Outrage over EU plans for «web censorship» - latest from Looney Land. We have funny years ahead of us, with crazy politicians with control freak neurosis and the most absurd ideas about reality.
Archive September 2007
Flying Logic : Software for Visual Planning Support - hmm. Constraint Solver as a graphical tool. Sounds quite interesting.
Netherlands: End for Nedap Voting Computers - and what about us? Everything is still being declared as totally secure. Keeping your head in the sand prevents you from noticing what's happening around you ...
Black money affair: Kanther gets away with a fine - not everyone is equal before the law. Or does anyone believe that as a regular citizen they could have wriggled out of it so easily? Against a clear violation of the law by a federal minister (who, like all officials, has sworn an oath to our constitution - but what is that worth these days)?
Tour: Rasmussen had artificial EPO in his urine - new techniques, already hard at work. Well, we can probably bury cycling for good now, because by the time the associations and anti-doping agencies catch up, the topic will have spread far and wide again. What really gets to me: this silly whining of the caught and suspected, their pathetic media fuss.
What the end of the world looks like - «Approximately 20 million curies, half as much as during the Chernobyl disaster, were released», explains nuclear expert Vladimir Kuznetsov. A radioactive cloud drove a veritable swath of contamination hundreds of kilometers into the Urals. But containment of the accident damage only began ten hours later. The local administration waited for a signal from Moscow.
Bounce ban for federal mail servers - what I think of the various anti-spam list operators is generally known if you've been reading along here. Why administrators still use these pathetic lists, even though it's clear that each of these lists will eventually become an absurd farce through silly power games, I'll probably never understand.
PIN-Code and fingerprint - it seems the idiots in Berlin still haven't quite figured out that the internet is international - and stores abroad will ignore their great control fetishism. But of course, they will continue to try to sell this to us as a great idea for consumer protection.
Police intervention at demo against the surveillance state - "The police command, which initially had 450 officers present, defended the use of force after half of the distance covered with the argument that there had been numerous violations of regulations, such as against the height and width of the permitted transparents and against the ban on covering faces, 'in relation to the entire history'. In addition, radicals had already caused 'evil destruction' at tables and chairs of the luxury hotel Adlon during pre-checks of bags." - great de-escalation strategy and very appropriate for the topic, right? Does anyone need a bucket of sarcasm?
Experts have significant concerns about data retention - but this will certainly not impress any politician much. The critics simply pay too poorly.
Buy two OLPC notebooks, donate one - hey, why should the second device go to a child of the buyer? If the buyer wants one for themselves?
Dolderer back at the top of Denic - one could have had the whole fuss cheaper and with less stress ...
IE pwns SecondLife - bah. I've always had something against fancy URL handlers that also inherit parameters from the calls. The problem is - why should an application trust a URL? If a call is made via a URL, the program should always classify this as untrusted and never initiate an activity that could potentially be dangerous without informing the user. The culprit here is -autologin in SecondLife - it shouldn't work in this situation at all. The browsers should of course also check the data (and Mozilla's reaction is correct, that Firefox was fixed accordingly when the problem also appeared there), but the real problem lies with the Second Life client.
Ozbus, London to Sydney Bus Travel - Bus route. London-Sydney.
Tor-Server-Betreiber stellt nach Razzia Anonymisierungsserver ab - the biggest danger when using Tor or similar techniques: the technical ignorance of the authorities. They simply don't know what the stuff is and how they should react (taking the tor server would not have helped either, but would at least be logically justifiable). And of course the possibility for the authorities to intimidate people into stopping - which I do not want to imply here, I really just see the ignorance of the deciding official here. Tor is just exotic. For operators of such systems, however, this is part of the necessary risk assessment - you often and "gladly" encounter ignorance.
Merkel finds debate on online raids "concerning" - that's what you call democratic discussion, Mrs. Merkel. Have you looked in the Basic Law recently? The last time I checked, it still said we have a democracy. And something like freedom of opinion. And even that members of parliament are only bound by their conscience. But most of them have long since auctioned that off to the highest bidder. Funny enough, I find the ignorance of the prolethicians in Berlin towards facts much more concerning ...
SCO requests creditor protection - the IBM lawyers will have to hurry if they want to reach a settlement before SCO goes bankrupt. Or will there be another fool who throws money into SCO's coffers?
Anonymity network Tor "phished" - Encryption and network security is still difficult to understand for many. TOR secures the transport within its own network against manipulation and spying. Not the protocols that are used.
Lawyer Gravenreuth sentenced to prison - "In doing so, she acknowledged the fact that Gravenreuth was already convicted in the year 2000 for forgery in 60 cases. During the trial, the judge emphasized, according to taz, that the public must be protected from Gravenreuth."
EU Commissioner wants to "block dangerous words" on the Internet - yet another politician running amok, ignorant of the facts.
Microsoft receives patent for notification of changes in privacy policies - yet another trivial patent. And yet again by Microsoft. Okay, that the patent offices allow such things to pass is embarrassing. But that companies even dare to show up at the patent office with such a lump of nonsense ...
Bayern will schärfe Strafen für Gotteslästerung - they're crazy in Bavaria. Maybe we can sell that to the Vatican? Probably no other state would want something like that ... the Union blowhards obviously haven't heard of separation of church and state.
Leatherman Skeletool: The Lightweight Multi-Tool You'll Actually Use - clearly has a "must-have" factor. Preferably the carbon fiber version.
Shades - allows you to adjust the screen brightness on iMacs, and below the ranges allowed by OS X. It seems to use live filters, so it takes some graphics performance, and has the one or other glitch when you then start games like SL, but it seems quite usable as a first approach.
External Filters from Erlang - interesting post about managing a pool of external programs from Erlang and assigning tasks to them. All in OTP technology.
Mobile Processing - and here is the variant of Processing that creates applications for mobile Java devices (phones, etc.).
NASA World Wind in Processing - and here the two previous links combined. Call the navigable Earth from the interactive Java environment Processing.
Processing 1.0 (BETA) - interesting project that does with Java what you used to do with Logo - interactive graphics programming with a good set of simple libraries. And just like Logo back then, this is suitable for far more than just playing around. There are also books available.
World Wind JAVA SDK - the NASA alternative to Google Earth as an embeddable Java library.
Tin-Foil-Hats - and their effect. Or something.
BabelDjango - better i18n framework for Django. Looks quite nice and solves some of the problems I had with the gettext mess back when I developed the i18n stuff for Django.
Microsoft Allegedly Bullies and Bribes to Make Office an International Standard - about Microsoft's nice business practices.