Archive for » November, 2009 «

Small Acts Of Civil Disobediance Anyone Can Do

Many people hear civil disobedience and immediately gasp and think anarchy. Civil disobedience is far from it. Anarchy is men governing themselves, while civil disobedience is merely refusal of civil laws in order to change governmental policy.

The easiest form of civil disobedience is to enact a right that is normally infringed upon. Many today don’t know it but their rights are infringed upon constantly. The biggest right of all is usually your right to privacy.

Your right to privacy means you have the right not to disclose certain information. If I came up to you and asked you where you were going, who were you seeing, why are you going there would you be obligated to tell me? Of course not, you have the right to privacy which can’t be taken away. Does that right change if I put on a uniform and badge? No, you still have the right to privacy and still can refuse to answer those questions.

There is no reason for answering questions like the ones in the above paragraph, those questions are probing questions, there to only try and see if your hiding something. Most of the time the officer will be cordial and nice and make it sound like he is making conversation, don’t be fooled, they have a job to do and it isn’t to be your friend.

By refusing to answer those questions your enacting your right to privacy and showing the officer that there are boundaries set and you know them.

The way to do this is to always be polite. Never be condescending, politely refuse to answer his question. When, and they always do, ask why don’t you want to answer, politely refuse that question as well and explain you believe in your right to privacy and this encounter doesn’t require me to give you that information.

With civil disobedience comes risk. Police hate when someone knows their rights and enacts them, it takes there power away from them and the only way they know how to get it back is through intimidation. You may be asked to get out of your car and asked to be searched, REFUSE. The supreme courts have ruled that officers can do pat-downs to search for weapons but not physically enter your pockets unless given consent. If the officer asks to search you, ask do you mean a pat-down or search? If it is a search refuse, if its a pat-down you have no choice, just be sure to try and document if he goes through your pockets without consent. They may want to search your car, again refuse, let them get the drug sniffing dog. If it goes this far you must start doing your own investigation, the officer is under policy to tell you what there searching for and what there probable cause is. Collect evidence against the officers and be sure to file a complaint or talk to a lawyer.

This act of civil disobedience is probably one of the easiest forms to practice. Most of the time it doesn’t go to the extreme as I described above, as long as your consistent and polite and not condescending. Always have it in the back of your mind that they’re here to serve us not the other way around.

This is the home of the free and land of the brave, always act brave and always achieve freedom.

Thanks for Everything

A lot of people say that file-sharing is just about getting stuff without paying for it. That’s one way of looking at it, but there’s a lot more to it than that. You could say that libraries are about letting people read books for free, but that would be missing the point. The point of file-sharing is that it gives everyone a chance to access more content than anyone could have dreamed of in the past.

If file-sharing didn’t exist, I probably wouldn’t have gotten interested in computers. Logging onto a BBS and downloading games, even if the games turned out to not actually be any good, was a lot more fun and interactive than going to a store and buying something. And I probably wouldn’t have gotten into programming if I hadn’t downloaded a cracked version of VB 3. I’m not sure if I could have gotten through the month I spent recovering from jaw surgery if I didn’t have downloaded Dreamcast games to play. And my cousin might not have learned to play bass and joined a band if I hadn’t burned 50 CDs of downloaded music for him when he was just starting to get interested in music. I’ve seen more films, listened to more music, played more games, read more books, and learned more things than I ever could have without file-sharing.

So thanks to all the sysops, the phreakers, the scene pioneers, the crackers, the hackers, the FTP hosters, the rippers, the p2p innovators, the trackers, the mods, the seeders, and the leechers. Thanks to everyone who has worked to share content without asking for anything in return. And thanks to TPS and anyone else who keeps file-sharing alive welcomes new people into the community.

My Thanks and A Penny for the Old Guy

I haven’t been a part of the private tracker scene or a member of TPS for very long. But the experiences I’ve had in that short amount of time have inspired me, so I would like to share them with you.

Admittedly, I had certain preconceptions about online forums when I started at TPS. To me, forums were just places where people came to get stuff they needed. And along the way you may be flamed or just flat-out ignored but that was the price you paid to get help. I knew about TPS’s the claims of “community,” but I was skeptical.

It didn’t take long for me to seriously reevaluate that skepticism. In one of my first posts at TPS, I was struggling to post a youtube video and at the same time thinking, “here goes another half hour of my life.” Much to my surprise, within minutes of my original post, another TPS member had identified my problem and posted an example of how to get the video to work.

A couple weeks later I had a similar experience. I dropped my name into the recruitment threads of two trackers I was interested in joining. I was skeptical of my chances due to my lack of seniority, but I thought I’d give it a try anyway. Again, much to my surprise, two invites showed up in my mailbox a few days later.

Today, I can’t say enough good things about the TPS community. I am thankful for all it has given me, and I hope it is thankful for my contributions as well.

I’d like to take these last few words to thank Beagle for all the great work he’s done for TPS. I see all of his handiwork throughout the site, and I know that this great community would not be possible without it. Thanks Beagle and the best of luck for the future.

Thanks

I would like to give thanks to an awesome music tracker for just having a great interview system. I had the pleasure of being with similar tracker before its fading into memory only. I was reading about other trackers, I read a post about this particular music tracker. I “googled” the name and read up on the site. Hearing and seeing how the tracker was set up, I started to relive the memories of past times.

I was selected for an interview. The first sets of Q’s were basic, similar to here. Then came the next wave of Q’s at which point I realized I was swimming in the deep end of the audio encoding pool and had no life vest. I failed…. Down but not out, I was given a second chance. This right here made me respect the site even more. I felt that they didn’t come off as elitist, there wasn’t a “one chance” you are out. I was given links to read up on and try again.

After a successful passing of my second interview, I had a new found passion to contribute that I didn’t have before. More than a 1:1 ratio feeling, this was an “I can do this too” and share what I have on CD’s as well, to those within the community. I can cultivate a genre using the knowledge I have gained. Having this type of feeling is worth more to me than anything! Thank you for everything!

What I’m most thankful for…

The one torrent related thing I am most thankful for would have to be TPS. I have only been on the torrent “scene” for about a month and what an arduous month it has been. I started out with the most obvious, TPB and eventually found my way over to kickasstorrents, which I really liked. Mind you this was all before I had any idea about private trackers and the like. I would always see people raving about demonoid, so I began my search of communities to join there. Alas, I was too late.

Well as I was googling around looking for private communities to join I started to pick up more and more of the terminology. Things like seedboxes and all that. How to set up home servers, what clients to use. Pretty much anything torrent I was trying to absorb. Seedboxes… That was the keyword right there. I had no idea what it meant, so I googled it and in some round about way it took me to savvyseed. Which then led me to TPS. And the rest is history.  Hell, I didn’t even know what IRC was until I had to get a program for it just to do the interview. 

But seriously, I am thankful for Mike (my interviewer) allowing me the opportunity to join this community. I have only been here a few days, but it just seems like such a tight knit group. I feel like I can ask anything here and not have to worry about somebody calling me a fucktard for not knowing too much about torrent stuff. There is a wealth of knowledge here that I just can’t seem to peel my eyes away from. My brain is going into overload!! I have probably spent at least 5-6 hours a night the last 3 nights just browsing TPS and it’s great.

So, thanks again to Mike, TPS in general and the whole TPS community for who you are and what you do. It’s great to be here.

Sharing is caring

Personally, i had three exeptional moments in content related side of my torrenting life last month

the third place goes to spanish guys at dvdquorum who really seed old & rare movies til they bleed at their often very very slow connections, still giving to others opportunity to get those hidden gems…

2nd place goes to karagarga community – i asked for a reseed of an old movie that was released on tracker about a year ago, snatched two times and was seedless for 11 months…. request was fulfilled! great job 

and the first place goes to the unnamed tracker and their release team who managed to give birth to a huge 60+ gb 690 rls pack of my favourite band. unbelievable job, thanks so much.

And last, but not least, the story of me joining BtS, the last content tracker that i aimed for… there’s a BtS rep here and guy had a recruitement, but he left his activities for some reason… in comments to BtS review i recognised avatar of a guy that i know from what.cd’s tm forum.. so when i saw him at what.cd’s irc, i asked if he could spoke to BtS rep and ask him to return to TPS so i could ask the guy for an invite.. he said that it it wasn’t an option and instead talked to another BtS mod so they could send me an invite… he returned back to me at irc with invite code, but, and this happend to me the first time, invite letter got lost at gmail. and joining BtS without the initial letter is almost impossible as they have quite strict security policies… I almost asked to resend me invite but another guy from another irc chan helped me with setting up my new account with all the information required for this procedure. It was the most difficult experience of such kind in my life and thanks to all three guys who helped me, we see now a lot of users who are devoted to one bt community and when it goes down, they’re hopeless, but the thing is that bt is a whole world and it feels great to be a part of it 

Giving Thanks to PTM

Before I joined TPS, PreToMe’s help IRC was chatting channel I was standing the most. If I was having a problem, I was directly joining the their help channel to ask for help.
One day I realized that, there is a Channels category at IRC, but I could not open them, so I joined help channel again and asked why can’t I open it. They said you need to write “type /msg nickserv register <password> <email> …” to be able join it. I asked; where should I write it (I did not know the properties of Java) they told me to write there, I said that I can’t find a place to write it etc. and after 30 mins, I realized that I should write it where I speak with them.
Then instead of writing “type /msg nickserv register <password> <email> ” , I wrote like “type /msg ****** (my nick at the tracker) register <password> <email> ” , so it couldn’t work, everybody got crazy and then another staff entered to help and tried to explain how should I do it, this part also took about 30-40 mins and when I was thinking that it was over, but it wasn’t… 
After those, I asked how can I join now, he told me that I should download mIRC (or whatever) for that. I said; is joining those channels worth that? They couldn’t know what to say (I understand what a pity it was now). So I downloaded mIRC etc., but now I wasn’t able to use it (I did the loading part but not the rest ), they tried everything, but I couldn’t so finally they sent me a link, showing how to install it with pictures and asked me to leave IRC as doing it, it took about 1 hour or so. But i still haven’t done it, so i joined the IRC again, and at that moment I realized how happy everyone to see me again (of course a irony) , so he said that’s all I can do, you’ll be fine, and I said that I know it’s my fault that I can’t do it, so never-mind, I don’t want to join channels anymore. I thanked all the staff and apologized for the pain, but no thank is enough for it.

So I want to thank them all again, I am really sorry for it. And thanks to everyone reading this.

Giving Thanks!

Okay all, let me start by saying that I am brand spanking new here. After interviewing with ravakk last night, I promised that I would participate and “not be a wallflower”. So, since I have many torrenting experiences to be thankful for, here goes my first real post…

I want to start by thanking Demonoid. Yes, I know… lots of “leet” types turn up their noses at Demonoid, but I truly love that tracker. It’s huge, easy to seed, has tons of torrents, and a really amazing community (if you bother to get involved in the forums). Anyway, before Demonoid had their current problems (and I hope they get them sorted out soon), I was sharing a lot of music (particularly jamband stuff… GD, WSP, Moe, ABB, etc) and there seemed to be a core group of us that were posting similar kinds of things and thanking each other, etc. I got to know several of these posters quite well and we still hang together on forums on some other trackers (at least til Demonoid is back up). So there is my first thanks… thanks to Demonoid for letting me make some amazing friends (we’ve been PM’ing for well over a year now!)

Another thanks to Demonoid for their invite forum. It’s the first place that I learned about other trackers, and proper etiquette, and proper invite technique. I lurked and read on their invite forum until I got the knack of things. Thanks to that forum, I learned how to study for, and take the IRC test for What.CD. I am now an Elite member on What (looking toward TM) and I owe it to my humble start on Demonoid. I also remembered my buds from the last paragraph and they are with me on What as well. Demonoid was also the place I got the opportunity to join RevTT… an outstanding tracker with incredible speed. Hmmm…. did I mention that some people turn up their noses at Demonoid? I don’t think so! Thanks again Demonoid for preparing me for the world of private trackers.

Then I’ll give another thankful shout out to What.CD. This is easily my very favorite tracker. The community there is second to none. I was welcomed with open arms and became a forum fanatic. I have met more great friends there than I can name. And I can’t even count the nights that could have been very lonely, and instead were filled with camaraderie and fun, all thanks to What! I cannot speak highly enough of this tracker. And like all things in the tracker world, What has opened doors for me to a load of other trackers, but more importantly, to the communities behind the trackers. Thanks What!

My last thankful bit goes out to FSF. I was spending a little spare time there recently, reading up on all things torrent, when I happened to notice them discussing a forum called TPS. After being intrigued by what I read, I decided to log into my IRC client and have a chat with ravakk… so here I am! Thanks FSF.

My TPS Thanksgiving

Since Thanskgiving time is the right time to give all the thanks for something so great I wanted to come in here and put my Thank You in. I would like to give my thanks to TPS for everything. I have been a loner in many things but have never felt at home until I found TPS. TPS is the only site I visit multiple times every day.

TPS has opened my eyes into the world of private trackers and the importance of being part of a larger community. It’s not about myself, it’s about the community and TPS is one of the strongest tightest communities I have ever been a part of. This site has some of the most dedicated loyal staff I have ever seen and they give up their time to be here with us. Thank you very much.

Thank you TPS for all the dedication in finding quality staff, making an excellent IRC room, an awesome forum site, and for the open mindedness the community has. I truly feel free here to express my opinion and that is the greatest feeling of all. This site really feels like family and it is something I am grateful for. I love TPS for everything and really appreciate the site for its unique form. TPS has the best posts I have ever seen on any forum site, they are the most informative, in-depth, and open minded postings you can find and they are just not filled with preservatives, the posts actually have a quality filling like home made stuffing.

Happy upcoming Thanksgiving – Thank you TPS.

Kings of Infinite Space

“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”
–Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” (Act II, Scene II)

In my short time as a member of the Pirate Society, I’ve done many things. Mostly I’ve asked other people for help, but I have also helped those where I could, and have made many friends whilst doing so. I have painted in my simple fashion pictures to make people smile. As of late I won a contest due to my skill, and have become a Captain, and though I have my own custom title to call my own, most people just call me Orange. Just like that too, name in color. Without even trying too hard, and just by being friendly and talkative, I am known by a pretty hefty portion of TPS by name and by color. Even when I was audacious enough to ask these good folks if I was even counted as a real captain, I was taken with raucious laughter and good humor, and completely reassured that I do indeed count.

Perhaps I’ve exaggerated in some points, of course. I’m not known by quite so many people as I’d like to believe, and maybe I’m liked by fewer than I imagine. But to me it makes no difference, because I know that I am known and liked by enough people, and am friends with some of the best in my book. I’ve been cheered on here in all my efforts, no matter how meager they may’ve been– my one and only tracker review, my decent photoshop skills, or my novel in progress. I’ve risen to the rank of captain in no time at all, and I am proud of that fact. It lifts my spirits to know, or at least presume to know that I am doing well here, and it keeps me happy to know that somewhere, somebody in IRC is laughing because of my bad jokes and awful puns.

Because while I raise in status here, and slide up the user class ladder at various trackers, I’m still just sitting here in real life with no air conditioning, a car that is quickly wearing down, and still no job. Eventually all of these things will be fixed and become better than they are, and I’ll be happy about that too. But I’m a Captain on the Internet– a King of Infinite Space– and that will more than do for now.