior counsel within Mediacom seems unaware of this practice.

Since I contacted Mediacom regarding this matter they have since dispatched a technician to my house to re-wire my house, which was entirely unnecessary, wasting the time of both their technician and that of my lovely wife. While some Mediacom technicians have claimed that these unethical practices can enhance performance for Mediacom users, my neighbors and I know all too well that Mediacom has a record of poor network performance, and it is likely that deep packet inspection is exacerbating the problem.

All I ask from Mediacom is that they cease deep packet inspection on my connection. If this practice is not going on, and I am mistaken, I would appreciate it if technical personnel within Mediacom could explain the error in my argument, and I would request a letter declaring that deep packet inspection is not going on, and that I would be unreasonable to believe Mediacom is in any way inspecting or modifying packets between my home network and the server from which data was requested.

I do not consider this matter closed, I will continue to pursue this matter with authorities local and federal to the extent I can, and I do still maintain that Mediacom does violate the ethical expectations of their customers by engaging in this practice. Should either Mr. McKnight or the FCC require further information from me, my information is below.

Sincerely yours,

Michael D. Stemle, Jr.

This is going in the post tonight, hopefully we can get this matter addressed soon. I’m considering sending this to my senators, congressmen, and Illinois’ attorney general as well.

Popularity: 58%

It seems talks in Copenhagen are stalled for a number of reasons. One, is that our shameful “democratic” process in the United States is actually trying to shoehorn in lackluster measures so they can continue business as usual.

Another reason why things are stalling is because the developing world is woefully incapable of funding the changes that are necessary for them to participate in the solution to man-made global climate change. They make a compelling case that the already-developed world owes a debt to the developing world for the years that we have enjoyed prosperity due to our polluting activities.

One more interesting point I’ve heard is that developing nations are being priced out of being able to participate because corporations in developed nations are implementing strict intellectual (imaginary) property regimes to prevent others from partaking of solutions science without paying top dollar.

America should be ashamed at how our corporations are behaving. We should be ashamed at how our leaders are behaving. And we should be shamed that while the science is calling for 20-25% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 emissions estimates, the United States is only willing to make a 4% change. Of course, we’re calling it a 16% drop, but then changing the benchmark from 1990 to 2002.

Some days it’s harder to be an American than others. Our government is controlled by corporations, despite the lies that Obama told us when he promised to keep corporations out of the White House. Obama, please give us the change we believed in and worked our asses off for.

Popularity: 60%

With all this talk about Kindle and eBooks being a cheaper alternative… have we forgotten about these lovely things called public libraries? They have New York Times best sellers and many newspapers for *free* all year round… and when you’re done reading them, you don’t have to store them, you don’t have to recycle them… you just take them back to the library!

Popularity: 83%

It looks like the National Organization for Marriage has filed a copyright claim for the audition tapes that were posted on YouTube. Per unjust and unconstitutional DMCA’98, YouTube disabled the video.

This is yet another case of people being able to abuse the DMCA’98 to violate free speech rights.

Popularity: 83%

Hey guys. I don’t know if you’ve taken a gander at the new FoxNation.com site… it’s full of hate-mongering idiots who hate gays, Mexicans, blacks, Muslims, gays, and are all actually quite seriously calling for violence against a legitimately elected government… surprised? Me neither.

Let’s all take some time to educate ourselves on the danger, hate, and fear oozing out of this band of merry idiots.

Popularity: 87%

I’ve been seeing a lot of hub-bub about O’Reilly going after some of these bloggers and such. I just now saw a clip where he said that the far left was afraid of him and his producer.

O’Reilly can send his producer out my way, and I’ll offer two statements. One: kiss my ass. The other, the one I give to Mormon missionaries and Jehovah’s Witnesses when they come knocking on my door: you can get off my property, or I will be forced to protect my family.

Come on O’Reilly, send your goons after me… I dare ya. Email me and I’ll give you my address even. I even used to think you were just a nice, misunderstood conservative with a big mouth… now I know you’re just another right-wing fear-mongering bully.

Popularity: 85%