OHAI Tourists!
pulls on orange vest

For those of you not shaking your heads in disbelief that I’m here again, I’m That Anonymous Coward.
People mostly just call me TAC, my current claim to fame is appearing in 4 sets of exhibits submitted to Federal Courts by Pretenda and its agents, as well as suing to unmask me for intentional infliction of butthurt… or something. 
I coined the term Pretenda. 
I am harsh, snarky, and pretty entertaining.
I am a legend in my own mind, and the stuff of nightmares for copyright trolls.

Now if you’ll all take your seats here on the short bus, the tour can begin, as soon as I get past this pesky club Mike put on the wheel. 
Hand me that canister… a little liquid nitrogen works wonders on stuck locks.
Multitool please….
Now we connect wire 1 to wire 3 and… we’re off.

Palantir (named for that creepy orb from Lord of the Rings that lets you spy on hobbit beauty queens changing), got $196 Million in funding.  Let’s ignore the absolute failure of the people behind it, and how they planned to use the tech to undermine Wikileaks for private customers.  And they would have gotten away with it, if not for those pesky kids in trendy masks.  So a company, who has no problem creating fake information, is being funded to gather more ‘real’ information for the government or anyone else with a briefcase full of cash. 

Oh everyone smile at the traffic camera, it’s gathering our images to update your status on NSABook.
Given the errors most data aggregators have… you are probably all George Takei.
Everyone smile and say Oh My!

Everyone wave at that nice policeman hiding in that alley… being anonymous online is okay for him, but everyone else should register themselves.
I wonder if he works for this guy.  I guess its open minded thinking like that, that leads to stuff like this.

Ok everyone roll up the windows, this is a bad neighborhood.  Those dark forbidding towers, the fire, the brimstone… Nope its not Mordor, one does not just tour Mordor… this is the Surveillance Suburb. DUMDUMDUMMMMM

I’d bother to narrate but this neighborhood is like the most insane HOA ever.
Pouring money into companies, making us all less safe, with nothing to show for it.
If you question them, you’re a freaking terrorist.
They scare everyone with ZOMG the terrorists will win, even as they do way more harm.
Protecting the cash cow is more important than people knowing the truth.

Ok this place depresses me… here let’s just do a doughnut in Rep. Rogers lawn…

BaBang
Whoops sorry that was a pretty big speed bump, oh wait no it’s just EA’s latest fail.

Let’s pay a visit to my favorite place, the Copyright Troll Cul-de-sac. 
We should be safe, with the Government shutdown those nice men from ICE are cooling their heels at home.
Just up here on the left, and this clicker I “found” opens the gates….

Given the amazing lengths some countries are going to appease the IP cartels, well this is confusing.
And well this just seems to fly in the face of the horrible times they claim…
They have given up buying the laws they want, they just think they can say it and make it law.

Yes it’s time to hit the wayback machine Peabody for background, as you should have learned last time I had the wheel… I go where I want, last tour I went offsite to Ars.  

I was talking about this lawfirm, Steele Hansmeier LLC and their boy wonder lawyer Brett Gibbs. 
They stood before a Judge and admitted they mislead the court in the original complaint, that the discovery wasn’t enough to identify the infringer and wanted the court to allow them access to pretty much anything with a computer in it in the target’s house.
My crystal ball is that good, I saw what was happening and well popcorn futures are way up as the comedy keeps coming.
It would be funny haha but the wheels of justice are slow, so its more funny utoh.
See that battered McMansion? The one that looks like its been hit by the wrecking ball a bunch of times, and somehow is still standing?  Prenda Prime, it’s pretty much Steele Hansmeier with new siding.
HA.  I think the upcoming holidays might be a little chilly.
HA. They ‘represent’ him, and their best answer is we think he’ll have a good answer?
HA! And the cash they owe, piles up higher.  

I guess gaming the justice system will finally catch up with you.  
The irony, it burns.  How big does the lie have to be when even a staunch copyright advocate calls you out?

What is this little dark alley… oh this is where the patent trolls are breeding.
Much like the copyright trolls they are filling peoples heads with dreams of imaginary dollars… that never seem to make it to their greedy hands.
It is almost like some people want these trolls to succeed and keep the world from moving forward.
They extract money from people who innovate so they can spend more money to keep themselves alive.
Heh, lemme flick on the high beams…. look at them run!
Ok it’s gross back here, let’s get out on the road…

FSCK someone got funding restored for ICE, everyone duck down while I get us out of here.  
STAY DOWN!
Well Mike can have those bullet holes filled with bondo…again…

I would be depressed about all of the NSA coverage, except my paranoia apparently was well founded.
Looking at the few revelations so far, can people understand why Occupy, LulzSec, & Anonymous scare the crap out of the powers that be?  
We had paramilitary action against citizens exercising their right to protest.  
Fun fact pepper spray is banned for use on soldiers in war because it is chemical warfare, but hosing down citizens seems to be perfectly ok.
‘Merika – home of the meek and surveilled.
Maybe those they demonize most are the ones who are done being meek.  
Maybe we should stop accepting what they tell us, as it’s clear they have no problem lying to us, and educate ourselves about them.
Not everything they do is well received, but when people fight back it gets messy.
I guess CFAA is the digital firehose being turned on protestors.

And back to the parking lot…
Ohhh look!  Everyone wave at the drones we aren’t supposed to know about.

So we’ve watched our rights get stripped away.
We’ve all paid the tax on innovation, and gotten nothing but more bad laws.
If you question those rights we all think we still have, they call you names and start digging for dirt (or farm that job out).
Is anyone scared that the guy in the Guy Fawkes mask is making sense?

Republicans are red, Democrats are blue, the really sad thing is, neither side gives a fsck about you.

Oh hey, Mike did my $25,000 ever show up?

You can use part of it to have the tour bus fixed up.

And that was part of the week that was.
I remain,
TAC

No, not that Anonymous Coward, but That Anonymous Coward is handling this week’s favorites….

Everyone on board the short bus!

I’m your tour guide, That Anonymous Coward but you can call me TAC.

So I was as surprised as you now are, when Mike asked me to write the Favorites of the Week post, but like moss I grow on you, given a chance. Everyone buckle up and lets review the short week as we ride the short bus.

If you look to your left, you can see Facebook whining because someone made their button illegal in Germany. They seem to be bothered that it is no longer the awesome tracker (read: money machine) they intended it to be. Who cares about silly laws, this is Facebook we are talking about.

Coming up on the right, just past the smoke from the fire and brimstone burning in the moat, you can just catch sight of the MPAA offices. After getting a court to decide the length of the cable matters in determining infringement, they then decided to put out some more “unique” uses of math showing losses to “piracy”. They really aren’t trying very hard any more to look remotely serious in their statements.

Now we turn the corner and zut alors! – France has decided Copyright is more important than Human Rights. I guess when you’re sleeping with a model/singer you get a little confused. Oh and if you can’t get the people to lay down to accept you screwing their rights, just sneak it in. (And let us not forget that they violate copyright when its convenient for them.)

Hold tight as we speed up to get past the villagers getting their pitchforks and torches ready to pay a visit to the capitol… and on your left we have, no wait, look away…. nothing to see here…. just making sure there are no terrorists hiding inside that nice lady’s vagina.

And now we come to the Copyright Troll Cul-de-sac, over there you can see the new house being built by lawyers representing a religious group. It seems they were upset over some former members saying unkind things online. They couldn’t get their names as they forced material down, so they filed for a copyright and boom the doors opened wide. Copyright is a great tool for bypassing those silly freedoms people expect.

Oh there is a moving van over at the USCG McMansion. They are considering shopping for a court that will blindly rubber stamp their lawsuit so they can “settle” with alleged copyright infringers. Little known fact: one of their clients is Uwe Boll, voted the worst director in history. Even Uwe saw the benefit in turning one of his “fantastic” films into box office gold by scaring people into paying on fairly questionable evidence.

And Swatch, this odd little shack seems just jammed into the neighborhood. We record our announcements so we can claim copyright if you report too much. This makes only slightly more sense than getting arrested for filming cops in public.

This little burned out quonset hut is the EMI “ranch”. It used to be nice, and there were hopes the new owners would fix the property up. Instead they have some lawyers chasing kids out of their yard.

Holy Hell!… A huge new section has been added to the Cul-de-sac, as if overnight it just sprung up before our eyes. It’s as if someone waved a magic wand and made every copyright holder’s wet dream come true. Those fires burning over there?… Oh those are just the things now made illegal by the public domain being gutted.

Because it’s my tour, I want to give a shout out to Steele Hansmeier LLC and their little stick house. So what if its on Ars… its my tour and I’m driving. Why yes your honor, we lied when we said the IP address would let us name the infringer… now let me search all the computers in the house because he refuses to settle. We’ll huff and we’ll puff and we’ll blow our own damn house down.

Oopsie the cul-de-sac’s private security force, those nice officers from ICE, are taking aim at us, and so we drive on….

Hey is that a wrecking ball heading towards the Cul-de-sac? I think that is being driven by Judge Bernard Zimmerman. He seems to be heading towards one of the smaller houses.

Look over there, ohh sweet a double rainbow… what does it mean? Yeah, I don’t understand, and neither does he.

Who here is from America, no hands… ummm I can tell some of you are pretending to be Canadian, I can understand why. When we aren’t secretly forcing other countries to do things we can’t do here, and shilling for Microsoft, we are getting the money flowing back here… for content holders…making laws up as we go along… just to support those who don’t pay their fair share… and want everyone else to pay to protect their content…. Well, I dunno what to say about that, eh?

Oh crap, pretending to be Canadian won’t cut it any more. What else can we pretend to be?

bump bump

Oops sorry folks, just a speed bump as we run over Ubisoft screwing their customers yet again and finding new ways to fail.

And that gleaming spire there on the horizon… that’s the number of “Patriot Act Warrant Requests”, I guess drugs are terrorists too…. It is ok give us unlimited powers with no oversight or responsibility… we won’t misuse it… Trust Us.

Intellectual Property is our greatest asset, it is a great slogan on that billboard over there. The shame is, they seem to only want to apply that to some people’s IP. When the people who actually make the new jobs, instead of cling to a crap business model, are against it, isn’t it worthy of some debate? If you really wanted to fix the whole problem with Imagin… I mean Intellectual Property, shouldn’t you keep people from having to find new way to do the same thing each time?

And here we are… safe and sound at home again. I hope you enjoyed the tour as much as I did giving it. Thank you Mike for the use of the bus, and letting me take your readers hosta… I mean for a ride. It shouldn’t take much to get the steering column repaired from me hot-wiring it.

I am and remain….

TAC