Interesting Links for 23-03-2013

[andrewducker]

• David Cameron: I will oppose 'aggressive secularisation' of British society
  (tags: religion davidcameron uk )
• Cardinal O'Brien was in long-term physical relationship with one of his accusers
  (tags: religion catholicism lgbt )
• 97% of UK GPs have prescribed placebos.
  (tags: uk placebo )
• How a Leicester blogger exposed Syrian arms trafficking from

Comments

[bart_calendar]

Completely unrelated but I know you have a lot of UK readers.

Kick Ass Torrents and several other sites were blocked by court order in the UK yesterday.

But, friendly hackers have already gotten around it.

One way is through come.in - this is not as fast as you may be used to for Kick Ass Torrents because it's doing a reverse proxy on your location making KAT think you are in India so you get routed to a server far from you, which slows things down. It's not a huge speed difference, however, and is unlikely to get shut down/blocked.

If you need to normal speed of KAT then you can go to katproxy.com. This is faster than using come.in, but the downside is that it will probably be blocked as soon as morons at the Ministry Of Truth find it.

[andrewducker]

oooh, cheers for the KatProxy link. I saw come.in earlier on your FB, but it's been suffering a lot, and it doesn't redirect on associated links - so the CSS doesn't appear, because that comes from kastatic.com, which is also blocked.

KatProxy.com does a much better job of it, so hopefully it'll be a while before it gets blocked.

Oh - and for generally accessing sites that are locally blocked, Tor does a great job. Also slow, because it bounces your packets all over the internet, but can reach almost anywhere:
https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en

[bart_calendar]

Just with my general experimentation come.in seems to work if you just want to download but has problems if you try to do anything more advanced while katproxy does everything just like the old KAT.

That said, I can easily imagine come.in suffering a bit from a shit ton of traffic once word gets out.

[kiffkin]

Something I'd like to add about Brown Moses that isn't talked about in the Guardian piece is that he's also been doing a lot of work pulling together info on the newspaper phone hacking scandal/Leveson Inquiry. There's some stuff on his blog (http://brown-moses.blogspot.co.uk/) and his Something Awful hackgate thread is currently in its fifth incarnation, having been going strong since last July (link to current thread here which contains links to previous threads, may require forums account to read - I don't know if that forum is behind the paywall or not just now).

[andrewducker]

Thanks for that!

[cahwyguy]

Regarding Apple's Two-Factor authentication: What I haven't seen anywhere is what iTunes versions it works with. I'm still using an iPod Classic, and I've read lots of negative press about the iTunes 11 versions. I'm still on 10 (10.4.1 to be exact), and I still haven't seen anywhere whether iTunes 10 can work with two-factor authentication. Does anyone know?

[houseboatonstyx]

97% of UK GPs have prescribed placebos.

Maybe the NHS should stop paying for these placebos, too.

[andrewducker]

I'd say so!

[houseboatonstyx]

I was being sarcastic! Placebos are worthwhile; they trigger the body's own healing.

[andrewducker]

I'm fine with anything that doesn't involve a doctor lying to their patient.

(And yes, lying by ommission is still lying.)

[apostle_of_eris]

David Cameron: I will oppose 'aggressive secularisation' of British society
If I recall the conclusions of polls of religiosity in England, isn't it a bit late for that?

[andrewducker]

It is very-much too late for that. Church Attendance is now down to around 6%, and those people are in their mid 50s. Twenty years from now religion in the UK will be, effectively, gone.