Archive February 2006

Signs of Crisis

BASF posts record year:

The world's largest chemical company, BASF, ended 2005 with a record result. As the company announced, sales rose by 14 percent to 42.7 billion euros. The annual surplus increased by 50 percent to 3 billion euros. And BASF also sees itself well equipped for the current year.

Oh, yes, the profit in the field of nutrition and plant protection has a declining profit - well, the politicians will certainly provide BASF with record profits with an increasing trend with the seed regulation, if the industry has finally succeeded in tying farmers to their seeds, fertilizers, and poisons.

Also cute are the high profits in the oil and gas sector. Of course, the price increases in these areas are solely due to the high costs and have nothing to do with the fact that oil and gas companies want to increase their profits. (Yes, BASF is also busy in the natural gas sector - for example, through Wintershall, a company of the BASF Group).

What do the 3,600 BASF employees in Ludwigshafen, whose positions were cut in 2004, think of this corporate development? Especially those who were not pushed out through severance packages or partial retirement, but through transfer to a temporary employment agency?

#4G European Grounded "Shuko" Adapter. Walkabout Travel Gear (tm) - Adapter for a bunch of plug formats on Schuko. Could be my savior if Expansys does not have the power supply for the i-Tech keyboard available in Schuko version ...

8-p.info - Creammonkey - something similar to Greasemonkey, but for Safari.

Bluetooth Security - Bluetooth Security - what's possible, what's being done, what's behind it.

Migrate apps from Internet Explorer to Mozilla - interesting article that covers a series of pitfalls when switching between IE and Mozilla.

PlayDeluxe Shop - Online-Shop - there's also an English-to-German adapter. Much cheaper. Search for "adapter englisch".

Browsers are not program starters

Apple Safari automatically executes shell scripts - more precisely, a whole range of techniques come into play. The trigger, however, is the stupid habit of Safari to automatically start the appropriate viewer for certain file types - and sometimes incorrectly assign file types. In general, it is simply a bad idea when a browser tries to classify downloads as safe or unsafe and then passes them on to an external program - because this external program is usually in no way prepared to receive unsafe content. As soon as the browser misjudges, the trojan is functional.

So people: turn off the "execution of safe file types" in Safari. And Apple could take this as an opportunity to finally remove this function from Safari. The few extra clicks won't kill the user ...

Update: and here's the reason why I get a bit pissed off about such bugs - sorry, but this is Microsoft-World, not Unix-World. Please pull yourself together and don't do such nonsense

Know Your Enemy: Learning with VMware - how to build a virtual honeynet with VMware and see what and how is being hacked.

Snowball - finds word stems in various languages. Algorithms in a specially developed language. Practical for classic word lists.

Stéphane Ducasse :: Free Online Books - a whole series of free books about Smalltalk. Some are only scanned, some are real text PDFs. A whole series of classics are included.

ZNC - RottenBoy - interesting IRC bouncer (proxy) for multiple users. Significantly more powerful than the Muh I have used so far.

Bush and Nuclear Power

Bush calls for increased use of nuclear power:

"Our plan is to increase the use of safer and cleaner nuclear energy," said Bush, who a few weeks ago called for a reduction in oil dependence. The development and use of new technologies for solar and wind energy are also to be intensified.

But the fact that the raw material uranium is also limited, meaning that it is not a real alternative to oil at all, and that the issue of the final disposal of nuclear waste is not solved at all in the case of nuclear power, all this does not interest him at all.

The patent solution of the complete idiots - instead of relying on oil as a slowly depleting raw material, one chooses another depleting raw material that is much more dangerous and dirtier. Great strategy.

Of course, he also doesn't care that he just had his crisis with Iran because the nuclear program there may not be used solely for power generation. And that in the USA, for good reasons (costs and dangers), nuclear power has not been actively promoted and expanded since the 70s.

The actually more obvious vision for the future - the increased use of renewable energy sources - is once again completely ignored. It would be too simple if one were to address the problem of non-renewable energy sources, namely the non-renewability ...

United States of Absurdity

According to National Public Radio, severely ill patients were killed with a lethal injection during the Katrina evacuation because they could not have been evacuated in time. Yes, Europe must urgently emulate the American social model that makes such things possible (and other absurdities like the suspension of small children in elementary school for allegedly sexually harassing other children or dismissal of a nurse for alleged incitement to hatred - because she criticized the Bush administration for its Katrina mismanagement). We are not yet stupid enough here.

And to those who will again accuse me of salon anti-Americanism: sorry, but this is no longer salon-like. For me, the USA is a collective case for the madhouse. And don't tell me that one must distinguish between the people in America and the respective government and administration - a not entirely insignificant part of this supposedly defensible population has elected the supreme moron.

And yes, I am fully aware of the irony of the whole thing in view of the current brainless Berlin occupation. We are not far from the same madness.

Cocoa for Bracket Fetishists

There is actually an Objective-C Bridge for the second best Scheme in the world. And I hadn't seen it before. It looks very interesting, the author has a nice tutorial online where he controls his iTunes with Scheme. And a lot of other source samples for Chicken-Scheme, including the obligatory currency converter. However, you need a newer Chicken-Scheme version (i.e., a current snapshot), otherwise the -objc switch is not supported.

If they keep being this productive, Chicken will soon displace the best Scheme from its place.

The installation is quite hairy, so here are some notes on how I did it:

• Chicken Scheme 2.3 is the minimum
• Install libffi from Darwinports: sudo port install libffi
• Install objc Egg:

sudo chicken-setup -c "-I/opt/local/include -L/opt/local/lib" objc

Gauche:ObjectiveCBridge - there is also an Objective-C Bridge for Gauche Scheme. However, with fewer sophisticated examples.

HOC: A Haskell to Objective-C Binding - even for Haskell there is an Objective-C Bridge that I didn't know about.

The Real Reason Behind Hartz IV?

When you see 1-Euro-Jobbers being used as strikebreakers against VERDI, you might start to have some strange thoughts:

1-Euro-Jobbers are now being used as strikebreakers against the strike in the service sector. In the Lower Saxony city of Osnabrück, Hartz IV recipients are being forced by the public employer to drive the municipal garbage trucks. At the beginning of the week, this had to be enforced by a massive police operation against the strikers.

But of course, the 1-Euro-Jobs are only about preparing people for work and motivating them. What they are supposed to be motivated to do through such actions, however ...

Dresdner was the "SS Trust Bank"

A study commissioned by Dresdner Bank itself documents the bank's involvement in the Nazi regime, which went far beyond the involvement of Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank. These three banks were also the ones whose dissolution was recommended in the OMGUS reports (which, however, was not implemented).

Nokia 770 and Virtual Bluetooth Keyboard - how to connect the Laser Keyboard with the 770.

OpenVPN on Maemo - Porting OpenVPN to the Nokia Pad. Could be quite interesting, as you are now a bit too visible to others over free WLAN hotspots.

Showing off testosterone-damaged proletarians

Isn't it cute how the defense minister puffs up about completely theoretical scenarios?

Since the Constitutional Court has overturned the so-called shoot-down paragraph, there is not even a legal basis for the shoot-down of unmanned or exclusively terrorist-occupied aircraft in the event of terrorist threats. This would only be possible in self-defense in the event of a state of emergency beyond the law. "In that case, I would also issue a corresponding order." As defense minister, he is obliged to protect citizens from such an attack.

The poor guy - so far there has not been a single terrorist attack with drones or exclusively terrorist-occupied aircraft, nor has there been any indication of plans in that direction, but it certainly sounds very manly when you let the big macho out.

What an inflated blowhard.

Bavarian Ministry of the Interior against the Basic Law

How was that about discrimination again? Bavaria wants to deny passports to those seeking naturalization who support the PDS:

In addition to the long-standing practice of routinely inquiring with the domestic intelligence agency, Bavaria plans to ask every person seeking naturalization in the future whether they are a member of or support any of the organizations classified as extremist by the Munich Interior Ministry. The basis for this is a list of all organizations monitored by the Bavarian domestic intelligence agency, which has included the PDS since 1990. In individual cases, as confirmed by the spokesperson of the Bavarian Interior Ministry, Thomas Ziegler, on Wednesday to junge Welt, non-German members of the Left Party may therefore be denied naturalization. Even purchasing publications from the Left Party.PDS or attending party events could be interpreted as "support."

Article 1, Paragraph 3: No one may be disadvantaged or privileged because of their gender, descent, race, language, homeland and origin, beliefs, religious or political views. No one may be disadvantaged because of their disability. - but Beckstein certainly wants to change that too.

Firewall providers, sharpen the fillers!

Since Basel II becomes law - and thus it may be that the banks will ask your customers for documentation of IT security before a loan is granted (since IT security is part of the risk assessments in credit scoring):

The operational risks of a company also include the risks arising from the use of information technology in business processes. An active IT risk management is required, which deals with all aspects of IT security for the respective company. Important IT systems must be redundantly available, availability must be ensured, attacks on IT systems from inside and outside must be effectively repelled, contingency plans should be developed, and so on.

And since customers usually do not create their own documentation (which always fascinates me, because actually they should take care of security themselves, so they should also maintain their own documentation), they then demand such documentation from the service provider. Usually one day after they have been asked about the topic (e.g. when the auditor is about to refuse them the seal of approval because the documentation is missing).

Hey, that's a whole new form of corporate extortion: be cooperative, or your next IT security audit for the new loan will go down the drain.

Beautiful, New RFID World

RFID: Password cracking made easy

"A normal cell phone contains all the components needed to compromise all RFID tags in the immediate vicinity," explained Shamir. He did not examine all types of transponders, but only those of the most widespread brand, and they are completely unprotected. However, he attributes the vulnerabilities found less to this specific, unnamed manufacturer than to the need to reduce the production costs of RFID transponders at all costs. This forced developers to throw all security requirements overboard.

And when will they found the Stasi again?

The German Bundestag supports suspicionless surveillance of telecommunications:

With almost all the votes of the grand coalition, the Bundestag decided today, Thursday, after an intense debate, to apply for the storage of telephone and internet data for six months (PDF file). The federal government is thus called upon to implement the directive, approved by the European Parliament, for recording user traces "with moderation" and in the "minimum requirements". The directive must first be confirmed by the EU Council, which the ministers of justice and the interior have planned for the beginning of next week.

You have to let that sink in: the Bundestag is demanding the implementation of the EU directive - before the EU Council has even confirmed this directive itself. With such commitment, we can be sure that the federal government will massively push to destroy the last bit of data protection on the net.

The fact that the whole story in the EU was massively discussed among the states themselves and that the current approach is nothing more than a brazen collusion to push it through - that doesn't matter. We also only creatively interpret the Basic Law when we plan to murder innocent people, so why shouldn't we also serve the rights of citizens on a silver platter to the surveillance authorities.

All of this, of course, garnished with the squealing of "data protection is protection for criminals" and other smear slogans. Where are the great investigative successes through the already existing excessive surveillance possibilities? No presentable results - because it's all just stupid lies.

Disgusting, how under the guise of fighting terrorism, citizens are betrayed and sold out. With what persistence our elected representatives shit on our rights and only have a police state in mind - red or black, both just scum. They all outraged themselves about the GDR, and now they are all so keen on building the same surveillance state themselves.

Google Maps Plugin for Address Book - Brian Toth - a plugin for the Apple Address Book that allows you to jump directly to Google Maps from an address.

Karlsruhe overturns Aviation Security Act

Karlsruhe slaps down the government:

The legislator would not have been allowed to pass this far-reaching provision in the Aviation Security Act at all, the constitutional judges further criticized. Article 35 of the Basic Law only authorizes the deployment of the Bundeswehr in the event of disasters and accidents, the court clarified.

Fortunately, this absurd law is now off the table - provided the government follows the directive. At least its harshest representative - Schily - is no longer in office, hopefully his successors have more sense (what am I telling myself - now the wheelchair user is in charge ...)

Management by Stupidity or by Corruption?

How is the ALGII software actually doing?

The subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom has, however, by now realized that the existing solution is "no longer repairable." There are simply too many fundamental errors in the software's architecture.

Ok, so far, so bad. And what is the Federal Employment Agency doing? Quite simple:

The series of mishaps with the unemployment software A2LL has, according to information from Netzeitung, prompted the Federal Employment Agency (BA) to commission T-Systems with the programming of a completely new software. "T-Systems is working on a fundamental solution," it was said in circles familiar with the situation. The creation of a new program is taking place "within the framework of the existing contract." The BA did not want to comment on request from Netzeitung.

Translated: someone has massively messed up a software, admits themselves that it is no good and gets the order for a new software within existing contracts (i.e. without tender!). This is how our tax money and unemployment insurance contributions are wasted. And the reason?

The crucial point for the BA is the compatibility with A2LL. "It must be possible to easily take over all eight million data records," it was said. For this reason, the authority has also decided to commission T-Systems again with the programming. It is important to have T-Systems "on board," even if the company is partly responsible for the A2LL fiasco. The BA has explicitly decided against the decentralized solution of the company Prosoz.

Please what? There was an alternative solution offered. But the loser from last time was used again to make the data records transferable? Who guarantees this? T-Systems has already proven its inability - why does anyone believe that they can correctly transfer the data if they cannot process it correctly?

Data transfers are really not tied to individuals or companies - instead of making the goat the gardener again, T-Systems should have been obliged to document and disclose all interfaces, data formats, and structures. And then make a tender based on this - and simply define compatibility with the old data base as a condition. This time, please with severe penalty clauses for non-fulfillment.

Either someone in the project management at the BA is completely incompetent, or completely corrupt. I can't think of any other explanation. When you consider the debacle with the online system, the whole thing becomes clear - with the money that was squandered there, one could have helped some unemployed people well over the winter.

MUlliNER.ORG : Nokia770 - a whole range of tools for the Nokia pad, such as the Wireless Tools or dsniff. Interesting for analysis in case of WLAN problems

SlimserverAndNokia770 - how to use the Nokia Pad with the SlimServer as a music player.

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.

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.

Yahoo! UI Library - the JS/Ajax lib used by Yahoo for its own applications. BSD license!

You just have to love Ask MetaFilter

Honestly - someone has a hole in their head and tries to see how deep it is with a paperclip. And what's the comment?

Not to derail, but, does anyone else think it's a really really bad idea to put random objects down holes in your head?

What if it was a reset button?!

screen4DSLR : Changing Focusing screen for Canon DSLR - another provider for replacement focusing screens for digital SLRs (not just Canon!). This one has lower prices (probably because it uses standard focusing screens and just cuts them to size).

Spirit reaches Homeplate

Spirit hat Homeplate erreicht - a rather strange rock formation on Mars. The area really does look quite strange.

Kids ...

My image blog hugoesk.de (meanwhile deactivated again) seems to be enjoying great popularity lately - various images have appeared as background graphics on myspace.com and xanga.com sites. It's kind of strange to owe several GB of transfer volume (about ten times the traffic my main blog has) to some kids... (and I haven't even written anything about Tokio Hotel).

Well, so educational measures have been activated again (and no, the image used is neither obscene nor offensive - just a polite request):

# Deeplinking von http://www.xanga.com/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} ^.*\.jpg$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www\.xanga\.com/.*$
RewriteRule .* /wp-images/bilderklau.jpeg [L]

# Deeplinking von http://www.myspace.com/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} ^.*\.jpg$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*\.myspace\.com/.*$
RewriteRule .* /wp-images/bilderklau.jpeg [L]

Of course, my images are all under a CC license, so they can take them if they want. But that doesn't mean my traffic and my computer resources are also under a CC license - and especially with full-size JPGs, that's quite a bit of volume and computer resources. One should at least follow the forms (e.g. ask first if you can't handle the traffic yourself).

A single image in January with 3500 and this month already with 1500 hits has easily consumed several GB of volume - and these are only two sites that link to it. They seem to have a really big (and online-active) circle of friends, those two girls.

And backlinks (which would have been the minimum according to the CC license I use) they naturally haven't set either...

Strategic Labor Market Policy

Müntefering wants to cut ALG II for young unemployed people - because if you don't want to do anything about youth unemployment and the lack of training places, then you at least want to reach into the pockets of those who have nothing. It's logical, right? No? Well, it's the SPD's idea of labor market policy ...

But no one knew anything about us

CIA asked Germans for Al-Masri information - the whole edifice of lies is slowly collapsing:

The news magazine "Der Spiegel" reports that there were contacts between US and German security authorities about the case during the abduction of the German Khaled Al Masri by the CIA. According to this, during Al Masri's captivity in Afghanistan in May 2004, two US agents contacted Bavarian and Baden-Württemberg investigators who were monitoring the Islamist scene in Al Masri's hometown of Neu-Ulm.

Online aerial images of Germany

Ok, I officially admit, I am impressed! Honestly, the idea of simply linking an address to a point on the map is great. Even if our area is only available with rather sparse resolution again. Great web application, big praise to the developers.

I'm not a hater, I just flush a lot.

It's always fascinating to see what questions are asked on the internet - and get answers!

Clear, I pack data to Google ...

Privacy advocates are not enthusiastic about Google Desktop Search 3:

On February 9, 2006, a beta version of Google Desktop Search was released, which allows you to find documents stored on different computers. This is achieved by storing the relevant files on the Google server, so you need to have and use a Google account to use this feature.

Great idea. Of course, I'll put data from my workplace on a Google server. Where it's readily available for anyone who gains access to the boxes. Very big idea. Google may have the motto "don't be evil" - but they should also think about the motto "don't be stupid" ...