Content-type: matter-transport/sentient-life-form

Show the flag against Nazis

The Netreaper reminds me that there is a counter-action to the Nazi march in Münster on February 18th. So actually even several counter-actions.

Show flag against Nazis

Data Protection and Security Interests

A real gem from the Niedersachsen data protection dispute, which concerns the transfer of data protection functions to the Interior Ministry:

Critics fear that moving to the Interior Ministry could compromise the independence of oversight. Minister Schünemann dismissed this concern but acknowledged that security interests and data protection interests are not always aligned.

Wow, what a novel idea, who would have thought that conflicts with data protection interests might exist in the Interior Ministry? Could this perhaps be the reason why data protection officers should be independent of ministries?

Pressure on Hardware Manufacturers

Suse Linux in the future without proprietary drivers - good thing, in my opinion. The more pressure is put on hardware manufacturers, the more likely we will actually get better OpenSource drivers or interface disclosures.

I actually enjoy the job... - "Fiction" of a monitor and his comment on data retention.

Mobile? 870 MB are Mobile?

Mobile Offline-Variante der Wikipedia massiv erweitert - it is now 870 MB in size. Somehow, this scares me, as we are already hitting the limit with the 1 GB memory card in mobile devices. Hey, for my Nokia Tablet I only have 512 MB on the memory card! (well, with that I can always search online)

Embarrassing SSL Blunder at GeoTrust

In the USA, there is a case of phishing with valid SSL certificates. There, a certificate was issued via GeoTrust - the guys who also bought Trustcenter in Hamburg after it went bankrupt - to someone who then used it to fake a banking site. And so well that it is no longer easily possible for a customer to determine its authenticity.

SSL is no guarantee - it is only proof that someone has been issued a certificate. But you have to know whether you trust the certificate issuer - and unlike Web-of-Trust approaches, there is usually exactly one single certificate issuer, not a group or even an entire network.

If the vulnerability is in the certification of the certificate issuer, it doesn't matter how many or few bits the key works with ...

pyOpenSSL - Python interface to the OpenSSL library - quite complete bindings. Looks much better than the previous libs I have looked at.

Sabrina and Twister - interesting "fictions" that unfortunately are not quite as fictional as one would like. Well-written stories about data protection, privacy, surveillance, etc.

Statistical programming with R

I had already seen the first part (environment and basic structure) of "Statistical programming with R" earlier. Meanwhile, part 2 (functional programming and data analysis) and part 3 (object-oriented programming) are also online. Exciting for number crunchers.

Yahoo! Design Pattern Library - A collection of standard patterns in web GUI applications and how to solve them with the Yahoo JS library. Very interesting as a cookbook.