California CCW - concealed carry forum

UPDATED: See my post at the end of this thread, on the next page. I now think this PDF could very well be real and legit. I'm guilty of bad science in my analysis of these JPEGs.

I hate to re-open this topic, but I found where those images came from, and it's not the NRA, and so all those who thought so collectively owe me a veggie burger (no mayo) and a sixpack of organic beer.

First, take a look at one of the images from the secret graphic novel, say: http://www.wonkette.com/assets/resources/2006/12/devilteve.jpg for example. Run a JPEG analyzer on it, and notice:

Code:

  Profile-app12: 15 bytes
 0x00000000: 75636b79 00010004 0000004d 000000             Ducky-------M--

Hmm, Ducky M. What is this Ducky M, I wonder?

Well just for fun, take a look at:

http://www.duckymag.com/oe_a.html

Notice the remarkably similar (and enjoyable) visusal style? Coincidence? I don't know, let's fire up the JPEG analyzer again on: http://www.duckymag.com/images/ducky_comic_2.jpg and we see:

Code:

  Profile-app12: 15 bytes
 0x00000000: 75636b79 00010004 0000003c 000000             Ducky-------<--

We've been goosed by Ducky! And Wonkette, she make joke, ja?

I shall now lock this thread because it was beat to death in the other thread.

Edited: And btw, I do like Ducky's style! The NRA oughta take them up on that (implicit) offer to do a graphic novel.

Edited: And I have unlocked this. Let's discuss the lighter side of this if desired; all the serious stuff has been beaten to death.

I had a nice duck salad last week.

Guns And Sushi wrote:

I had a nice duck salad last week.

I love duck!

Thanks Admin! I sent this post off to the appropriate people.

For the record, Wonkette (which is written by two men - take note everyone who keeps calling the writer "she") seems to have been pranked by Ducky. BoingBoing has updated their post crediting CACCW for busting the hoax.

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/12/24/fearmongering_graphi.html

Wow things move fast on the Web! Christmas Eve and the wires are humming!

Thanks Sean. Now ALL those people out there who passed this meme along also collectively owe me (if only at a karmic level, rather than a practical or physical level) a veggie burger (no mayo) and a sixpack of organic lager.

Edit: I just did a quick Google search on NRA graphic novel and that story is everywhere now! Anyway, it would be super-cool if Ducky Magazine would do some graphics, or even a graphic novel, for this site. They can even feel free to slip in some secret (subliminal perhaps) anti-gun messages if they want to, I don't care, their graphics are so cool I would be ok with it.

Time to round up the usual suspects and turn them into a demeaning comic book

I am glad that for once, I have absolutely NO CLUE what the sam hill you guys are talking about, it sounds like it was a rousing scene here today, glad I missed it--duckys?, wonkettes?, boing boing? OK, this is like listening to some of the "users" at work talk at lunch, they might as well be speaking in Urdu or Sanscrit for anything I get out of the conversation.

No matter, ignorance is bliss...

Platus insalatum vilus mutatum.

klaatu verata niktu

I'm glad I was in Hollyweird today, otherwise I would think this were normal????!!

seanbonner wrote:

klaatu verata niktu

Gort! "The Day The Earth Stood Still" great old movie--I recently bought a copy for a friend.

Message aside they are good illustrations. Kinda remind me of Chris Coopers stuff.

Hey Buddies --

This is Ken from Wonkette. My toddler is awake and going nuts because, you know, Christmas is in a few hours. So I checked email. And I see my work site (Wonkette) has been slimed by Boing Boing over that NRA comic book thing.

I don't understand this "JPG analysis" thing, but I can tell you that the JPGs come from MY office laptop, because they're saved from screenshots from the FREEDOM IN PERIL pdf in Adobe Reader. If the Admin will contact me, I'll send him / her the entire PDF as I received it from an anonymous DC tipster. (We get everything from anonymous DC tipsters. We say what it's supposed to be and let the reader and other media figure it out -- like the Mark Foley emails, which we ran before ABC News did, because an anonymous tipster sent them to us.)

This booklet is repeatedly tagged with NRA logos, NRA exec signatures and statements, etc. We ran a handful of crazy images from a big booklet. You can post the whole thing if you like ... it's not ours!

And this will only make sense to you folks, so I'll only say it here: There are parts of the booklet that are extremely compelling even to a very non-NRA guy like myself. (I own guns and I shoot and I always will, but I refuse to support the NRA's lowest-common-denominator Stalinist propaganda.) For example, there's an image of 20+ SWAT Police State goons in full armor all drawn on a little old lady in her bedroom with a handgun ... and the main goon has his boot on her throat. The vulture reporting the local news is pretty true to life, too -- except it's an actual vulture bird holding the TV-13 mic.

If it's "fake" -- meaning, if the NRA didn't pay for this very expensive, elaborate, beautifully produced booklet -- then I would love to know who did it. There's a bold flying eagle on the cover ... The Colbert Report?

Anyway, post this thing, Mr. Admin. It is 4MB. We posted the ugliest parts -- the parts trying to get a membership fee out of people through racial fearmongering.

By the way, in Nevada where I currently live, CCW is *easy* ... I will miss it here. Cheers & Happy Christmas to you all.

The person who claims it's a hoax is using the "Ducky" tag in the jpg as the proof that it comes from duckymag.com. That's just not right, sorry.

Of course, "DUCKY" is one of the default application tags for Photoshop-produced jpegs. I believe it means the image was saved with the "Save for Web" feature. It has nothing to do with duckymag.com.

Check out this google search for a bunch of examples of "DUCKY" tags on jpgs:

http://www.google.com/search?q=app12+ducky

If you run your jpeg analyzer on many web images, you'll find that "ducky" string in there. For example, here's one from my site:

http://menino.com/westjet.jpg

Run your jpeg analyzer on that and you'll find the ducky string.

Miguel Borges
http://menino.com

Thanks for making sense of that, MiG. Yeah, the Wonkette JPGs are in "save for web" small file format, because they post to a blog, so that makes sense.

Well, it doesn't make *sense*, except in the world of computer programmers, where everything needs some goofy little text tag like "ducky."

(I use Adobe Photoshop Elements -- the $90 version -- so don't know if the ducky thing is the same. Haven't ever run a jpeg analysis so it's all greek anyways.)

Woops. I was too confident in my own analysis here. I was just using ImageMagick identify -verbose, which spits out a bunch of stuff (what type of camera took the picture, camera settings, image editor information, etc). I didn't realize about the "ducky" tag. I think I goofed. I don't ever use Photoshop so I didn't think about the possibility that "ducky" is a universal Photoshop tag, and it happens that the visual style of the graphics on Duckymag is remarkably similar to the style and coolness of those images. Those images are so outrageous that they seemed laughable to me... but maybe they are real. I make mistakes, and this could very well be one of them. Anyway, the official word would be a message from the NRA on the subject. The story started out interesting, and continues to get more interesting I guess.

The other thing is, I can analyze the PDF also. There is much more information embedded in a typical PDF than in a typical JPEG. Ken, if you would please email that to me as admin at californiaccw.org I would be grateful, and would post the results of what I find embedded in it.

Analyzing documents, whether digital or otherwise, can have its pitfalls!

And Ken, WELCOME to the site. Here you'll find a variety of views, open-mindedness, civility, and fun. And if you're moving to California you will also find experts here who can help you have the best possible chance of getting a CCW. It depends largely on which county and city you move to. Finally, we have fun events all the time and we hope to see you at one of them soon.

Let me see if I am understanding this, a supposedly "secret NRA document" is posted (or parts of the document) online. Do we have the NRA's viewpoint on this? I think we have enough card carrying members to get a real person on the blower to verify this--maybe not during Christmas weekend, but by Tuesday at least. Seems like a lot of conjecture so far--does anybody here have a complete copy of this nefarious document? Has anybody here even seen this document?

Ken has kindly offered to send it to me. Ken specializes in publishing "leaks" from "inside the beltway" I guess they call it. Ken routinely gets sent documents which are non-published, shocking, and genuine. To be clear, I think this is one of the highest callings of journalism: to shed light where there is shadow, so my description of Ken's metier is with respect. In fact we sometimes use PRARs for a very similar function.

Anyway, when I get it I'll take a look at the PDF itself to see what I can glean from it, but this time with an open mind and no pre-conceived idea of what I should find.

Or could it be that this fabrication was "leaked" to a site that was willing to post anything spectacularly incendiary on a long weekend so that it would have plenty of run time before it could be shown to be false? I, too, would love to find out who was truly behind this tripe. If it was the NRA, that is why we have elections. If it was an anti-gun group meaning to slander and defame the NRA, that is what lawyers and litigation are for.

seanbonner wrote:

Wonkette (which is written by two men - take note everyone who keeps calling the writer "she")

I guess I'm behind the times -- Wonkette (AKA Ana Marie Cox) left her blog last July 31 for a new job as Washington D.C. editor of Time.com. She also left behind her blog's name for the new blog editors of the "Wonkette" blog. So, this NRA hoax column apparently wasn't written by Wonkette at all, but is currently the Alex Pareene and Ken Layne show. Just makes things a bit confusing for those who don't read "Wonkette, the D.C. Gossip" blog every day.