Censorship Quest

Posted: Thursday 21 August 2014

One zero, one zero. Just bits and bytes on the internet. Meaningless digital information that's constantly being thrown around and streamed through fast networks of cables and wires on the internet.

Traditionally, a censor is defined an "official who examines texts for the purposes of suppressing objectionable material". However, contemporary definitions of censorship is more broad not restricted to an individual.

Censorship is is the suppression of speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other such entities.

Gaming

Click, click, click. Ever heard of the dreaded web-based games where you just click all day? Candy Box and A Dark Room some of the exceptions, however "Depression Quest" is not.

The whole gist of the game is that it's like an interactive book. There's some sort of text that you have to read, and a hyperlink that you would have to click to progress through the story.

No scores, its not an "activity engaged in for diversion or amusement". Defining "Depression Quest" as a game is like defining a 10 second clip of wind gushing as music. Sure it has elements that might one day might make it potentially fun and enjoyableit a song, but overall, noise and sound is not a song.. Given the title "Depression Quest", its obvious that its hardly meant to be fun and to be played as a "game".

Traditional Media

This post will not be a sole wall of text. Here's an example of censorship at its finest.

Russell Brand provides an engaging discussion solely based upon censorship on this video. You can watch it here. But note our favourite host Sean Patrick Hannity of Fox Mews censors the speech of Yousef Munayyer (Palestine Center - Pro Palestine - Pro Israel) while freely allowing Zuhdi Jasser (American Islamic Forum for Democracy - Pro Israel - Pro Palestine) to speak.

Edit: Daniel Nascimento pointed out that I got the agenda of the guests mixed up.

To clarify, "Yousef Munayyer" of the "Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development" is for the "Palestinian people", whilst "Zuhdi Jasser" of the "American Islamic Forum for Democracy" is against Islam and tends towards the "Pro Israel" side of the debate.

I have my own agenda, but the sides are not important in this post, it's the idea that censorship is real and will inevitably influence the rest of our lives.

In hindsight, we all know that traditional media is bias. And its highly recommended that you actually watch the conversation above (either the original or Russell Brand's version), to see censorship for yourself. Now watch this, this is where the "Depression Quest" game links in with censorship.

The issues that this video explores raises the question, "What if article-based sites. Dedicated professional gaming news blogs covering 'Depression Quest'. Suddenly degraded to a point where it becomes the next 'traditional media'? Like fox news."

Feminism

I am not a feminist, but nor am I misogynist.

I prefer the idea that everyone should be treated as equals.

That way, we won't have issues such as.

RACE RIOTS

RACISM

SOCIO-ECONOMIC INEQUALITY

or people white knighting in defence of an abuser of social justice - Miss Zoë ʻGRANOSʼ Quinn.

The people supporting Zoe Quinn, aka "TheQuinnspiracy" aka "The Quinnspiracy", are mostly feminists, mostly consisting of a female population on twitter and tumblr, however also consisting of a fairly vocal male minority.

I have not a single issue about this. Free speech is key to overcoming issues of censorship and online freedom.

But the issue lies due to the following

Shitstorm

The Streisand Effect: An attempt to impose censorship leading to backfire and the reverse of what is intended happening.

This shitstorm is highlighted in TotalBiscuit's mini-post

DCMA censoring leading to EVERYONE knowing about it? Good job, Zoe! Or should I say, good BJ...

Shitstorm? I don't believe that the defecation of faeces is an appropriate term for this scenario. Maybe a Hurricane would be a more appropriate term to define this even. Since it blows you away.

This is ""feminism"".

Typical "factual" response


FOUND ONE! (strictly speaking its not a review, but its been mentioned and looked at - "to look at or examine again")

This is the rest of the nonsense.

Oh yeah. Someone on YouTube just posted this...

Edit:

The consensus is that the entire cause of this "gamergate" issue is one of sexism and misogyny, when in fact it only targets Zoe Quinn. Sexism and misogyny is untrue, as media journalism is a part of a conspiracy where they are currently facing criticism for being biased to the matter, favouring Zoe, and hence why the reputations of "gamer" news sites are currently taking a substantial hit across social media. With that said. Zoe Quinn may be a gamer, but "Depression Question" is hardly a game. IN fact, the symbolic aspect of the title "Depression" subverts the very meaning of "game". "An activity that one engages in for amusement", hence, Zoe Quinn has managed to manipulate a plethora of so-called web "journalists" who cannot see beyond it. Instead lets call "Depression Quest" an interactive web app. Because that's what it is...

The judgement to make is that this Quinnspiracy mess is a result of corruption to start off with.

No matter how you look at it, it doesn't matter that Quinn is a female and happened to be a "game developer", she still offered bribes to further her own cause.

If you are a female and reading this post, remember this, Quinn does not represent females, she is representing herself and her own interests only - if it was a male building sexual relations with female journalists for favours - just like with Quinn, then who would you support? the male? or the community that's affected? Right... The male, because you also happen to be a Social Justice Warrior (SJW) who's also interested in your own cause.

Gamergate is ONLY about Quinn's involvement in the gaming community. Remember, the livelihoods of MALE journalists are also getting screwed over. So its not a sexist thing.

Though...

Gamasutra founder:

Intel pulling ads from Gamasutra, and therefore protecting the interests of the gaming community:

An example of narcissism, and "condescending" behaviour in females

Oh. And seriously, there is a reason why there is a social disparity between females and males in the world of information technology and computing exist.

And its because there's a stigma to it. The only real way for this stigma to be overcome is for more females to enter in computing courses at a young age, instead of pursing textiles, design and hospitality classes.

Though. Make your own judgements about what's going on in this scenario, before continuing. Because it is real, though quite hilarious.

"Radical feminism is wrong, because it rejects the idea of equality."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_feminism

Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that focuses on the hypothesis of patriarchy as a system of power that organizes society into a complex of relationships based on the assertion that male supremacy[1] oppresses women. Radical feminism aims to challenge and overthrow patriarchy by opposing standard gender roles and oppression of women and calls for a radical reordering of society.[1] Early radical feminism, arising within second-wave feminism in the 1960s,[2] typically viewed patriarchy as a "transhistorical phenomenon"[3] prior to or deeper than other sources of oppression, "not only the oldest and most universal form of domination but the primary form"[4] and the model for all others.[4] Later politics derived from radical feminism ranged from cultural feminism[1] to more syncretic politics that placed issues of class, economics, etc. on a par with patriarchy as sources of oppression.[5] Radical feminists locate the root cause of women's oppression in patriarchal gender relations, as opposed to legal systems (as in liberal feminism) or class conflict (as in socialist feminism and Marxist feminism).


[1] Willis, p. 117.
[2] Willis, p. 118.
[3] Willis, p. 122.
[4] Willis, p. 123.
[5] Willis, p. 141.

Social Justice Warriors do not promote "Social Justice", but in fact promote social injustice. Radical feminism is the branch of feminism that they propagate and attempt to brainwash others with. The use of the words "oppression", and "patriarchy" are recurring ideas that so-called "Social Justice Warriors" work with, and yet, hypocritically, even if they're not being oppressed in real life and given free-speech on Tumblr, still attempt to promote Radical Feminism for their own profit.

Social Justice Warriors can only exist as long as what they say are hip and trendy, and so until as we get ideas of true equality going, then the Radical Feminists are going to be the most vocal as the loud-mouthed hypocritical "Social Justice Warriors".

Over time, Radical Feminism will die down, and more Liberal ideas of Feminism will eventually propagate. Equality is what everyone deserves, so don't try to promote inequality just to be seen as promoting equality.

Radical Feminists on Tumblr (uhm...):

http://sexselector.tumblr.com Source
So why do women hurt?
1. Patriarchy means patrilinealism, which means that males have the upperhand in picking mates. Males select for things in women that make subsequent generations more childlike instead of woman-like. This starts to become a problem for obvious reasons. We’re going on about 6,000 years of it, too.
2. Pollution by men’s industrial factories, radiation from men’s nuclear plants, EMF (coming off smart meters and those fuckign BP wind turbines that do almost nothing), poisoning with synthetic hormones like the pill and fertility drugs, GMOs and processed shit food that can’t hardly be gotten away from.
3. The psychological effect of being told by oppressors that a certain part of your body is a smelly dirty secret is that your brain will slowly stop giving that area quite so much maintenance/attention. When you feel like your menstrual muscles are atrophied, that’s because they are. :( Thought is powerful.
So there are the reasons that natural body processes of women hurt. Pain should never be considered a part of life. Being in pain is not a good evolutionary strategy. Of course, this will be a reason for evo psyche to say that women’s pain indicates that she needs male help at that time of month. Ah-ah-ah, now! Men’s choices in the patriarchy *created* women’s pain.

Radical Feminists on Reddit:

Radical Feminists on Twitter:

@radicalbytes @AllidoisGwynn

Advanced Query Syntax (AQS) is not powerful enough!

Posted: Tuesday 19 August 2014

Windows 7 came with a nifty feature called AQS which allowed users to search files and folders based upon rules and expressions.
This functionality was extended to Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, where the syntax and concept have remained intact.
Compared to regular expressions, AQS have yet to realise its "Advanced" claim, and should really fashion itself as the "Basic Query Syntax (BQS)".
Consider this scenario. I have a list of archives that I want to search through on my computer. These archives have a specific naming structure, 01-01-01 Archive.rar, 02-01-01 Archive.rar, 03-01-01 Archive.rar... Basically following the pattern of "DD-MM-YY Name.rar"
With "AQS", you're allowed to use the AND and OR operators, where to achieve searching the said files, you could hypothetically do something like: (0 or 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 or 9) and (0 or 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 or 9) * type:.rar

Well.. This worked in Windows 7. But, since Windows 8.1 is the trend now, I updated my computer and found out that it no longer worked.

The question to be asked. Is why is it so complicated to search numbers in the first place?
  • (0-9) and (0-9) * type:.rar
  • [0-9] and [0-9] * type:.rar
  • title:(0-9) and (0-9) * type:.rar
  • title:[0-9] and [0-9] * type:.rar
  • (0-9)(0-9) * type:.rar
  • [0-9][0-9] * type:.rar
  • (0-100) * type:.rar
  • [0-100] * type:.rar
  • title:(0-100) * type:.rar
  • title:[0-100] * type:.rar
All do not work...

With regular expressions, the following works fine:

However, the same regular expression fails completely in Windows 8.1...

The best solution that I could come up to solve my problem was to use the following AQS query: ("00" OR "01" OR "02" OR "03" OR "04" OR "05" OR "06" OR "07" OR "08" OR "09" OR "10" OR "11" OR "12" OR "13" OR "14" OR "15" OR "16" OR "17" OR "18" OR "19" OR "20" OR "21" OR "22" OR "23" OR "24" OR "25" OR "26" OR "27" OR "28" OR "29" OR "30" OR "31")

Though, I guess when it comes down to it, this is just proof that the "Advanced Query Syntax" format is simply not powerful enough.

New site design

Posted: Sunday 17 August 2014

Scroll down to the comments section to comment!
The web will continue to innovate and inspire new technology to impact on how we view the web and the world.

Familiarity

The current site template is focused on consistency and functionality, with interactive user interface elements given a clear distinction amongst other interfaces. A highlight of this new design consistency focuses on links. The idea of having links look like buttons, because the idea of hypertext being just a "link" is over. Buttons provide the gateway to more interactivity and content, and so why can't links convey the same meaning?

New web standards

HTML5 isn't new. It's been out there for a few years now. However, each second of time passed will see more new features added to HTML5, which makes it unique. This site design seeks to establish the new HTML5 tags with meaning and intent, with the <header>,<section> and <footer> tags reiterating meaning with site structure, and this is visually emphasised with CSS3.
SVG graphics are also featured in this new design. With most of the visual icons in an embedded SVG format. Vector graphics are at the hallmark of 2013-2014 web development, yet, major sites still rely on .jpg, .png and .gif for delivering graphical content. No more blocky graphics here! SVG aliases lines so they look good at any resolution!
Oh, and as of the time of this post, the site is also valid HTML5, but it might not be true from time-to-time (due to updates, e.t.c..) and isn't worthy of mentioning on the site itself.

Content-rich

Being a site that focuses on feature-rich content, the new site design is focused on making content as readable and interactive as possible. Scrolling triggers a mini parallax effect that is both used to indicate the position on the page, but also to increase the level of interactivity that this site has to offer.

One-size fits all, responsiveness

We should have to push you off to mobile-optimized versions of websites when mobile devices can only do so much in 2014. Whether it be a HDTV, 4K TV or a 300DPI "smartphone", the website will scale appropriately and still be readable... This coupled with the SVG graphics detailed above, leads to a crisp and clear browsing experience.
So, what do you think? Is it a little bit too over-the-top? Or is your experience stuttered by lag?
Comment here!

Checking for users who don't followback on Twitter

Since I no-longer "digest" my news from twitter,

I maintain my twitter account solely for people interested in "subprojects" that I embark on, and to stop others from grabbing at "extramaster".

I am aware of those that don't really care about my tweets and about the fact that a substantial portion of twitter users are bots.
And so, to keep my twitter followers as close to 1:1 as possible, I created a little online tool which identifies users who are not following you, hence not "followbacking".

Instructions:

In order to check for Twitter users that don't follow you back/aren't following you, then you can follow the steps below.

  • Step 1: Visit the landing page - http://www.extramaster.net/tools/twitterFollows/
  • Step 2: Click on the "Login to Twitter" button.
  • Step 2.5: Authorize the application with Twitter, or if you already have, let it login automatically.
  • Step 3: Look through the accounts that aren't following you (that you follow), and have fun!
Please keep note that if you want to build a semi-meaningful relationship with me, feel free to have a chat with me on Google+! Twitter feels too much like a race, and it's doomed to fail anyways.

Simple Base64 to PNG Converter

Posted: Tuesday 5 August 2014

Of course, if you want to convert a Base64 data to pretty much any type of file, you can just use the online tool at http://www.extramaster.net/tools/fromBase64/.

But on the off-chance that you are naturally suspicious of anything that anyone makes, here's a simple Base64 to PNG Windows application that can convert from Base64 to PNG offline and without internet.

So, without further adieu,

Download:
http://static.extramaster.net/Base64 to PNG.exe

MD5: 991EFE1DD11EE004A218EDCDD0B523DC
SHA-256: E3E49B60989DDDEA2649DC7880E583475E931CB0F40A06A7EEFBC7085B92756C

VirusTotal Scan:
https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/e3e49b60989dddea2649dc7880e583475e931cb0f40a06a7eefbc7085b92756c/analysis/1407166729//

Source-code?

I'm straying away from the open-source community for a while. But if you really, really need the code, then the basic one-liner is available here: http://blog.extramaster.net/2014/08/value-of-type-1-dimensional-array-of.html

With VB.net, typically trivial errors are easy to overlook, which complicates the process of software development.

As the title of this post suggests, "Value of type '1-dimensional array of Byte' cannot be converted to 'Byte'." can be caused when you're attempting to use a function that returns a quote unquote "Byte"

This error is quite irritating because, when searched on StackOverflow, it has already been answered!

VB Value of type String cannot be converted to 1 dimensional array of Byte

With decoding base64 to bytes in VB.net, you can use the following function:

Convert.FromBase64String(_string_input_)

... where the error becomes evident

The solution to the "Value of type '1-dimensional array of Byte' cannot be converted to 'Byte'." error is quite simple.
Just remember to dim the variable of where you are trying to push the resulting bytes to as a byte array type, aka
Dim variable As Byte()
This works as when you're defining the Byte type, you're only really defining a single byte, not an array of bytes. Think of it as defining a string as a character, where the array of bytes (
As Byte()
) is the equivalent to an array of characters (hence, being represented else-wise as a string)