y.st./source/pages/en/weblog/2016/03-March/04.xhtml

<?php
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$xhtml = array(
	'title' => 'Addressed to the Stars',
	'body' => <<<END
<p>
	Before heading out yesterday, I found this letter in my inbox:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
	Please use the ticket number located in the subject line of this email in any correspondence with the IRS.
</p>
<p>
	SUBJECT: Comment from Web Site sent to irs.gov.website.helpdesk@speedymail.com
</p>
<p>
	Dear [REDACTED]@y.st,
</p>
<p>
	Thank you for contacting the IRS.gov Website Help Desk.
</p>
<p>
	The purpose of the IRS Website Help Desk is to assist with navigational questions about IRS.gov.
	 We do not have access to specific tax related information.
</p>
<p>
	We are here to assist with finding content on the IRS.gov website.
	Please refer to the link below for information applicable to your inquiry about the Live chat room.
	Please note that the IRS does not maintain a live chat or email address regarding specific tax related information.
</p>
<p>
	https://www.irs.gov/uac/Navigate-IRSgov
</p>
<p>
	I do apologize but due to the notice you have for verifying your identity, there are two options.
	The first one is to use the website provided in your notice to verify your identity, or the other option would be to do it by phone.
	I understand you are unable to reach them by telephone.
	In this case you may want to visist your local IRS office in person and discuss concern with a agent.
</p>
<p>
	For additional website assistance or information, you may insert a few words or phrases relating to your inquiry into the &amp;#8216;Search&amp;#8217; field located at the top right hand corner (blue area) of our Web page.
	 You may also review our &apos;Frequently Asked Questions&apos; or &apos;Tax Topics&apos; Web pages.
</p>
<p>
	We appreciate your visit to our website and invite you to visit us for your future tax needs.
</p>
<p>
	I would like to know what you thought about your email experience.
	Please click the survey link (http://research.affina.com/snapwebhost/surveylogin.asp?k=144898929474) to complete our online customer satisfaction survey.
</p>
<p>
	Sincerely,
</p>
<p>
	The IRS.gov Web Site Help Desk
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
	I couldn&apos;t really go in person because the $a[IRS] doesn&apos;t have any offices in my town or the adjacent town.
	I&apos;m a pedestrian and there is no legal requirement that I own or know how to drive a vehicle.
	The website mentioned had been telling me that I couldn&apos;t verify my identity online and using a telephone and encouraging the moronic telephone number system was out of the question.
	Again, there&apos;s no legal requirement that I have a telephone line, so government agencies such as the $a[IRS] cannot demand that I do anything by telephone.
	The letter did mention how to get to the live chat page though, which much to my embarrassment, was right on the same page as the initial form that I had used to initiate this email conversation.
	There was no time to act on this yesterday though, as the entire span of time that the live chat sessions are available during a day, I was in Springfield.
</p>
<p>
	I came up with three plans on what to do about the $a[IRS].
	The first plan was stupid and counterproductive on several levels.
	I made it while I was still pretty angry, so I&apos;ll just leave it out.
	The second idea was to attempt to refile via postal mail, including a copy of my Social Security card and photographic $a[ID], a copy of their letter to me, and a letter to them explaining the situation, saying that if they would not allow me to prove my identity over the Web and did not accept my mailed-in identity documents as proof, I did not know what else to do and they would need to make accommodations.
	I would assert that as there is no law saying that I am required to have telephone service, they cannot demand that I use a telephone to perform this mandatory identity verification.
	I would then conclude saying that as they do not have an office in my city or the neighboring city, and because I am not a driver, I cannot reach them in person, but if they want to reach me in person, they are welcome to send someone to my house.
	If they send someone over, I would be more than happy to answer any identifying questions that they have and show them original copies of my identity documents.
	The third plan was the most simple, and in my opinion, the best: I would simply wait it out.
	The $a[IRS] said that if I didn&apos;t verify my identity to them within thirty days, they would throw out the tax filing information that I had sent them.
	I&apos;d check the data in which that happened, then simply re-file using the exact same information.
	If they demanded verification again but wouldn&apos;t allow me to comply without a telephone, I would file for an extension (seeing as the tax-filing deadline would be past), then continue waiting and submitting until they accepted my tax documents.
</p>
<p>
	Of course, all of this planning was only in case the $a[IRS] people manning the live chat session refused to help.
	I started the live session today, and the representative seemed to understand my problem, but didn&apos;t have any information on what to do about it.
	As the representative had mentioned using the online verification at one point, I decided to attempt verification again to get a screenshot, which I should have taken two days ago.
	However, much to my embarrassment again, the verification site functioned without issue this time.
	I apologized to the representative and explained that the verification site had quit denying my verification.
</p>
<p>
	This time, the verification site asked some random multiple-choice questions of me that it had not before, such as the address of my former residence.
	The verification site mentioned using a third-party site to acquire such questions and their answers, so perhaps that third-party website was down before.
	If that is the case, it means that the $a[IRS] is not guilty of both failing to provide helpful error messages and maliciously discriminating against $a[Tor] users; they are just guilty of failing to provide helpful error messages.
	In other words, they are idiots.
	All that they would have had to do is have their error message state that there were technical difficulties and that the user should try back later.
	Instead, they said that I couldn&apos;t verify online, not even mentioning that it was a temporary problem.
	I am now only mildly annoyed with the $a[IRS].
	I can handle idiots a lot better than I can handle those that attack the Internet by, for example, discriminating against $a[Tor] exit nodes.
</p>
<p>
	One of my flashes of inspiration yesterday was about <a href="apt:ricochet-im">Ricochet</a>.
	I tried in the past and failed to get Ricochet to make use of the onion address provided by the system&apos;s $a[Tor] daemon.
	But what if I could do the reverse? What if I allowed Ricochet to be over-controlling and manage the onion address itself? If it could just forward the ports to my other services, they could all share the onion just fine.
	I wouldn&apos;t be able to get two over-controlling services to share an onion address, but I would be able to make one share with permissive services and those that are unaware of $a[Tor].
	I broke out my key for <a href="/en/domains/nfcbk2sgyblvdnq3.onion.xhtml">nfcbk2sgyblvdnq3.onion.</a> and started testing.
	However, I wasn&apos;t able to actually set this up.
	It seems that the $a[Tor] configuration used by Ricochet is actually built into the binary; it isn&apos;t a separate file.
	I found the relevant line in the source code, but they aren&apos;t a plain-text configuration file, they are in the form of function calls and objects.
	I&apos;m not sure how to properly modify it to have it open up other onion ports for other services.
	I also tried onion port forwarding from the system $a[Tor] daemon to Ricochet again, but like before, that didn&apos;t work.
	I also tried adding <code>HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:80</code> to <code>{Ricochet directory}/config/tor/torrc</code>, then to <code>{Ricochet directory}/config/tor/default_torrc</code>, but in both cases, $a[Tor] didn&apos;t properly start.
	Ricochet then couldn&apos;t connect to the network.
	The error message made sense, <q>[warn] HiddenServicePort with no preceding HiddenServiceDir directive</q>, but I&apos;m not sure how to get around it.
	I&apos;m not sure if the problem is that these files are parsed before Ricochet adds its onion address or if the problem is that they are a separate file than the one that defines the HiddenServiceDir.
	I could test, but I didn&apos;t think of that until I was writing my weblog entry and heading off to bed.
	Either way though, it wouldn&apos;t fix the issue.
	It&apos;s also worth noting that Ricochet also fails to add its onion and fails to connect to the network if you make the permissions on its hidden service directory too permissive.
</p>
<p>
	Another idea of mine from yesterday was to use mod_rewrite to fix malformed $a[SNI] host names in order to allow <a href="apt:apache2">Apache</a> to accept invalid $a[SNI] host names without throwing an error.
	The main purpose of this would be to set up a test page that checked Web browsers to see if they were sending both the correct Host header and correct $a[SNI] host name.
	Mod_rewrite didn&apos;t work the way I needed it to though, and I&apos;m reasonably certain that what I&apos;m trying to accomplish isn&apos;t possible.
</p>
<p>
	<a href="http://www.joshwoodward.com/">Josh Woodward</a> is about to release a new album, <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshwoodward/josh-woodward-addressed-to-the-stars">Addressed to the Stars</a>.
	He posted his new album on Kickstarter, and as usual, he&apos;s quickly surpassed his funding goal.
	He doesn&apos;t really ask for as much as his work is worth and his fans sure do love to throw money at him! At the \$44 $a[USD] tier, he&apos;ll send you a copy of both this album and an early version of another album he&apos;s working on, as well as your name in the credits of his liner notes, so I went with that option.
	Hopefully I can talk him into using my $a[URI] in place of my name, or at the very least, get him to use my real name instead of my legal name (he does know the latter).
</p>
<p>
	In an article about the <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/25/tor_users_discriminated_against/">harm caused by discrimination against $a[Tor] users</a>, which is ironically blocked by CloudFlare, I learned some disturbing news.
	$a[Tor] users can be maliciously blocked not only at the application layer level, but at the $a[TCP] level! I&apos;ve run across several websites in search results that seem to no longer exist.
	I&apos;ve wondered why these sites are still in search results instead of being weeded out by the search engines when attempting a recrawl.
	Now I know.
	The sites only appear down from my end because of this devious form of anti-privacy block.
</p>
<p>
	I started setting up a mirror of <a href="https://ronsor,net/">Ronsor</a>&apos;s website, but I had to set that aside fro tonight.
	As a little exercise, I set my server to recognize the &quot;.html&quot; and &quot;.htm&quot; file extensions, the two that he used for pages of his site, as $a[XHTML].
	If his markup was clean, it would have worked with little modification.
	However, there were some sloppy-yet-valid-in-$a[HTML] parts, such as use of unquoted values.
	I tried to talk to Ronsor about fixing these, but he didn&apos;t go for it, stating that it wasn&apos;t meant to be served as $a[XHTML].
	I had even offered to do the fixing my self if he wanted and send him the changes! Not that he knew it, but I wasn&apos;t planning to fully convert his site to $a[XHTML], but I was going to clean up the code.
	While waiting for his response, I had cleaned up the first page, and found something that someone more knowledgeable than I would already know, but which was interesting to me: even with the code cleaned up syntactically, it did not display as a Web page when sent as $a[XHTML].
	To make the Web browser recognize it as a Web page, I needed to set the <code>xmlns</code> attribute.
	This would have been something that I fix on my end but not include in the fix that I sent him, as he had clearly not intended to use $a[XHTML].
	I may have gotten nowhere in getting him to accept cleaner code or clean the code himself, but learning that <code>xmlns</code> is necessary for more than validity was worth the minor amount of effort, so I&apos;d say the experiment was a success.
</p>
<p>
	I have now received a third letter from the health care people, and I now think that I have all the necessary information for making use of my coverage.
	Why did they send it in three parts? It would have saved envelopes and postage to include all of the information at once.
	They could have waited to send anything until they had all the necessary information themselves.
	In any case, it seems that my health care provider is <a href="http://www.woahcco.com/">Western Oregon Advanced Health</a>, a place on the far side of the city from me.
	It&apos;s practically two cities away, given the strange layout of the town.
	I have to pass through North Bend, then back into Coos Bay from another angle in order to reach it.
	Being a pedestrian, this means going in to see a doctor will be an all-day affair.
	At least I&apos;m meating the government&apos;s ridiculous requirements though.
</p>
<p>
	For a good chunk of the day, we went to the nearby beach with the sinky sand.
	This time, I made sure to stay far enough from the water that the land was fairly stable, as did Cyrus.
	My mother and Vanessa on the other hand went out and sank.
	After that, Cyrus went home and Vanessa, our mother, and I went to gather more bullet shells.
</p>
<p>
	A thought just occurred to me.
	When I was using OX X, years ago before I discovered freedom, I built a Web interface for manipulating <a href="/en/domains/chicken.local.xhtml">chicken</a>&apos;s files with.
	Again, this was back before chicken was chicken.
	Now, I use $a[SSH] and $a[SFTP].
	It&apos;s built nearly-seamlessly into my desktop! But when did I start using $a[SSH]? How did I find out about it? I can&apos;t remember ever using $a[SSH] on OS X, but I also cannot remember using my Web interface on Ubuntu (Ubuntu was my first Linux distribution, again, before I found freedom).
</p>
END
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