Category: Brian Layman

I’m making this a different post from Web censorship in Saudi Arabia because it more has to deal with differences in the Qur’an and the Bible than SA’s take on censorship.

Usefulness of Filtering:

God Almighty directed humanity in the Nobel Qur’an in the words of His prophet Joseph: “He said: My Lord, prison is more beloved to me than that to which they entice me, and were you not to divert their plot away from me I will be drawn towards them and be of the ignorant. So his Lord answered him and diverted their plot away from him, truly, He is the All-Hearer, the All-Knower” Yusuf(12):33-34

This reasoning Seems to be the basic “If your eye offends you, pluck it out” logic extended to include “If your neighbor’s eye might offend him, pluck it out.” That may sound harsh, but there is a certain logic to it. If it is certainly better for you yourself to get to heaven with 1 eye than with none at all, wouldn’t the choice be the same for a loved neighbor? It takes a first party statement and moves it to third party. The side effect however is that with this specific verse as the example, it specifically has the state of Saudi Arabia taking on the place Allah in its people’s lives. In the Bible, though Christians are told to give unto Czar what is Czar’s, the government taking on the role of God is not supported. In fact the protestent and anabaptists movements were both started in part because the Church was taking on the role of God.

Though Saudi Arabia’s internet service also provides secular reasoning based upon scientific research done in the United States, their actions are based, religiously, upon two verses of the 12th chapter of the Qur’an. That Chapter/Book is called Yusuf.

Yusuf largely parallels the story of Joseph from Genesis 37 & 39 with, from my perspective, a few twists, details, motivations and editorials added in. Christian and agnostics alike will probably recognize the story as that of “Joseph and the coat of many colors” (or the Joseph and Technicolor dream coat if you only know of the Bible through Broadway Musicals).
Continue reading The Islamic Muslim rational for web censorship

An exausting but good day…Yeesh… just got a chance to breath. was supposed to make some phone calls when I got home tonight but after getting the kids in bed it was too late.

I just checked the logs at on my wife’s site Knitchat.com and she’s had another incredible day. four days ago, she shot up from an average of 850 unique hits (using the most generous of three unique hit log analyzers) to 5995. The past couple days she’s been up at 1300. So, whatever happenned, it seems to have stuck.

A large number of the hits are from Saudi Arabia. That, to me, at first screamed “anonimizer proxy”. There are many services that will give you fake IPs from all around the world, but I can find no trace, so far, that these are not legit people. I guess I need to get the actually times and IPs of the visitors and see if they are at regular intervals or something, but without digging straight into the logs, this all looks legit.

Anyway, I went over to the website that the various SA addresses resoved to and it was this www.ISU.NET.SA the main internet service provider for Saudi Arabia.

I thought I would share some of their views on the internet with you:
http://www.isu.net.sa/saudi-internet/contenet-filtring/filtring.htm

Introduction to Content Filtering
What is this service?:

The Internet Services Unit oversees and implements the filtration of web pages in order to block those pages of an offensive or harmful nature to the society, and which violate the tenants of the Islamic religion or societal norms. This service is offered in fulfillment of the directions of the government of Saudi Arabia and under the direction of the Permanent Security Committee chaired by the Ministry of the Interior.

Types of Materials Blocked:

The types of materials which the ISU is directed to block are few, most noteworthy among them are pornographic web pages which consist of 95% of all blocked web pages. As for the other categories, they consist mainly of pages related to drugs, bombs, alcohol, gambling and pages insulting the Islamic religion or the Saudi laws and regulations.

How are they filtered?:

KACST maintains a central log and specialized proxy equipment, which processes all page requests from within the country and compares them to a black list of banned sites. If the requested page is included in the black list then it is dropped, otherwise it is executed, then the request is archived. These black lists are purchased from commercial companies and renewed on a continuous basis throughout the year. This commercial list is then enhanced with various sites added locally by trained staff.

Performance:
The difference between filtered and unfiltered web page retrieval reaches on average no more than half a second, which is too miniscule a timeframe for most humans to perceive.

Usefulness of Filtering:

God Almighty directed humanity in the Nobel Qur’an in the words of His prophet Joseph: “He said: My Lord, prison is more beloved to me than that to which they entice me, and were you not to divert their plot away from me I will be drawn towards them and be of the ignorant. So his Lord answered him and diverted their plot away from him, truly, He is the All-Hearer, the All-Knower” Yusuf(12):33-34

Confirmation from modern scientific studies:

In a study by Cass Sunstein in the Duke Law Journal it was found that countries which impose strict laws relating to prevention of pornography enjoy a reduction in the rate of rape and murder and vice versa. Similarly, in a study conducted by the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography and another conducted by the University of New Hampshire it was found that those states trafficking most heavily in pornography saw a similar increase in the rate of rape. Specifically, Alaska and Nevada were the two states with the highest rates of pornographic materials (five times that of other states), accompanied by a similar increase in rape activity (eight times that of other states).

Interesting…
You may now discuss the aspects ethics of National Internet Censorship…

Early this morning, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the
morning, the time and date was 01:02:03 04/05/06.

That’s coming up again this afternoon. For my readers in Europe, you’ve got a month and a day yet! Get ready!

If you miss this one, you’ll have ruined your whole century for 02:03:04 05/06/07 and 03:04:05 06/07/08 just won’t feel the same will they???

Man, had I thought of this earlier I’d have created a website for pictures of people’s clocks and conspiracy stories people have heard. Like:

“A bug in Microsoft Windows XP will cause the year to start incrementing the year instead of the second afte the date time reaches 01:02:03 04/05/06.”

And it’s my very first infamous Krishna spam too!

—–Original Message—–
From: Neateye [mailto:nitaigouranga@aol.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2006 4:18 PM
To: Brian
Subject: Gouranga

Call out Gouranga be happy
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga!
That which brings the highest happiness…

See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gouranga#Email_and_ICQ_spam

Every body sing, all together now:

Slow down Krishna, slow down! Your email spam goes way to fast!
Slow down Krishna, slow down! Or your pop3 account will never last!

Taken from The Bobs – “Slow Down Krishna”. Well it went something like that… For the curious, that song was written by Gunner “Bob” Madsen (or was it Richard “Bob”?) who lived down the street from a Krishna – umm… complex? Monastary? Commune? Encampment? – uh let’s try community – he lived down the street from a Krishna community and one of the teenage kids there bought a BRAND NEW TransAm and would rumble up and down the street behind his fellow Krishnas as they left for their daily doings. He began to think about what the community leaders had to say about it. So the song is not meant to be insulting at all and shouldn’t be taken as such. 🙂

I’ve blogged about this before but now I have a good screen shot.

A secret Russian government plan was discovered by Brian Layman in late February, 2006. It is beleived that this giant structure is intended to patch the hole in the O-Zone. But only if America surrenders to the Russian government all of the former members of the group known as Munudo.

See here for Googliscious details.
Or look at the wide angle shot.

I found this to be a very interesting article. It turns out that my stressing myself about not ever getting 8 hours of sleep is probably doing more harm, than just staying up and doing what I want, does….

Original Article: Sleep Deprivation: The Great American Myth

Robin Lloyd
Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.com
Thu Mar 23, 12:00 PM ET

People who get only 6 to 7 hours a night have a lower death rate than those who get 8 hours of sleep. —From a six-year study of more than a million adults

Many Americans are sleep-deprived zombies, and a quarter of us now use some form of sleeping pill or aid at night.

Wake up, says psychiatry professor Daniel Kripke of the University of California, San Diego. The pill-taking is real but the refrain that Americans are sleep deprived originates largely from people funded by the drug industry or with financial interests in sleep research clinics.

“They think that scaring people about sleep increases their income,” Kripke told LiveScience.

Thanks to the marketing of less addictive drugs directly to consumers, sleeping pills have become a hot commodity, especially in the past five years. People worldwide spent $2 billion on the most popular sleeping pill, Ambien (zolpidem), in 2004, according to the BioMarket, a biotech research company.

Earlier this month, it was reported that some Ambien users are susceptible to amnesia and walking in their sleep. Some even ate in the middle of the night without realizing it.

Global sales for all sleeping pills, called hypnotics, will top $5 billion in the next several years.

The number of adults aged 20-44 using sleeping pills doubled from 2000 to 2004, according to Medco Health Solutions, a managed care company. Sleep problems are commonly reported in the elderly, but the increase in spending on sleeping pills was highest in this period for 10-19 year olds, possibly due to an association with medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Sleep on this

Still, more sleep is no guarantee for overall health, and more sleeping pills might not bring on either.

A six-year study Kripke headed up of more than a million adults ages 30 to 102 showed that people who get only 6 to 7 hours a night have a lower death rate than those who get 8 hours of sleep. The risk from taking sleeping pills 30 times or more a month was not much less than the risk of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, he says.

Those who took sleeping pills nightly had a greater risk of death than those who took them occasionally, but the latter risk was still 10 to 15 percent higher than it was among people who never took sleeping pills. Sleeping pills appear unsafe in any amount, Kripke writes in his online book, “The Dark Side of Sleeping Pills.”

“There is really no evidence that the average 8-hour sleeper functions better than the average 6- or 7-hour sleeper,” Kripke says, on the basis of his ongoing psychiatric practice with patients along with research, including the large study of a million adults (called the Cancer Prevention Study II).

And he suspects that people who sleep less than average make more money and are more successful.

The Cancer Prevention Study II even showed that people with serious insomnia or who only get 3.5 hours of sleep per night, live longer than people who get more than 7.5 hours.

And there are questions about the effectiveness of sleeping pills. A study by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School found that a change in sleep habits and attitudes was more effective in treating chronic insomnia, over the short- and long-term, than sleeping pills (specifically Ambien).

Night of the living dead

Until 15 years ago, sleeping pills were mainly addictive barbiturates (such as Seconal, Halcion, Qualude) and sedatives called benzodiazepines (Valium and Dalmane). For this reason, they were less popular and less prescribed. That changed in the early 1990s when Ambien, which is less addictive, came on the market. It acts on the same neural receptors as a benzodiazepine, but is safer. It is the only hypnotic drug Kripke recommends and then, only for fewer than four weeks. Other new hypnotic drugs are safe but ineffective, he says.

Most sleeping pills are recommended for short-term use, but lots of people take them frequently and become dependent upon them to fall asleep. Most sleeping pills, especially when taken over long periods of time, stay in the bloodstream, giving a hangover the next day and beyond, impairing memory and performance on the job and at home.

A time-release version of Ambien (Ambien CR) bound for the market and designed to prevent waking after 4 hours when the drug normally would wear off, along with one of the newest pills on the market, Lunesta, or eszopiclone, (designed for longer-term use) might be even more harmful in this way, Kripke says.

Hypnotic drugs have dangerous side effects, Kripke says. For one, they reduce fear of risky behavior, such as driving fast. Ironically, that could result in the inability to see that the sleeping pills are doing more harm than good over time.

A recent study published in the British Medical Journal showed that the risks of taking sleeping pills (benzodiazepines and other sedatives, in this case) outweighed the benefits among people over 60 in a series of studies carried out between 1966 and 2003. The pills helped people fall asleep and they slept more, but they were twice as likely to slip and fall or crash a car due to dizziness from the pills than they were to get a better night’s sleep.

Even the safest hypnotic drugs have strange side effects, as the alleged Ambien sleepwalkers showed.

And one over-the-counter approach, the hormone melatonin, was found by scientists at the University of Alberta, Canada, to be ineffective in treating jet lag and sleep trouble associated with medical problems. Studies also show it is associated with skin blanching in frogs, gonadal atrophy in small animals, and obesity in some mammals.

Are you sleeping?

The real number of Americans with sleep problems is unclear because the same figure—70 million—appears on National Institutes of Health documents from 2006 and from 1994. This catch-all category reportedly includes insomnia, jetlag, sleepwalking, bed wetting, night terrors, restless legs syndrome, narcolepsy and disordered breathing during sleep (called apnea).

The National Sleep Foundation, the source of many sleep surveys and statistics, has financial and institutional ties to sleeping pill manufacturers, according to the Sacramento Bee newspaper.

Sleep problems could be increasing, Kripke says, but there is no evidence for this. If they are increasing, it could be a result of less exposure to daylight (due to cable TV, the Internet, indoor gyms) and increasing obesity, which causes apnea. But he still recommends against taking sleeping pills in nearly all cases and in favor of improved sleep habits.

“Sleeping pills usually do more harm than good,” he says.

Some Serious Shut-eye
Improved sleep behavior and attitudes do more good than sleeping pills for the treatment of insomnia, experts at a recent National Institutes of Health Consensus Conference agreed, says Daniel Kripke of the University of California, San Diego. The changes he recommends:

• Do not take sleeping pills. This includes over-the-counter pills and melatonin.
• Don’t go to bed until you’re sleepy. If you have trouble sleeping, try going to bed later or getting up earlier.
• Get up at the same time every morning, even after a bad night’s sleep. The next night, you’ll be sleepy at bedtime.
• If you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back to sleep, get out of bed and return only when you are sleepy.
• Avoid worrying, watching TV, reading scary books, and doing other things in bed besides sleeping and sex. If you worry, read thrillers or watch TV, do that in a chair that’s not in the bedroom.
• Do not drink or eat anything caffeinated within six hours of bedtime.
• Avoid alcohol. It’s relaxing at first but can lead to insomnia when it clears your system.
• Spend time outdoors. People exposed to daylight or bright light therapy sleep better.