CCC | Chaos Computer Club analyzes current version of the state trojan. Well, well, the current state trojan is just as bad as the alleged prototype. And of course, everyone claims not to use it. So what is the wonderful, legally compliant version of the state trojan that is allegedly used in the authorities? It would be interesting if the authorities would provide this trojan to the CCC for analysis. But that would be honest and transparent behavior. Apparently, we can no longer expect that from authorities in our banana republic.
Linkblog - 28.9.2011 - 26.10.2011
Galileo Computing :: Developing Apps for iPhone and iPad - index. Since I once again have access to an iOS Developer Account, I'll blog about it. A free book to read about iOS development, which also works with the new features in iOS and Xcode (at least with some of the new features). Seen at Schockwellenreiter. Of course, you can also simply buy the book if you want dead trees.
Deutsche Telekom can't seem to learn... | iPhone 4S: Deutsche Telekom exchanges SIM cards | Mac & i News Forums. Interesting - the Deutsche Telekom problem with SIM cards in the iPhone 4S doesn't seem to be new at all. Okay, it's a link to the Heise forum and thus anything but hard fact, but somehow still strange. In Google, for example, in various Android forums I also found something from April this year, it really seems to be the case - and the hotline also just accepted the order for the exchange without any problems. I'm curious to see if the replacement card is also a 3N card (you can apparently see this directly on the cards). And just as curious to see if my iPhone's tantrums will stop then. However, it's a weak image that the Deutsche Telekom service notes still claim that exchanging the SIM card won't help and that there is no normal announcement - I only saw this by chance in the Heise ticker.
Pixelmator 2 Sneak Preview. Hmm. Sounds like it could be a good alternative to Photoshop Express - the Healing Tool and content-aware Fill would be exactly the two features I use in PSE (and which are not provided by LR or other tools). I really should try it out - the over 1G disk space usage just for PSE is somehow quite annoying ...
Mellow Morning » Django Facebook 3.2 – Simple image upload and wall posts. Since FB is unfortunately still the only social network with a serious API (sorry, but G+ doesn't have a serious API as long as they only offer a level like RSS-over-JSON and the Diaspora API is unfortunately still internal - but Diaspora is in alpha anyway, so there will certainly be more in the beta), you have to deal with it. And the new features of django-facebook look like they could ease some of the pain (and maybe one or the other interesting toy could become interesting for me).
Oh, Apple… oh, Aperture… | massenbelichtungswaffen.de. Since I often wonder if I should try Aperture - this article has cured me from spending the 70 euros for a longer time. Because what good is an image manager and image editor that might have problems with my (current or future) cameras ...
WordPress Germany FAQ » Privacy notes on the use of Akismet in Germany. Found at Schockwellenreiter and also implemented - I already had the explanation in the imprint, now the checkbox when commenting has also been added. It might be a bit cumbersome for the three people who comment here from time to time, but I think it's bearable. Especially since there are other ways to comment - your own blog posts, or tweeting, facebooking or googleplussing (there's also a privacy-compliant user consent for that), so you can choose where you want to leave your data traces. (And of course, you can also simply send me an email to the email address listed in the imprint, which then works without consent - but be careful, my email provider is Google! They are evil!)
iPhone 4S: Users report problems with new SIM cards. I would like to point out that I find it particularly unpleasant when such problems occur with me. Bugs can please have The Others (tm), ok? Definitely not only occurs with previously used MicroSims and turning off the SIM PIN only brings half the relief: then the miserable slow SIM unlocking is better, but the network connection still drops. The last time at least it helped to simply turn mobile data off and on again, but this is not a solution, as you don't notice it directly and therefore in the time when the phone desperately tries to get a connection outside, the battery is sucked dry. Bah.
PayPal is (once again) a pigsty: "PayPal just sent us an email saying “appeal denied,” where they announced that they would lock up the Diaspora* community’s donations for 180 days. Yes, you heard that right. PayPal gets to earn interest on all of our donations for 6 months, while we have to wait for PayPal to come up with a reason to justify their decision." via Diaspora* — How Diaspora* Found Its Tiger Stripe in the Midst of a Paypal Fiasco. I only use PayPal because it is still the only way to meaningfully cash out small amounts in SecondLife (and I certainly don't make large amounts there). Otherwise, Stripe really sounds quite interesting, especially for smaller projects where you need payment - and don't want to submit to PayPal's arbitrariness.
The impact of Apple’s Siri release: From the former lead iPhone developer of Siri. One of the developers of the app that later became Siri spills the beans. Very interesting, some things are indeed simpler than one might have imagined, others certainly more complicated than it reads in the summary. But I agree with one thing: this will surely give a boost to user interfaces for small devices and consumer computers - I can't imagine that we will forever stick with the rather crude text input interface, with keyboard and all.
Mojolicious - Perl real-time web framework. Looks quite interesting, simply because it gives a rather lean impression and does not require too many Perl peculiarities. Of course, you can also have this with Ruby or Python, microframeworks are not extremely exciting, but there are still people who work with Perl.
vim-orgmode - Text outlining and task management for Vim based on Emacs' Org-Mode : vim online. Who wants OrgMode but finds the Emacs key layout simply sick (which could be about 99% of all VIM users), now there is also OrgMode for VIM. As a plugin. I myself mostly use VimWiki, but maybe I'll check out VimOrgMode as well, it sounds quite interesting (although I have connected VimWiki with Trunknotes to edit things on the go - but there is also an iPhone app for that).
AirPrint Activator v2.0 « Netputing. Bookmarked for later - this allows you to share your network printers and the PDF converter on the Mac as AirPrint printers, so you can print from the iPad on the couch (and since you can also print to a PDF converter, you don't even have to waste paper).
About Weavrs. Social Media Bots. Defined by keywords, they run around and simulate a defined personality. Can be further controlled by filters and topics. And here someone who is now getting started with the bots and releases several "personalities" on G+ in response to "Real Name Requirement". Of course, this won't convince Google that the Real Name Policy is completely bananas. But it's still funny.
Textastic – Syntax highlighting text editor, FTP, SFTP, Dropbox – for iPad. I use this editor on the iPad - also integrated with PythonMath, as it has "open in..." and Dropbox integrated.
Python Math | Python for iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch. Pretty cool, this is a really useful Python on the iPad. No GUI modules or anything - just a slightly enhanced shell and the standard library as well as sympy. numpy, scipy and matplotlib are under consideration. The implementation is surprisingly usable - it's good for small tinkering and you can export the transcript by email and get files via the "Open in ..." functions e.g. from Mail or Dropbox.
Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera // Jonas Pfeil. That's a really cool concept. A ball with padding and a lot of small cameras built in, arranged in such a way that the ball can take a full 360-degree panorama with one click. You just throw the ball up and get the panorama back. Way Cool. Want one!
Diaspora* Advanced Sharer. Another Diaspora share button, this one is hosted on github (and can therefore also be "cloned" for self-hosting). It offers a selection of pods that you have used - not just a single pod. Therefore interesting for those who are on multiple pods.
Cleaning… – Marco.org. There are still some odd things about iOS 5. Here's the issue with the cache and tmp directories, which are now cleaned up much more aggressively, causing some applications to have to fetch data from the network much more often (or violate Apple's guidelines and store documents in the cache). This mainly affects offline readers, as their content is, by definition, reconstructable and thus belongs in the cache - but it might be removed there, which makes the whole offline reading absurd. Not good.
Bundestrojaner-Artikel-Sammlung - Farlion Inside. Since it's getting a bit confusing, here is a very comprehensive and detailed collection of links on the topic of Bundestrojaner, which, by the way, was also used by the BKA. But of course only in a modified version, which we all believe because they have just lied to us heavily in the denial.
[Service to share on any Diaspora* pod [[Basshero.org]]](http://www.basshero.org/blog/108/service-to-share-on-any-diaspora*-pod). Well blogged, this already looks quite neat. A Share-on-Diaspora button that first asks the user for their home pod and then stores this in a cookie, so that this Share button can really work with all pods. Maybe I could rebuild this into a Wordpress plugin and integrate it into my blog - then everything comes from my own blog, so there are no problems like with the other Share/Like/Tweet buttons (and it doesn't need to be as complicated as with FB, Twitter or Google+).
How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%, Nuxeo Developers Blog. Badly blogged, as we will probably soon play around with apps and the Android simulator is extremely slow - testing with it makes almost no sense, as with Phonegap applications, you could outperform the browser rendering with paper, pencil, and eraser, so slow is the image build-up. With the solution here, you don't have an exact test of an Android device, but at least for the first feeling tests, it should be sufficient, as with Phonegap it is more important that the rendering engine is the same than that the CPU is the same.
A Lesser Photographer - A Manifesto. I'm not big on manifestos, but here someone has simply written down their thoughts on photography and reduced them to 10 essential points. Interesting about this: they drastically reduced their equipment in the process. And in their manifesto, they provide the reasoning behind it. A lot of sensible information compactly summarized—it's definitely worth taking a look. You won't become any less intelligent from it.
State Trojan also in NRW - WDR 2 Der Sender. Just heard a radio report - and again annoyed. If someone lies to you multiple times, why do you believe wild, unverifiable claims? The alleged "configuration" of the Trojan is feasible for the police, but not the development? Haha, very credible. And the configuration as well as the deployment - these are digital traces that are, on the one hand, trivially falsifiable (unless there is a usable cryptographically signed audit) and, on the other hand, not retrievable afterwards. The documents on the cases only contain what the respective official has said. Whether that is true, no data protection officer and no lawyer can find out afterwards - unless the Trojan is found and examined on devices. And that is exactly what happened with the Bavarian Trojan - and the examination by the CCC did not speak of deactivated features, but of active functions. So again, why do parts of the press still believe the claims of the state criminal investigation departments and politicians?
Kodak Said to Weigh Bankruptcy Filing to Clear Path for Selling Patents - Bloomberg. Ouch - that would be tough, among other things for Leica. Because their digital Ms get the digital part from Kodak. And that could also become negative for M8 and M9 users, if there is no replacement electronics available there. I have already been bitten by Kodak once, when my DCS 520 died (and that was only the digital part from Kodak - the analog part from Canon was problem-free).
Ricoh GXR A12 Field Report - just when you think you've made your decision, someone comes along and throws everything up in the air again, and you have to sort it all out from the beginning. Sure, the NEX 5n, which I favor, probably has the better overall features - but the lack of an anti-aliasing filter really appeals to me, as does the fact that microprisms are also used here to optimize imaging with M optics. Well, I'll have to ponder a bit longer. But even after the article, it will probably remain with the NEX system - because with the M8 I already have a compromise camera, the GXR doesn't really deliver much more beyond that - and the technical gimmicks (video and panoramas) are just fun with the NEX. Especially since the linked text suggests that the 5n also has a rather weak AA filter.
Fujifilm FinePix X10. I'm a sucker for well-made retro design, and this one hits all the right notes for me. Although I would probably have trouble justifying the 599 Euro price tag for a 2/3" chip with a fixed 28-112mm equivalent lens and a purely optical tunnel viewfinder. But just the fact that Fuji took the trouble to make a pseudo-leather finish is nice.
Bundestrojaner: The Privates behind the Bundestrojaner | Politics - Frankfurter Rundschau. Jaja, but the BKA has already denied it. It will certainly be funny, especially because even the "normal" media have picked up on this - and even if Merkel and Co. ignore blogs and the like, something like the FAZ really hurts them when they get it read to them by their press sorters.
I usually ignore Techcrunch, but they have this story first (at least I haven't seen it anywhere else):
Now, some company called VS Technologies is suing Twitter, alleging that it infringes on a patent of theirs, entitled “Method and system for creating an interactive virtual community of famous people”. For real? For real.
via Twitter Gets Sued For Letting Famous People Interact Online | TechCrunch.
SuperCollider » About. This is what is used as a basis under the previous project. SuperCollider has its own programming language, so it can also be used for live coding and similar purposes.
Home // Overtone. I'm always excited about sound makers - this is a tool for interactive sound programming and live coding and instrument building (of course digital), and all of it written in Clojure. Maybe for one or the other a reason to take a closer look at Clojure.
Henri Cartier-Bresson | Adam Marelli Photo. An interesting article that examines the geometric basis of HCB photos and thereby makes one aspect of HCB's photography more understandable.
Chaos Computer Club: The German state trojan has been cracked - Current - FAZ. I'm linking to the FAZ. And then to an article where the FAZ uses the CCC as an expert source. But such things happen when your own executive wants to screw over the citizens and just builds constitutionally illegal trojans that are supposed to spy on the citizens. And in the process does things like implementing arbitrarily reloadable (and thus unchecked) code - and then has the whole thing checked for security by verifying an IP address to a redirect server in the USA. Which is just great again. Oh, and you can also deposit data on the computers of the suspects with the software. And of course without any control. No investigator would do that, that would be illegal. About as illegal as the whole trojan. And of course we trust the people who come up with such things, don't we?
Time zones: tz database shut down due to lawsuit. This is probably one of the extra-absurd cases of patent extortion. Time zones are hardly copyrighted by this silly company, and the banal compilation of facts that do not belong to you really does not have a level of creativity that needs to be greatly protected. Patent trolls are annoying.
oryx-editor - Web-based Graphical Business Process Editor. Just looked this up for a colleague and it looks quite interesting - I should take a closer look at what it actually does. This could be quite exciting for some work projects.
virtualenvwrapper 2.10.1 — virtualenvwrapper v2.10.1 documentation. Hmm, I think I've already seen this, but since I now almost exclusively work with virtualenv, I should take another look - this seems to really simplify things (although it seems to assume that all environments are in a main directory, I would probably have to adjust a bit on my side).
Straight Talk on Event Loops. After his beautiful rant "Node.js is Cancer" Ted Dziuba goes into more detail about what the problem is with pure async-event solutions like node.js. As a programmer of a rather old project in Python - the Toolserver for Python - I can certainly understand this. There are good reasons why I implemented threads integrated into the event loop for parallel processing as needed. This "async is faster and better than threads" is exactly the kind of hype nonsense like "NoSQL is faster and better than SQL" and other pigs that are currently being driven through the village.
Glass cover replacement for Sony NEX LCD screen | Photoclubalpha. Well blogged, this could also be worth it for my NEX 3 - the display now looks rather silly with the rubbed-off anti-glare coating. At least I could remove the no longer particularly well-functioning film - according to reports from other users, the glass underneath alone should also be quite good.
The Olympus 45 1.8 Micro 4/3 Lens Review by Steve Huff. Okay, with Steve you always have to subtract some enthusiasm, but the 45/1.8 really sounds very exciting. The Micro 4/3 system is finally gaining momentum. Some of the latest lenses that have been announced and actually released are very interesting. The same goes for the Olympus 12/2.0 or the Panasonic 14-42 Powered Zoom (yes, yes, powered zoom sounds like a compact camera, but hey, the lens is extremely small and thus ideal for the GF1 for an always-with-you camera with a bit more flexibility than the 20mm). I'm still torn between the Sony E-Mount and the Micro 4/3 system, but in the end, it will come down to the lenses - what good is a system that is better in terms of the sensor if the lens selection is too limited. Sony is definitely releasing new bodies too quickly - and too slowly new lenses.
Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems—climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, eking out the occasional tiny innovation—like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done. via Innovation Starvation - Neal Stephenson at World Policy Institute.
My profile on my own Diaspora pod - if anyone is also there, just add gb@pod.rfc1437.de as an aspect. It's running quite smoothly now and therefore it's now so to speak semi-official. Not that there's much going on there yet, but maybe one or the other reader here also hangs out on a Diaspora pod. It's the little details that interest me about Diaspora - of course also the big things like cost efficiency and distributed architecture, but when you see for example that the profile naturally has an RSS feed as standard, that's already nice. Or that Markdown is simply offered as formatting. And since the last iterations, the mobile interface is also quite nice. No app, but at least an iOS adapted surface. And well, the distributed installation - Diaspora is a bit like OpenSim in that way. And that's at least quite interesting as a toy. BTW: personally known readers can write to me for an invite if they want to play around with it. Sorry, no open pod, but I currently have no desire for the automatic hassle that results from public systems.
Clearly identifiable: NATO wants individual signature for every internet user. The next pig that will be driven through the village. Military facilities are not exactly known as birthplaces of democracy, so I'm not surprised to hear such nonsense from that direction. But it will certainly be interesting to observe which politicians and which lobby groups will pick this up. Wouldn't be surprised to see some of the hardliners from Berlin or e.g. the rights extortionists of the music industry. Oh, and it will certainly be funny to see what the "data protectors" will not say about it.
Data Protection Officers: Social Plugins Not Permissible in Germany - Golem.de. Great, with this, almost all external linking will go down the drain. Loading JavaScript libraries via a delivery network? Forbidden. Displaying YouTube videos? Forbidden. Displaying Flickr slideshows? Forbidden. The fact that such an absurd perspective leads the entire internet ad absurdum will surely please rather than concern the political level. At least the part that already stands out due to regular misunderstanding. Sometimes I have the feeling that the current group of "data protection officers" are only moles for hardliners in the parties who would like to regulate everything to death. Because only a dumb and quiet citizen is a good citizen. This has nothing to do with real protection of our data - because these "data protection officers" do not take action against the transmission of flight data or intra-European account movements to foreign intelligence services. Nor do they take action against nationwide central databases that are being built through the introduction of the central tax number or the electronic patient card (or in the future through a toll for private cars that will surely come at some point) - there is only half-hearted, weak-kneed "protest". There is nothing to be heard about the threat of fines. Who believes that the "data protection officers" would bravely throw themselves in front of the lions in the internet to protect our data, also believes that lemon folders would fold lemons.
dust is a JavaScript template library used in Kanso. Functionally very similar to Django Templates, though with slightly modified syntax.
Kanso Framework. That sounds very interesting - a framework for programming JavaScript CouchApps. So applications that are written in JavaScript and run entirely from a CouchDB installation. The server only needs to provide a CouchDB instance and that's it in terms of requirements - and since CouchDB comes with replication by default, you can easily scale up or implement fault tolerance - simply form a cluster of several CouchDB instances. Equally interesting are replications of the production database to another pot, such as a private developer machine or various other scenarios that are possible with CouchDB. Since the whole thing is based on CommonJS as the language base, JavaScript is not quite as bad as if it were used raw.
StatsModels: Statistics in Python — statsmodels v0.3.0 documentation. Not my focus at the moment, but with this module you can examine numbers for their statistical model.
pandas: powerful Python data analysis toolkit — pandas v0.4.1 documentation. I think I haven't had this before, but it's quite interesting for number crunchers and list comparers: a quite powerful toolkit for analyzing large datasets, especially with handling missing data and aligning data on a common basis. Overall, not entirely uninteresting for a project at work where I frequently deal with larger datasets from external sources.
websites - How do I suppress the address bar in mobile Safari? - Apple - Stack Exchange. Bookmarked because I just want to remember this - it's quite practical for web applications if the silly address bar is not there (at least if you work with Single-Page-Applications that do most of the work on the client)
"Algorithm" is Not a Four-Letter Word. Algorithms and their diversity and why programmers should deal with them (keyword: mental bench press) using the example of algorithms for generating labyrinths.
trunkdesk - Mac desktop companion for Trunk Notes - Google Project Hosting. Since I keep playing around with desktop wikis and generally have the problem that I also want to access data on the go - and not just for viewing, but also for making changes, and with comparable features and not just limited (which unfortunately rules out VoodooPad because the iOS version only supports plain text versions and these are not rendered properly on the desktop, but are also only displayed in plain text there), this could be interesting - it's a simple desktop client for TrunkNotes. Basically, I'm doing this right now with VimWiki, but I wouldn't mind having somewhat more complete support for TrunkNotes features on the desktop.