When companies meet their doppelgänger - A particularly creative form of piracy
Archive 31.3.2006 - 29.4.2006
This was the Roots: How the Internet came to Germany - and not a word about the IN e.V. at Heise either - which was also significantly involved in private internet activity.
Oberon Script. A Lightweight Compiler and Runtime System for the Web - an Oberon compiler in JavaScript. Now that's weird.
World Press Photos 2005: Germany Premiere in Hamburg - and starting this Saturday, I'll be in Hamburg for a few days.
Mamiya to sell camera division - and the next old name in photography is sold off
WASG-Bundesvorstandsmitglied switches to NPD - because there's no difference between left and right in Germany anyway ...
Hyperlink-Prozess: Netzaktivist erneut freigesprochen - good. Very good!
Network Games
Well, that's the thing with games or virtual worlds that are operated somewhere on the internet. You have access, your own access is running smoothly. And the operator's servers are also working fine. Only some stupid backbone provider in between has a faulty router in the route, with around 30 percent packet loss over longer periods of time. Which of course makes playing significantly more difficult.
But: where do you complain now? I mean, he's taking away my evening entertainment, that damn place
Pur3d.de | TEXTURES - a lot of textures that can also be tiled.
UVMapper - 2.5D Software
AOL.de Zugang - WiFi Hotspots. And yes, that's the devil. But what can you do when network withdrawal threatens ...
Critical security vulnerabilities in Mac OS X - yuck. Please people at Apple - get your act together and use current and fixed versions of the various libraries. Otherwise, I might as well install Windows in the long run ...
Outrage over Schäuble - oh kids, now you're suddenly outraged about him. Do you really think he only came up with his ideas today?
Gazprom threatens EU with gas cut-off - again, great surprise all around. Did you really believe it would just stay with the threats against e.g. Ukraine?
Metasploit: Exploit Development: GroupWise Messenger Server - those who still convince themselves that the time from the discovery of a software vulnerability to an exploit is correspondingly long: forget it. Here someone shows an example development of a complete exploit one day after a hole in the GroupWise Messenger Server became known ...
News from the Christianism Mullahs
«Education Alliance» with Churches launched - what is this nonsense? The church has no place in the state. And why on earth should their outdated and partly simply absurd (I'm thinking of their stance on abortion, birth control, homosexuality, etc.) now also be state-sanctioned? Are we in America, or what?
And the press? They are at most outraged that other religions were excluded. What is this nonsense - we should finally leave this behind. If someone thinks that values education is necessary, then introduce ethics classes, but please ones that are free of religious nonsense!
'Pioneer-Anomalie': Mysterious Force in Space - something is slowing down our probes. No one knows exactly what yet.
YES, finally! me too! - how to deal with lawyer mail as well
Philips will to prevent switching during ad breaks - well, just another reason not to turn on the telly anymore ...
Incitement to hatred Part III - Public Prosecutor vs. Alvar Freude - Public Prosecutor's Block Wardens still on a censorship spree.
Open Letter to D-Link about their NTP vandalism - why you should simply avoid D-Link products.
SPD insists on de minimis clause for copies - "The SPD" probably does not include the federal justice incompetence. Maybe they should hand in their party membership?
Tibet at Wikipedia - and FAZ
Already quite cute how the FAZ, on behalf of the Tibet Initiative Germany, spins in front of their propaganda machine and accuses Wikipedia of naivety - but lacks any form of criticism itself. For example, the fact that a very large part of the refugees in India belong to the monasteries - whose feudal rule is certainly not what one would imagine under a free society ...
Update: what was also ignored/omitted is the fact of the connection of the author of the FAZ article with the TID. So much for professional journalism and the quality control by established editorial offices ...
Yummy mummy feeds young its skin - an amphibian. Looks like an earthworm. Lays eggs. And feeds the young with its own skin. Strange Nature ...
Virtual Worlds and Attack Scenarios
What do you get when you have virtual worlds with scriptable objects? Cracker attacks, of course. In this case, a user in Second Life built objects that, via script, produce further objects. This is a classic attack scenario in such worlds - overloading servers through high load, i.e., a classic DOS from within. What was interesting about this attack was that these objects catapulted every avatar a few million meters into the air - possibly to hinder cleanup efforts.
Cleanup efforts? Yes. The system of Second Life is a virtual world with many scripted objects - so you can't just throw everything away, as this would destroy the users' content. Instead, all regions (in principle, a region is a server in a large server farm) that were attacked had to be cleaned of exactly the affected objects. To do this, the Lindens (the employees of the operator) first approached these objects inworld (i.e., within the simulation environment) to examine them. Presumably, the operator will have tools for mass cleanup of malicious objects, but nevertheless, the entire work took several hours!
Well, one might say that this is trivial - after all, it's just a virtual world on a server cluster, nothing more. But Second Life is more - among other things, it is a micropayment system. And a lot of money is transacted there - thousands of US dollars per hour (and not just to the operator, but also among the users themselves!). There is therefore direct economic damage from the downtime. Not to mention the interactions of users in the system and events taking place - for example, on that evening, there were two major openings of new clubs with live music. The musicians were completely disconnected from the system by the events, as they no longer received any feedback, they did not know whether they were still live or not (although the streams usually continued to run) and of course, a lot of people's party was ruined. And the club owners certainly had a different idea of their opening party.
All in all, of course, predictable - because any system with influence possibilities will be misused by people, even if it is out of sheer malice - but nevertheless extremely annoying.
Hamburg Regional Court: Forum operators are liable for contributions - I hope this absurd ruling is overturned as soon as possible. Nonsensical nonsense that the judges are spouting, and absolutely not in line with previous case law.
2003 UB313: "Tenth Planet" barely larger than Pluto - I still support giving this object planetary status - or revoking it from Pluto.
Get A-Life: Core Wars / Tierra - a researcher lets a few Core-Wars algorithms loose in a digital primordial soup with simple mutation and simple death - and finds evolution and parasites shortly thereafter.
Texas Judge Orders Medication for Inmate - how perverse must a judge actually be if he first grants a mentally ill prisoner a stay of execution because of his mental illness - and then forces him to take his medication. Specifically so that he can be legally executed.
Using Vodafone and Sony Ericsson V600i / V600 UMTS via Bluetooth under Mac OS X - if it's the company phone.
Bundesrat considers software patents - and who cares about the Mittelstand and open source software. Certainly not the Prolethicians in Düsseldorf ...
PHI, the golden ratio - various definitions of the golden ratio.
The nonsense about AdSense - about the inconsistencies in Google's AdSense/AdWords programs.
Rights holders want information from providers without a court order
At the current development in copyright law, the demand for self-justice of the music industry was simply only logical. And with the currently sick thinking in Berlin, it would not be surprising if this were granted ...
Expert: Google Earth Endangers World Cup Security
I've heard that Paranoia can indeed be treated within certain limits.
Eiffel development environment becomes Open Source - yes, there was another object-oriented language.
Man Was Enduring the Dentist's Drill 9,000 Years Ago - a 9,000-year-old dentist? Scary ...
Patent Busting: EFF against patent on online exams - and no end in sight for the ridiculous patents.
Python 3000 - Adaptation or Generic Functions?
Python 3000 - Adaptation or Generic Functions? Wow. GvR sees the light! Generic functions in Python 3000! Hell freezes over, third time ...
Things nobody tells you about the south pole
What you never wanted to know about the South Pole, but you get told anyway.
Maemo Development Platform Roadmap - where the Nokia tablet with version 2.0 of the system is heading.
Colorblind Web Page Filter - a filter with which you can check websites for compatibility with various forms of color blindness.
Apple Converts Xserves from PowerPC to AMD
Wow, I didn't realize that Apple is transitioning the XServe to AMD processors. I wonder if Intel agrees with their assessment of server performance?
Deutsche Bahn becomes a DSL provider - ok, this is definitely one of them. For the WDR, this is damn good.
IP addresses for vanity - yes, the date can sometimes be important.
WordPattern - probably the next one for today?
Educational Goal: Myth Instead of Knowledge!
The Prolethicians in Düsseldorf have finally lost their minds, as they are advocating for a reference to God in the education law:
A draft law by the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia intends the following reformulation for §2 of the school law: "To awaken reverence for God, respect for the dignity of man, and willingness for social action is the highest goal of education."
As an atheist, I feel personally attacked and offended by such nonsense. We have a separation of state and religion in Germany - and it should stay that way. The demand for reverence towards a superstitious institution is an absurdity and an insult to every atheist and has simply no place there.
IBM offers bounty for Exchange customers - clear message (although Notes vs. Exchange is like "driving out the devil with Beelzebub" to me)
python-constraint - had I already seen this? Doesn't matter, there's a new link and everything is repeated on TV anyway. Constraint solver in Python. Could definitely be interesting for projects.