The really nice thing about my Zeitgeist is that it also shows me the absurd little things. So I would like to let anyone know who searched for naked pictures of Bill Gates that I don't possess any such pictures and don't intend to have them here on the blog. You have to draw the line somewhere.
Large consumers are to be relieved of electricity costs at the expense of private households. And this is not some backbencher demanding this – rather these are demands from the government to a regulatory authority in the energy sector to be established. Great – another piece of evidence that all these wonderful regulations are only about allowing companies to cut themselves the largest possible pieces of the cake at consumers' expense. Politically sanctioned rip-off. An excellent example of Clement-style special democracy.
As the Schockwellenreiter already correctly asks: is it any wonder when the members of parliament are paid by energy suppliers?
Debut as CDU General: Kauder shocks Red-Green with Nazi comparison. At least one stops wondering why the JU invites Hohmann as a keynote speaker - the tree simply doesn't fall far from the apple here. The Union has been playing with the right-wing fringe time and again since Kohl.
Protests against the situation in Saxony only exist because a few seats didn't go to their own ultra-rightists there. So no real difference of opinion, but pure turf warfare...
Eric's Archived Thoughts: WP-Gatekeeper is a very interesting approach to comment spam: it simply asks one of many pre-configured questions that a human can answer very easily, but a spam bot cannot. Similar forms are already being used in various blogs, but here it's nicely worked out (although in my view it could also be completely realized as a plugin). The basic idea is essentially that of a CAPTCHA - but a textual CAPTCHA. A human can easily answer the question what is 1+1 - a spam bot won't get anywhere with that. Sure, spammers can create databases of questions and answers. But if everyone sets up their own collection of questions, it won't get them far. For comment spam, it should be a very usable solution.
Unfortunately, there's no such simple solution for trackbacks...
Update: since I find the idea somewhat amusing, I'm currently writing a corresponding plugin. So it's possible that my comments might behave a bit strangely tonight.
FDP: "In Germany, the wrong people are having children" - I was also sitting there pretty flabbergasted at the garbage that Bahr spouted. I just hadn't quite figured out how to verbally attack it. Ralf took that off my hands. Go read it.
freshmeat.net: Project details for JRuby - cool, JRuby has now reached Ruby 1.8. A nice alternative in the Java environment to simply program with Ruby. The Jython folks should get a move on and finally make Jython fully Python 2.3 compatible - there's still a lot that needs work there.
heute.de - The Unequal Brothers. A good summary of the blogosphere and its relationship to journalism.
Internet Explorer still vulnerable after patch - which is embarrassing enough in itself. But the Heise editorial recommendation:
In principle, ActiveX is always a gateway for malware and should be disabled if necessary. However, some websites will then no longer function correctly.
is somehow peculiar: I've never really noticed ActiveX as a barrier to visiting any websites. Well, I'm a Mac and Linux user - if websites only worked with ActiveX, I would have noticed it, since it's conceptually impossible for me to run it (not even in IE, because of the wrong processor architecture).
Sure, there are a few Microsoft products that rely on ActiveX - but you really can't claim that it's become widespread out there on the web. So I'd say: disable ActiveX at least for the Internet zone. It has no value there. And in the trusted zones - which I already consider a pretty big euphemism for IE - only enable it if it's really necessary (for example, because an intranet solution unfortunately uses ActiveX). Or install a proper browser for surfing the web. That's the better solution anyway ...
Introducing JSON - another object ASCII notation, this one based on JavaScript syntax. Quite interesting - not as fussy about whitespace as YAML and not as verbose in syntax as XML.
JSch for J2ME - no idea if I'd want to use an SSH client on my phone (text input on a phone is more than annoying), but it would be possible with this...
.: json-rpc.org :. - an RPC library based on JSON.
Young Union invites ex-CDU politician Hohmann - and thereby makes itself (yet again) a laughingstock of the nation. How stupid can you actually be to stage such an action as criticism of the party leader? Sure, the Young Union hasn't overtaken the federal party on the far right for the first time - but then the CDU must surely be asked the question of how it actually intends to actively combat strengthening right-wing extremism if it recruits its people from such political newcomers ...
Ringtone hit parade from April - clear case for Wonko...
MIDI Bagpipe Roundup - if anyone still wants to give me a pointless and overpriced gift: I'd love one of these electronic bagpipes. If only to drive the neighbors crazy.
mit dem Link-Kondom rel="nofollow"
ModSecurity - Web Intrusion Detection And Prevention / mod_security is an Apache module that examines requests and decides based on filters whether a request should be allowed through or whether a filter measure (script, log, etc.) should be triggered. Quite interesting, even though I'm generally skeptical about rule-based filtering against attacks - it only finds known or expected attacks. The real danger lies in the unexpected attacks...
MT-Blacklist -> Hijacked comments.cgi - anyone using Moveable Type should disable the comment script. The email verification that checks whether the sender address input doesn't contain junk is broken - which allows you to sneak in additional recipient addresses by separating them from the actual sender address with a line feed. And with that you can happily use MT to spam other people.
A real beginner mistake - the email validation is done with a regex that doesn't match the end of the string and uses dotall - so it only goes up to a possible line feed and ignores everything after it. Really stupid.
Hotel Falckenstein: Wühlmaus-Monogamie - a highly recommended comment on the state of gender equality. And on secret paternity tests. And on voles.
