Archive 6.8.2007 - 2.10.2007

Creative Commons sues - because a photographer is too stupid to correctly read the CC licenses (which really do have very easy-to-understand descriptions as cover sheets). Stupidity apparently wants to be rewarded in the USA.

Berlin court bans storing of personal data - ouch. On the one hand, of course commendable when the amount of data is reduced that is left behind everywhere. Detailed log files from web servers that in the standard settings of many installations sometimes run for a year or longer - that is already bad in terms of data protection. On the other hand, a flank for warnings will certainly be opened again: anyone who has their web statistics publicly accessible documents their IP address collection via log file. It will be interesting to see what comes out of it.

Pandoc - also an option. A Haskell program (hey, I've been looking for an excuse to despair at Haskell again!), which translates between various structured languages. It can convert Markdown to S5 (which shouldn't be particularly difficult, as S5 is normal HTML), but also various other formats. I like Markdown, use it for example in my blog software.

Slides with S5 - Cognitiones Publicae - that's really a nice little toy. S5 and Wiki integrated - and it looks like it's also quite good. Maybe I should set up a PHP environment (i.e. an isolated padded cell in the high-security wing) again.

Outrage over EU plans for «web censorship» - latest from Looney Land. We have funny years ahead of us, with crazy politicians with control freak neurosis and the most absurd ideas about reality.

Flying Logic : Software for Visual Planning Support - hmm. Constraint Solver as a graphical tool. Sounds quite interesting.

Netherlands: End for Nedap Voting Computers - and what about us? Everything is still being declared as totally secure. Keeping your head in the sand prevents you from noticing what's happening around you ...

Black money affair: Kanther gets away with a fine - not everyone is equal before the law. Or does anyone believe that as a regular citizen they could have wriggled out of it so easily? Against a clear violation of the law by a federal minister (who, like all officials, has sworn an oath to our constitution - but what is that worth these days)?

Tour: Rasmussen had artificial EPO in his urine - new techniques, already hard at work. Well, we can probably bury cycling for good now, because by the time the associations and anti-doping agencies catch up, the topic will have spread far and wide again. What really gets to me: this silly whining of the caught and suspected, their pathetic media fuss.

What the end of the world looks like - «Approximately 20 million curies, half as much as during the Chernobyl disaster, were released», explains nuclear expert Vladimir Kuznetsov. A radioactive cloud drove a veritable swath of contamination hundreds of kilometers into the Urals. But containment of the accident damage only began ten hours later. The local administration waited for a signal from Moscow.

Bounce ban for federal mail servers - what I think of the various anti-spam list operators is generally known if you've been reading along here. Why administrators still use these pathetic lists, even though it's clear that each of these lists will eventually become an absurd farce through silly power games, I'll probably never understand.

PIN-Code and fingerprint - it seems the idiots in Berlin still haven't quite figured out that the internet is international - and stores abroad will ignore their great control fetishism. But of course, they will continue to try to sell this to us as a great idea for consumer protection.

Police intervention at demo against the surveillance state - "The police command, which initially had 450 officers present, defended the use of force after half of the distance covered with the argument that there had been numerous violations of regulations, such as against the height and width of the permitted transparents and against the ban on covering faces, 'in relation to the entire history'. In addition, radicals had already caused 'evil destruction' at tables and chairs of the luxury hotel Adlon during pre-checks of bags." - great de-escalation strategy and very appropriate for the topic, right? Does anyone need a bucket of sarcasm?

Experts have significant concerns about data retention - but this will certainly not impress any politician much. The critics simply pay too poorly.

Buy two OLPC notebooks, donate one - hey, why should the second device go to a child of the buyer? If the buyer wants one for themselves?

Dolderer back at the top of Denic - one could have had the whole fuss cheaper and with less stress ...

IE pwns SecondLife - bah. I've always had something against fancy URL handlers that also inherit parameters from the calls. The problem is - why should an application trust a URL? If a call is made via a URL, the program should always classify this as untrusted and never initiate an activity that could potentially be dangerous without informing the user. The culprit here is -autologin in SecondLife - it shouldn't work in this situation at all. The browsers should of course also check the data (and Mozilla's reaction is correct, that Firefox was fixed accordingly when the problem also appeared there), but the real problem lies with the Second Life client.

Ozbus, London to Sydney Bus Travel - Bus route. London-Sydney.

Tor-Server-Betreiber stellt nach Razzia Anonymisierungsserver ab - the biggest danger when using Tor or similar techniques: the technical ignorance of the authorities. They simply don't know what the stuff is and how they should react (taking the tor server would not have helped either, but would at least be logically justifiable). And of course the possibility for the authorities to intimidate people into stopping - which I do not want to imply here, I really just see the ignorance of the deciding official here. Tor is just exotic. For operators of such systems, however, this is part of the necessary risk assessment - you often and "gladly" encounter ignorance.

Published email traffic incriminates anti-filesharing service provider - Bock. Gärtner.

Merkel finds debate on online raids "concerning" - that's what you call democratic discussion, Mrs. Merkel. Have you looked in the Basic Law recently? The last time I checked, it still said we have a democracy. And something like freedom of opinion. And even that members of parliament are only bound by their conscience. But most of them have long since auctioned that off to the highest bidder. Funny enough, I find the ignorance of the prolethicians in Berlin towards facts much more concerning ...

SCO requests creditor protection - the IBM lawyers will have to hurry if they want to reach a settlement before SCO goes bankrupt. Or will there be another fool who throws money into SCO's coffers?

Anonymity network Tor "phished" - Encryption and network security is still difficult to understand for many. TOR secures the transport within its own network against manipulation and spying. Not the protocols that are used.

Lawyer Gravenreuth sentenced to prison - "In doing so, she acknowledged the fact that Gravenreuth was already convicted in the year 2000 for forgery in 60 cases. During the trial, the judge emphasized, according to taz, that the public must be protected from Gravenreuth."

EU Commissioner wants to "block dangerous words" on the Internet - yet another politician running amok, ignorant of the facts.

Microsoft receives patent for notification of changes in privacy policies - yet another trivial patent. And yet again by Microsoft. Okay, that the patent offices allow such things to pass is embarrassing. But that companies even dare to show up at the patent office with such a lump of nonsense ...

Bayern will schärfe Strafen für Gotteslästerung - they're crazy in Bavaria. Maybe we can sell that to the Vatican? Probably no other state would want something like that ... the Union blowhards obviously haven't heard of separation of church and state.

Leatherman Skeletool: The Lightweight Multi-Tool You'll Actually Use - clearly has a "must-have" factor. Preferably the carbon fiber version.

Shades - allows you to adjust the screen brightness on iMacs, and below the ranges allowed by OS X. It seems to use live filters, so it takes some graphics performance, and has the one or other glitch when you then start games like SL, but it seems quite usable as a first approach.

External Filters from Erlang - interesting post about managing a pool of external programs from Erlang and assigning tasks to them. All in OTP technology.

Mobile Processing - and here is the variant of Processing that creates applications for mobile Java devices (phones, etc.).

NASA World Wind in Processing - and here the two previous links combined. Call the navigable Earth from the interactive Java environment Processing.

Processing 1.0 (BETA) - interesting project that does with Java what you used to do with Logo - interactive graphics programming with a good set of simple libraries. And just like Logo back then, this is suitable for far more than just playing around. There are also books available.

World Wind JAVA SDK - the NASA alternative to Google Earth as an embeddable Java library.

Tin-Foil-Hats - and their effect. Or something.

BabelDjango - better i18n framework for Django. Looks quite nice and solves some of the problems I had with the gettext mess back when I developed the i18n stuff for Django.

Microsoft Allegedly Bullies and Bribes to Make Office an International Standard - about Microsoft's nice business practices.

Abmahnung: GEZ untersagt "GEZ-Gebühren", "PC-Gebühren" und "GEZ-Anmeldung" - actually still on vacation, but it was just too good to ignore. It has probably already been driven through the blogosphere (after all, it's 5 days old), but this is really a knockout. Society for Restricted Cerebral Function - or what does GEZ mean again? I must have forgotten ...

Court Rules: Novell owns the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights! Novell has right to waive! - "That's Aaaaall, Folks! The court also ruled that "SCO is obligated to recognize Novell's waiver of SCO's claims against IBM and Sequent". That's the ball game. There are a couple of loose ends, but the big picture is, SCO lost. Oh, and it owes Novell a lot of money from the Microsoft and Sun licenses."

The Shakespeare Programming Language - oh. shit. Someone definitely had too much time and too much beer.

We all have agreed to comment spam - "In the legal correspondence of the last few days, the opposing lawyer even insisted that the consent of the two million bloggers is available". Well, if my blog is included, there is no declaration of consent. And given the number of blogs, I generally doubt this statement as well. Blog spammers are the lowest of the low.

BrandweekNRX: Red Cross sued over its - Red cross! - uh. Sue the Red Cross over its symbol? They've completely lost it. If they've had the sign for so long - why are they only noticing the similarity now? I mean, the Red Cross has been around for a few years too ...

MathTrek: Cracking the Cube - they can solve the Rubik's Cube in 26 moves. I needed 26 seconds back then.

New FCC rules may impact Linux-based devices - the FCC thinks that Security-by-Obscurity is a great idea for radio technologies. And undermines both Open Source projects and the security of wireless solutions. Idiots.

TidBITS: New iLife '08 Revealed - sounds quite nice. And the expansion of .Mac sounds as if it could be interesting now. Not because of the disk space etc. - I have that on my own machines cheaper. But because of the extremely simple integration into the iLife tools.

Free ERP and CRM solution for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X - yeah, yeah, I know, ERP is boring and dull. But since I've been working in the field for 20 years, it's naturally interesting for me to see what open source solutions there are.

Major setback for US voting machine manufacturer - wow. I'd love to see something like this here in Germany.

Light Blue Touchpaper » Electoral Commission releases e-voting and e-counting reports - The Commission’s criticism of e-counting and e-voting was scathing; concerning the latter saying that the “security risk involved was significant and unacceptable.” They recommend against further trials until the problems identified are resolved. - Grossbritannien auch. Und wann wacht unsere Politik auf?

m-e-c AS2 ::: Open source AS2 software - EDI transmitted over the Internet. RFC 4130.

real-time GPS shark hunting - funny idea, in which a player takes on the role of a researcher and studies sharks. The player moves research ships, which are real sharks with GPS transmitters, whose signals are incorporated into the online game accordingly.