AirPort Blog - a weblog about AirPort (Apple wireless solution)
Archive 24. November 2005
Off to total surveillance
Matching the US military's satellite-communicating RFID chips, there's also some brainless news to report from Europe: EU committee approves compromise on telecommunications data retention:
Data protection advocates have rejected the agreements as a "disastrous breach" in telecommunications surveillance and a "massive restriction of fundamental rights." In their opinion, the question of the constitutionality of the bill would also arise in its revised form here in the country.
But the politicians involved in the compromise are celebrating the whole thing as a great success. Well, the constitution doesn't interest anyone here in Germany, especially not the current government - as can be seen from their budget for 2006, which is not in compliance with the constitution ...
Oh, and since we're on the topic of brainless ideas: the music industry demands the same access rights to citizens' dial-up data as those provided for combating terrorism. Another parallel to the brainless consequences of the fight against one's own population in the USA.
DOPE Squad Security - open source WLAN driver for Apple Airport. Designed for use as a passive WLAN scanner.
DragAndDrop - MochiKit - Trac - Drag and drop with MochiKit.
Holographic Storage Media with up to 1.6 Terabytes
News on holographic storage media:
The discs should initially only allow filling at 20 megabits per second and hold data for at least 50 years after writing.
Please with affordable media prices, then I finally have a usable archiving medium for images ...
How Secure is WEP, Anyway? - an interesting link about the security of WLAN, specifically how easy it is to crack a WLAN with WEP.
Weird Python 2.3 Bug
Some bugs you chase are really strange. Just take a look at the following Python script:
import re
r = re.compile('^', re.M)
src = '''<html> <head> <title>Logviewer</title> </head> <body> <div> <h1>Titel</h1> </div> <div> {{}}
{% block content %}
{% endblock %}
</div> </body> </html> '''
for match in r.finditer(src):
print match.start()
Looks quite harmless - it just returns the positions of the newlines (yes, I know, you do this differently - the source is not mine). The script has an infinite loop on the last, closing newline under Python 2.3. If you remove it (i.e., paste the """ directly behind the last tag without a line break), the script works. Under Python 2.4, both variants work. And you have to chase after things like that...
Do I really need to emphasize that this little snippet of code was hidden in a larger pile of code, or?