Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi - "Nicholas' new OLPC is dropping those pesky education goals from the mission and turning itself into a 50-person nonprofit laptop manufacturer, competing with Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Asus, HP and Intel on their home turf, and by using the one strategy we know doesn't work. But hey, I guess they'll sell more laptops that way." - about the alleged downfall of OLPC. A good idea, but apparently a poor implementation in key areas such as deployment and actual use as an educational tool.
Linkblog - 18.4.2008 - 17.5.2008
Consequences of the SSH/SSL weakness - clear words about the impact of the bug. Only 32767 different keys were generated for the machines during the time the defective OpenSSL version was in use (at least since spring 2007, if you were on stable). Ouch.
Debian OpenSSL Predictable PRNG Toys - and here are the matching toys to play with the hole. Generating the 32767 keys for various key architectures.
Questionable Risk Assessment: Is Genetically Modified Feed Dangerous? - "So everything is fine with green genetic engineering? Not at all. Because the safety tests of genetically modified plants are paid for by the very companies that want to make money with genetically modified plants. Is objective risk assessment possible in this way? A rascal who thinks evil of it ..." (it's old and possibly I already had it, but because I just searched for it ...)
Getting Started with Processing.js - what the title says.
Google Doctype - References to all the things that make up Web 2.0 today (HTML, CSS, JS)
Lily - a visual programming environment for the web. Now also using Processing.js
Nudibranchs - no, not that kind of nude photos you perverts. Sea slugs. Colorful.
processing.appjet.net - and this basically gives you the typical Processing interface - only in HTML and in the web browser, with Processing.js. Ideal for experimenting.
Some Chrome For Pjs - why the lucky stiff provides a suitable desktop application for Processing.js
The Bla Page - when a language designer can't think of anything for the language's name ...
Debian and OpenSSL: The Aftermath - for anyone who has doubts whether they need to recreate their keys: "However, rather than fix the calls to RAND_add(), the Debian maintainer instead removed the code that added the buffer handed to ssleay rand add() to the pool. This meant that the pool ended up with essentially no entropy. Clearly this was a very bad idea." - yes, "essentially no entropy" when generating keys is a really bad idea. Ouch.
Panorama freedom in danger - great, now they're making photography completely impossible by requiring every little thing to be registered with permission in triplicate and checked with the big boss first. What nonsense? Public space is public space, even if there's some alleged art crap standing around. With the cultural understanding of our prolethicians (who are usually responsible for the "beautification" of public space), these things are mostly just disruptive to photography anyway... (yes, I saw the note about "commercial use" - but since commercial intent is often attributed to blogs, photo bloggers quickly find themselves in a gray area)
Vendors Are Bad For Security - about the "bugfix" in Debian that has made all generated OpenSSL keys more or less unusable since 2006. Thanks for the extra work, you idiots. Funny also the comments in which the OpenSSL developer gets his own rant stuffed back down his throat because the OpenSSL idiots did not deem it necessary to deal with the fix suggested by the Debian developers (except for one who actually signaled thumbs-up). Well. All software sucks.
Wallraff exposes malpractices in bread factory - how to make a lot of noise with small bread rolls ...
Injection against paralysis - wow.
Kamelia - a Python framework for, hmm, things. Whatever. Apparently also web applications. And apparently by the BBC. And looks damn interesting.
US officer wants deterrence in cyberspace - cute, these military types, strutting around and talking nonsense.
Why your internet experience is slow - "If content is king, why is there so little of it on the web? And why are content providers like Salon always whining about their huge bandwidth costs, given that 99% of what they ship — and that is an exact measurement, not hyperbole — is spam?"
Shamelessness - "First he fought for workers' rights, soon he will fight exactly these: The change of Transnet CEO Hansen to the railway management raises questions. His behavior during the privatization of the railway also now appears in a different light." - well, with such a workers' representation, you don't need a boss to screw you over anymore.
fseventer - interesting GUI tool for live analysis of file changes on the Mac.
Munster stands still for a moment - Nonsense, damn it!
Taskpaper - interesting approach to a to-do list: a GUI program that works directly with very simply structured text files. Perfect for managing the files with Mercurial or similar and conflicts can also be resolved in a usable way. Ideal for parallel use on multiple computers. And there are also useful modes for various editors with which you can edit the files well. Hmm. But can this solve my Omnioutliner dependency?
Was the scrap concrete used in the nuclear power plant? - "Several large buildings in Baden-Württemberg are said to partly consist of inferior concrete, including the interim storage facility of the Neckarwestheim reactor. The Ministry of the Environment sent experts to the interim storage facility last night to investigate the allegations." - uh, yes.
hacksector.cc as a model case for § 202 c? - this is where we see what this infamous "hacker paragraph" leads to. Pointless action against a forum. Where is the alleged technical competence of the investigating authorities and the appropriate assessment of the tools in question? All the stupid soothing talk of the prolethicians in Berlin turns out to be exactly that: stupid nonsense without any reference to reality. Yes, credit card data was probably pushed around - which is illegal, but which was already illegal before. But all the fuss about the alleged hackers, the great investigative work and the great success with the "breakup" is simply ridiculous.
Phishers go on whale hunting with summonses - well, in order to distribute a trojan, one simply targets the dumbest users imaginable: either men looking for porn, students and pupils looking for homework material suitable for plagiarism, or business managers (and in the latter case, some interesting information might even be found - among other things, perhaps the overlap with the first group?). In any case, we now know how Schäuble wants to get the Bundestrojaner installed.
SCM Integration Scripts - here's how to integrate an external Diff in Mercurial.
Telekom-Chef sieht Managerbezüge als angemessen an - another one of those blowhards who talk about the responsibility of managers. Where is the responsibility of Ackermann? Where is that of Esser? Where is that of Sommer? What have their alleged responsibilities actually resulted in?
Sneaking Ruby Through Google App Engine (and Other Strictly Python Places) - why the lucky stiff (jo, he really calls himself that) is at it again: this time it's a Ruby-to-Python-bytecode compiler. Interesting idea.
vi in javascript - some people just have too much time ...
Announcing Teh - the minimalist blog tool using Google App Engine - and if Google would finally send me my access to GAE, I could even play around with it.
Frag - a 3D first-person-shooter in Haskell.
Magma - Object Database as Open Source for Squeak.
Ready Lisp: Common Lisp for Mac OS X - cool. After the Eclipse version, there is now also the classic Emacs version. Very nice - Eclipse works on my iMac, but it's not really a hit there. And for a nostalgic Lisper like me, old == better.
DAZ Productions Hexagon 2.5 - a 3D subdivision modeler, and it looks quite usable. Above all, it offers export for Second Life Sculpted Prims, including texturing. Maybe I should take a look at it too (normally I use AC3D, which is fixed and well configurable, but it looks rather thin on the side of texture creation, at least for someone with my non-skills)
GreaseKit - User Scripting for all WebKit applications - great. With this, Safari is getting closer to Firefox. With this and PithHelmet, Safari is already quite rounded. However, it would be nice if Apple would officially support plugin interfaces for such tools instead of constantly breaking the functionality of these tools. Even better would be a direct integration into Safari, because the ideas of these two tools are really not that far-fetched ...
Mailplane - wow, I definitely need to check that out. A Webkit-based specialized browser for Google Mail that can handle multiple accounts. I currently use multiple Prism instances for this, but a single program with switching capability would of course be much better. Besides, Prism is nice, but (thanks to Mozilla technology) is simply not a Mac application. And Fluid would be Mac-like, but unfortunately it can only handle one Google Mail account (since it does not separate cookies or KeyChain entries).
New version of VirtualBox also runs under Mac OS X and Solaris (Update) - and offers seamless desktop also for Linux guests. That would almost be interesting and reason to take a look at it. Although Parallels has been working so well for me that there is little "pressure to suffer" for such experiments.
TidBITS Entertainment: Thank You for Not Playing: Microsoft Expires Future Playback of DRM-Protected Music - anyone who still thinks DRM is great can read this. In my opinion, this is simply fraud what Microsoft is doing.
Your personal data just got permanently cached at the US border - isn't it cute how countries that otherwise always emphasize freedoms so much issue the most absurd regulations? Which freedoms are actually being defended when you give them all up?
How do I delete my Facebook account - this is really worth reading. Deactivating does not delete - but deleting is made so difficult by FB, it's beyond ridiculous.
USBOverdrive - I need to check this out, it allows you to assign functions to additional keys on USB devices. My Logitech keyboard and mouse have some unused keys, and you don't really want the Logitech Mac software on your computer ...
Limp: When You Need More Than Just a Lisp - the proof that VIM is as powerful as Emacs. An integrated Lisp development environment in VIM.
Posturing against Internet censorship - sorry, but you can't really take the prolethikers seriously in light of things like, for example, the blocking orders from Düsseldorf. Because if it were serious, they would first clean up their own dirty doorstep ...
Victorian All-in-One PC - nice mod job.
Planned BKA Law The Lidlization of Law - "The seized computer data should not be reviewed by an independent judge to determine whether they constitute an 'interference with the core area of private life' (and therefore may not be used); instead, this review should be conducted by 'two employees of the Federal Criminal Police Office', 'one of whom has the qualification for judicial office'. Only if these two police officers have doubts should they submit the seized data to the judge for review." - I've been saying it all along, put the federal government under surveillance by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, because the biggest enemies of the constitution today are sitting in Berlin.
Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation by Shriram Krishnamurthi - download and read offline. You won't get dumber from it.
RFID System Mifare Classic cracked? - "According to the recently published work of Nicolas Courtois, Karsten Nohl and Sean O'Neil, it is possible to crack the encryption within seconds using PC hardware without having to pre-calculate extensive tables (Rainbow Tables). The security of the algorithm, according to the researchers' conclusion, is 'close to zero'."
BBC - Radio 4 - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - in Flash with illustrations. Nice.