Merkel wants to extend nuclear power plant operating times

Total radiation in Merkelnix's head ...

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

PyPerSyst - Orbtech Wiki - Persistence for Python objects

The Spinning Cube of Potential Doom

Very interesting: a graphical visualization of security events that makes various port scan techniques visually recognizable.

Here's the original article.

Upcoming Qonos Scientific PDA

The company Hydrix (apparently consisting in part of former HP RPN calculator developers) is working on a calculator based on Linux and using open source software for the tasks. Very interesting - it's supposed to come out at the end of this year. Let's see what it actually turns out to be.

Here's the original article.

Adapters: Olympus E-1

For the Olympus E-1, there is now also a set of adapters for various SLR lenses - so there are now two digital options for classic lenses like the Leica R or Contax MM line. The Olympus version is even more robustly and generously designed than the EOS version, since the Olympus system has a significantly shallower flange focal distance and therefore more space remains for adapters. As a result, the adapter for the Olympus system can remain directly on the camera (with the EOS adapter it's better to keep it on the lens). Particularly interesting for people who are simply looking for a digital option for their lenses and don't want to invest in the Olympus system. Here's the original article.

digitale Fine Art Prints - Barytabzug - Iris Giclee Prints - exposure on baryta paper - unfortunately not really cheap

Tax authorities threatened with tax shortfalls due to Mannesmann shares case

This can't possibly be true. A company artificially inflates its stock price to sell itself off, the board members pocket million-euro severance packages for it, the stock price comes back down to earth, and the state — and thus all taxpayers — are supposed to foot the bill?

The whole Vodafone-Mannesmann deal is nothing but one big fraud anyway, and we get to clean up the mess. The very idea of such blatant corruption makes you pretty angry.

Tax justice in Germany has been gone for a long time. And this whole pile of garbage is the best proof of it. It can't be right that companies themselves still profit from this crap, while ordinary taxpayers are constantly hit with higher burdens because the money runs out.

If we're blowing billions up the backsides of companies for stupidity and audacity, it's no wonder money is lacking...

Here's the original article.

Schwarzweiss-Magazin Wollstein 6/2003 - Permanence of various photographic techniques

Insanely exciting Germany tour stage

I don't know when I last saw such an exciting stage in a tour race. The leader and his 4 pursuers only 20 seconds apart. Several pursuers (especially Jens Voigt and Igor Gonzalez de Galdeano) attack in turns. And Patrick Sinkewitz keeps up with them. A fantastic performance - especially since he had no more helpers. Until the finish with a final sprint against Jens Voigt, he was fully involved and defended his yellow jersey brilliantly. If he keeps the yellow jersey until Leipzig, he owes it definitively to his great performance and not to the weaknesses of his opponents.

Francisco Mancebo drove out the last kilometer on the mountain sovereignly - he's simply a mountain expert.

Jan Ullrich has shown that he still needs to work on his mountain form at the Tour de Suisse to be ready for the Tour de France - on the mountain he's definitely losing far too much time.

BugMeNot.com

A very interesting service - it provides (dummy) login credentials for services that require registration. For example, all those newspaper archives that need logins. If you don't want to enter your data, you simply use BugMeNot. With the bookmarklet, the whole thing is nice and easy. And you can also use the service to link to pages on services that are so heavily restricted.

Especially practical for those annoying demographic-data-collecting and we-spam-your-registration-to-death services.

Is that ethically correct? Sorry, folks, but is the constant asking for shoe size, hair color, and penis length (hey, the penis-enlargement providers have to get their addresses from somewhere) by the various archive services ethically correct?

Here's the original article.

E-MailRelay -- SMTP proxy and store-and-forward MTA - general purpose SMTP proxy with its own spool handling and the ability to integrate external filters

fotoKASTEN - Digital photo development on the Internet

Yet another image printing service with an affiliate program

mtaproxy.py - Teergrube utuility for SpamBayes - Tarpit with integrated SpamBayes

RoughingIT - pyblosxom 1.0 Release

PyBlosxom (Blosxom in Python) has been available as a 1.0 release since May 25th - still new enough that it's worth writing about now

Here you can find the original article.

STIM - MouseSite

Everything around human-computer interfaces and their origins such as the mouse, graphical user interfaces, windowing systems. Currently mainly documenting the presentation from 1968, when Doug Engelbart showed in a 90-minute multimedia presentation how to work with a networked computer with a window-oriented interface, hyperlinking and other features. It's quite fascinating what ideas and partially realized implementations already existed so early on. Here you can find the original article.

Stopping spam with the Anti-Spam-SMTP-Proxy (ASSP) - SMTP proxy with Bayesian filtering, this one is without honeypot

Toll Collect: Toll rate cannot be changed

Are the toll rates hard-wired into the devices? What kind of idiots designed all this crap?

I hope it was just some official without a clue speaking again and the thing isn't actually built that stupidly. On the other hand, we're talking about Toll Collect here...

At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.

Greylisting with Exim and PostgreSQL

Greylisting is a technique to reduce spam by temporarily rejecting emails from unknown senders. The mail server is then expected to retry sending the email after a short delay. Since most spam is sent by machines that don't retry, this is an effective way to filter out a large portion of spam.

I've implemented greylisting for my mail server using Exim and PostgreSQL. Here's how it works:

How it works

When an email arrives, Exim checks if the combination of sender, recipient, and sending server has been seen before. If not, the email is temporarily rejected with a "try again later" response. If the combination has been seen before and enough time has passed, the email is accepted and the database is updated.

Implementation

The implementation uses a PostgreSQL database to store the greylisting information. A simple table stores the sender, recipient, sending server, and timestamp of the last attempt.

Configuration

To enable greylisting in Exim, you need to add an ACL rule that queries the database and decides whether to accept or reject the email. The rule should be placed in the DATA ACL.

Results

Since I've enabled greylisting on my mail server, the amount of spam has decreased significantly. Most spam never retries, so it's never delivered. Legitimate emails are still delivered, just with a slight delay on the first message from a new sender.

Tollef Fog Heen : Yahoo Breaking SMTP Standards

One of the reasons why I don't like Greylisting. In short, what greylisting is: when a server makes a connection to another server for mail delivery, a triple is formed from the sending host, destination address, and source address, and it is checked whether this combination is known. If not, the combination is noted and the current mail is rejected with a temporary rejection. The theory is that mail servers attempt redeliveries but spambots and virus distributors typically do not. So far, so good. Problems with this approach:

• not every mail server responds correctly to temporary rejections. Example: Yahoo. And that's far from the only server that reacts this way.
• even with temporary rejections, bounces often occur, which then cause mailing list hosts to unsubscribe you from lists.
• a spammer only needs to attempt to send the spam twice in quick succession and the spam gets through. This is minimal effort for spambots — either the user gets one or two spams — but they will get them.
• greylisting only works if you have control over all MX servers for your own domain, otherwise spam simply comes in through the other mail servers on which greylisting is not running.
• if all MXes use greylisting, delivery attempts of legitimate mail are slowed down, since these normally try the other MXes on temporary rejections and then also fail there. Depending on configuration, you then automatically end up in slower queues or longer waiting times on that server (because three delivery attempts have already failed at three MXes).
• Whitelisting (which is mentioned as a solution for some problems) is itself a problem: spam from servers on the whitelist is not detected. But precisely some of the large distribution servers have to be added to the whitelist because they have exactly the problems mentioned (Yahoo is not only a source for many mailing lists, but also for a lot of spam).
• Problems with greylisting are typically only noticed indirectly — since it is a largely transparent process and you can really only conclude that there are problems with greylisting from reactions by others.

All in all, greylisting only has an advantage temporarily: because it is rarely widespread, it is currently not taken into account by spambots. But taking it into account is trivial and would automatically happen with wider adoption. Thus greylisting is doomed to become ineffective if it spreads further.

Of course, many of the problems can be fixed. But ultimately, this is just as much an attempt to plug the holes in a sieve with paper as using rule-based spam filters against spam. Statistical spam filtering (Bayesian filter) is still the best available solution.

Here's the original article.

Gallery :: your photos on your website - Interesting software for photo albums on the web

Girls are Evil - Mathematical Proof

Here you can find the original article.

Omikron Basic 8.0 runs natively on Mac OS X

Yet another zombie that's still alive. When I read through the Features, tears of joy come to my eyes. Those were the days when you could program in Basic on home computers. The world was so much simpler then ... At The Macintosh News Network you can find the original article.

Photo Organizer - Feature-rich web photo album with a rather stylish default look

SCO vs. Linux: Mission impossible

First SCO stands up and says there are millions of stolen lines of code. And that they can name them. Then they demand sources. They get them. Search through them for ages and find nothing. Hello? Why do they even have to search if the locations are supposedly known? And why don't they notice that the JFS for Linux is based on the OS/2 JFS? That's even stated in the documentation - if they search the sources, why don't they read it at the same time? But probably that's exactly the problem: if you don't read text, you can search through it forever without ever finding anything.

At heise online news there's the original article.

Silverlab Partnerprogramm - Photo print service with financial participation of the photographer

Symantec Chief: Windows is not less secure than Linux

Sure, quite clearly. Windows is the easier target to hit, which is why it's not inherently less secure than Linux. And of course the security problems are due to attachment clickers - funny only that considerably more server attacks against Windows are possible, all of which have nothing to do with attachments. And all this despite the fact that with servers, Linux and Apache are definitely the train rolling through the whole city, while IIS - alongside IE and Outlook, the security hole par excellence - rather only runs in the seedier suburbs ... At heise online news there's the original article.

United States Patent: 6,727,830

What a load of rubbish: clicking an application button once is the standard function, holding it for at least one second is a secondary function, and double-clicking an application button is then a tertiary function.

And for such banality, the US Patent Office grants Microsoft a patent. And we're just introducing those oh-so-meaningful and innovative software patents in the EU. Thanks, Ms. Zypries, for letting us deal with such brilliant innovative solutions and such meaningful patents in the future.

Here's the original article.

EditThisPagePHP - Edit pages online in PHP - Alternative for situations where a real CMS is too large and a wiki or weblog is too rigid in structure

SCO vs. Linux: Investor Baystar exits

Final beginning of the preliminary end?

At heise online news there's the original article.

SF Author Bradbury: "Michael Moore is a terrible person" - Culture - SPIEGEL ONLINE

Bradbury certainly had a bit of a dark side. Instead of being pleased that someone like Moore was basing a film title on one of his book titles, he complained that he should have been asked. What more does he want? Should thermometer manufacturers with Fahrenheit scales also ask him for permission? Rarely a more foolish man than Bradbury...

Here's the original article.

Vellum: a weblogging system in Python - Nice little weblogging system in Python

Adventure Earth - To Hell

Just stumbled upon it while flipping through channels. Absolutely well done! And interesting - the giant Andean vulture with an 8-meter wingspan (extinct) was just as new to me as the fact that New World vultures (including the condor) are related to storks and not to birds of prey, like Old World vultures are.

Here's the original article.

drbs - Distributed Replicated Blob Server - Server system modeled after Google File System

GDL - GNU Data Language - Another one for the number crunchers

Maypole / Apache::MVC - Perl framework for creating web applications

mnot's Web log: Ubiquitious Fragment Identifiers - Interesting fragment link solution with CSS

paramiko: ssh2 protocol for python - SSH2 protocol implementation in Python

PYSH: A Python Shell - Shell that uses Python as a shell language

SoftPear - PC/Mac Interoperability

Wow - now they've got a recompiler for machine code in there too. That sounds increasingly interesting - a recompiler is the most important step for usable performance for such systems.

Here's the original article.

Sony's Clié Says Goodbye

Was obvious. After all, I bought one myself and I'm quite happy with it. Whenever I get something like this, the manufacturer goes bankrupt or discontinues the product line or does something else crazy. I'm starting to feel like the rain god in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. At heise online news you can find the original article.

Sun Insists that Red Hat Linux is Proprietary

Just to show that the IT world has more crazy people than just the SCO boss. The SUN boss's loss of touch with reality is also quite remarkable.

Here's the original article.

Telekom wants to collect customer data from internet users

They must be out of their minds. What a mess - since when can providers decide which of my email addresses are allowed to be published? The whole thing is absolutely ridiculous!

At heise online news there's the original article.

Acratech, Inc: Precision Machining & Photographic Equipment - Manufacturer and marketer of the Ultimate Ballhead

Curdled (1996)

Occasionally, real gems are shown on television

Here is the original article.

Jan Ullrich in the Tour of Germany

In the time trial, he clearly showed that he really is back to full strength. The fact that Michael Rich took 24 seconds from him in the end is not a big deal - you can afford to lose in a time trial against someone like Michael Rich, the man is simply an exceptional rider. So a really great race overall. But absolutely top-notch was the performance of the Gerolsteiner team: getting 4 riders into the top 8 positions is quite something. Not many people can match that.

However, the ARD should learn to use their microphones properly. That was total chaos at the end.

KODAK PROFESSIONAL READYLOAD Single Sheet Packs and Holder - 4x5 inch single sheet film cartridge system for easy sheet film use

Lycos - web hosting

Great terms they have there: Copyrighted or illegal material may not be stored and may not be offered for download. Under German law, everything someone writes is automatically protected by copyright, if I remember correctly. So I wouldn't be allowed to publish my own content that I write myself if I host it there, since this own content is protected by copyright.

Hier gibts den Originalartikel

Mark Lentczner's Journal

Ouch. A periodic table of Perl operators. Could it be that someone went a little too far with the definition of possible operators in Perl? Just a tiny bit? The original article is here.

Syndication formats cause of progressive dementia?

Who wants to know what a typical civilized discussion about syndication formats looks like should just follow the link. Surprisingly, Dave Winer behaves very orderly in that thread. The same cannot be said for Mark Pilgrim. Quite amusing - ultimately, what I suspected back then comes to pass: if it's good for nothing else, the Atom format at least makes for a great network psychology experiment. On the technical side: Atom is poorly designed. The louder Pilgrim and his Pilgrim-Fathers-of-Atom-Format shout, the more embarrassing the whole affair becomes. During the discussion about the Atom API, criticism was frequently expressed that PUT and DELETE as HTTP verbs were unusual and often not supported. The comment on that was that these people should just throw their toolkits away if they couldn't handle standard techniques. At the same time, these same people specially invented their own authentication scheme for HTTP just for Atom, which merely reinvents the technique of Digest Auth under a different name and with different syntax - arguing that many toolkits and server technologies don't support Digest Auth. Yes, that's right, the exact same argument was used by Pilgrim and company in two opposite directions. So much for consistency of argumentation.

Another example: there's constant harping on how consistent the Atom format is with respect to tags. Curiously though, while all links in the format are mapped via the Link tag (and specified with corresponding rel attributes), they define three different tags just for date specifications - even though a single Date tag with rel attribute for the type of date would be far more logical in this context.

Also amusing was the discussion about the type of API - many wanted an XMLRPC API, simply because RPC integrates well into programming. What prevailed was the document faction, who prefer an API with REST structure (because documents are natively managed there via GET/POST/PUT/DELETE). Fair enough - I can accept that. But embarrassing was the manner in which various REST proponents tried to argue why XMLRPC wouldn't work. Which is rather silly given the widespread use of XMLRPC for all kinds of purposes. And for someone familiar with RPC-style APIs, the whole discussion was more of a staircase joke than a serious technical discussion. How old is RPC as a programming technique in the Unix environment? 20 years? But of course that's all just imagination...

Well, what can you expect from people who take the fact that Googlegroups and Blogger all forcibly received Atom feeds as the basis for claiming that Atom is already more widespread than RSS today? Now can you understand why it's really no pleasure to deal with content syndication? Only psychopaths and cranks in that field, hardly a mentally normal person to be found. Can someone now explain to me why I programmed my own aggregator for the Python Desktop Server? Here's the original article.

Taxi (1998)

Very casual

Here you can find the original article.