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- <header>
- <h1>Addressed to the Stars</h1>
- <p>Day 00363: Friday, 2016 March 04</p>
- </header>
- <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 &#8216;Search&#8217; field located at the top right hand corner (blue area) of our Web page.
- You may also review our 'Frequently Asked Questions' or 'Tax Topics' Web pages.
- </p>
- <p>
- We appreciate your visit to our website and invite you to visit us for your future tax needs.
- </p>
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- 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't really go in person because the <abbr title="Internal Revenue Service">IRS</abbr> doesn't have any offices in my town or the adjacent town.
- I'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't verify my identity online and using a telephone and encouraging the moronic telephone number system was out of the question.
- Again, there's no legal requirement that I have a telephone line, so government agencies such as the <abbr title="Internal Revenue Service">IRS</abbr> 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 <abbr title="Internal Revenue Service">IRS</abbr>.
- The first plan was stupid and counterproductive on several levels.
- I made it while I was still pretty angry, so I'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 <abbr title="identification">ID</abbr>, 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 <abbr title="Internal Revenue Service">IRS</abbr> said that if I didn't verify my identity to them within thirty days, they would throw out the tax filing information that I had sent them.
- I'd check the data in which that happened, then simply re-file using the exact same information.
- If they demanded verification again but wouldn'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 <abbr title="Internal Revenue Service">IRS</abbr> 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'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 <abbr title="Internal Revenue Service">IRS</abbr> is not guilty of both failing to provide helpful error messages and maliciously discriminating against <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> 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't verify online, not even mentioning that it was a temporary problem.
- I am now only mildly annoyed with the <abbr title="Internal Revenue Service">IRS</abbr>.
- I can handle idiots a lot better than I can handle those that attack the Internet by, for example, discriminating against <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> 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's <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> 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'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 <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr>.
- I broke out my key for <a href="/en/domains/nfcbk2sgyblvdnq3.onion.xhtml">nfcbk2sgyblvdnq3.onion.</a> and started testing.
- However, I wasn't able to actually set this up.
- It seems that the <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> configuration used by Ricochet is actually built into the binary; it isn't a separate file.
- I found the relevant line in the source code, but they aren't a plain-text configuration file, they are in the form of function calls and objects.
- I'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 <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> daemon to Ricochet again, but like before, that didn'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, <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> didn't properly start.
- Ricochet then couldn't connect to the network.
- The error message made sense, <q>[warn] HiddenServicePort with no preceding HiddenServiceDir directive</q>, but I'm not sure how to get around it.
- I'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't think of that until I was writing my weblog entry and heading off to bed.
- Either way though, it wouldn't fix the issue.
- It'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 <abbr title="Server Name Indication">SNI</abbr> host names in order to allow <a href="apt:apache2">Apache</a> to accept invalid <abbr title="Server Name Indication">SNI</abbr> 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 <abbr title="Server Name Indication">SNI</abbr> host name.
- Mod_rewrite didn't work the way I needed it to though, and I'm reasonably certain that what I'm trying to accomplish isn'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's quickly surpassed his funding goal.
- He doesn'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 <abbr title="United States Dollars">USD</abbr> tier, he'll send you a copy of both this album and an early version of another album he'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 <abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr> 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 <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> users</a>, which is ironically blocked by CloudFlare, I learned some disturbing news.
- <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> users can be maliciously blocked not only at the application layer level, but at the <abbr title="Transmission Control Protocol">TCP</abbr> level! I've run across several websites in search results that seem to no longer exist.
- I'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>'s website, but I had to set that aside fro tonight.
- As a little exercise, I set my server to recognize the ".html" and ".htm" file extensions, the two that he used for pages of his site, as <abbr title="Extensible Hypertext Markup Language">XHTML</abbr>.
- If his markup was clean, it would have worked with little modification.
- However, there were some sloppy-yet-valid-in-<abbr title="Hypertext Markup Language">HTML</abbr> parts, such as use of unquoted values.
- I tried to talk to Ronsor about fixing these, but he didn't go for it, stating that it wasn't meant to be served as <abbr title="Extensible Hypertext Markup Language">XHTML</abbr>.
- 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't planning to fully convert his site to <abbr title="Extensible Hypertext Markup Language">XHTML</abbr>, 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 <abbr title="Extensible Hypertext Markup Language">XHTML</abbr>.
- 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 <abbr title="Extensible Hypertext Markup Language">XHTML</abbr>.
- 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'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'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'm meating the government'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>'s files with.
- Again, this was back before chicken was chicken.
- Now, I use <abbr title="Secure Shell">SSH</abbr> and <abbr title="SSH File Transfer Protocol">SFTP</abbr>.
- It's built nearly-seamlessly into my desktop! But when did I start using <abbr title="Secure Shell">SSH</abbr>? How did I find out about it? I can't remember ever using <abbr title="Secure Shell">SSH</abbr> 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>
- <hr/>
- <p>
- Copyright © 2016 Alex Yst;
- You may modify and/or redistribute this document under the terms of the <a rel="license" href="/license/gpl-3.0-standalone.xhtml"><abbr title="GNU's Not Unix">GNU</abbr> <abbr title="General Public License version Three or later">GPLv3+</abbr></a>.
- If for some reason you would prefer to modify and/or distribute this document under other free copyleft terms, please ask me via email.
- My address is in the source comments near the top of this document.
- This license also applies to embedded content such as images.
- For more information on that, see <a href="/en/a/licensing.xhtml">licensing</a>.
- </p>
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- <abbr title="World Wide Web Consortium">W3C</abbr> standards are important.
- This document conforms to the <a href="https://validator.w3.org./nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fy.st.%2Fen%2Fweblog%2F2016%2F03-March%2F04.xhtml"><abbr title="Extensible Hypertext Markup Language">XHTML</abbr> 5.1</a> specification and uses style sheets that conform to the <a href="http://jigsaw.w3.org./css-validator/validator?uri=https%3A%2F%2Fy.st.%2Fen%2Fweblog%2F2016%2F03-March%2F04.xhtml"><abbr title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</abbr>3</a> specification.
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