Government wants to "close the last gaps" in computer criminal law - surely there will be plenty of gaps again, through which our freedoms will be further restricted. For example, what hacker tools are - farewell to practical helpers like nmap and co? With the "craftsmanship" quality of the Berlin bunglers (some call them government), I don't expect anything useful anyway ...
Linkblog - 8.8.2006 - 20.9.2006
Seehofer annoys farmers and GMO critics - and once again, the citizen is being screwed. Public opinion doesn't matter to politicians, because a) voters forget about it anyway and b) corporations pay better ...
The denial industry - how Exxon fights climate studies on global warming - and why Phillip Morris is behind these studies and why PM also fights other environmental studies, even though they have nothing to do with smoking (Solution: where do you hide a tree? In the forest. Where do you hide an unwanted study? In a collection of discredited studies)
From "controlled" crashes and "bail-out" zones - imagine your house is in a place where American military aircraft initiate controlled crashes in emergencies - and no one tells you.
Expert opinion: Trivial clause in file-sharing is nonsensical - because proving non-trivial use is not possible for the rights holder. Why the burden of proof is reversed and simply all file-sharing users - and even more importantly all paying customers! - are suspected of copyright infringement. Not compatible with the rule of law, but we have already thrown that overboard ...
H I P P O P O T A M O U S E - Authentic Works of Victorian Surrealism.
Internet Treasure Hunter of the Virtual - I still hope that this report is based on a misunderstanding. But the idea that the National Library should archive all German internet publications (including closed and private ones), and that there is a law for this, is absurd enough to be credible.
Spam opponents should pay 11 million dollars - I don't usually hold much of blacklist operators, but in this case I'm still on the side of spamhaus - because I hold even less of spammers and stupid US judges ...
The Perry Bible Fellowship - evil comics. Very evil.
The "Triple-X" hack - an exclusive CSS filter for IE7 - CSS hacks for IE7. You'll definitely need this later ...
Little People - a tiny street art project - interesting project, little human figures in the big world, doing what the big ones also do.
Leica M8 Hands-on Preview - ok, I am officially in love with the camera. Including the very stylish Tri-Elmar for the digital M. Modern shutter (finally better shutter speeds than the mechanical ones), DNG storage for RAW format, compatible with the M lenses, operation like a classic M - how cool is that?
Strongtalk: A High-Performance Open Source Smalltalk With An Optional Type System - now completely open source, including the VM (which provided essential impulses for the Java Hotspot technology).
Connecting with people in six steps - don't trust a statistic you haven't faked yourself ...
John Graham-Cumming: Did SoftScan, Sophos and Panda rip off my blog? - how "research" really works at the big antivirus companies. Well, stealing is better than bad research ...
KETTLE - Data warehousing with open source. Here is a data transformer with GUI job editor and batch job executor. Sounds quite nice.
Wearing helmets 'more dangerous' - because the psychological effect on drivers is added. Hey, the researcher at least made sacrifices, he was touched twice during work ...
Nigeria widows lose their fortune - Life imitates Spam!
Prosecutor seizes anonymization server - what if the prosecutor was indeed aware of the function of Tor? What if this is just an attempt at intimidation? Beat around the bush?
Unencrypted WLAN and Störerhaftung: LG Hamburg opens Pandora's box - because we haven't had a strange ruling for a long time ... this could be the death knell for free WLAN in cafes if this catches on ...
Study: Heavy chatters often have mental disorders - in 61 people recruited through an outpatient clinic for internet addicts, a scientist found internet addiction and mental disorders. Wow. Likely the same scientist would also find increased alcohol consumption in alcoholics ...
elektrosmog: Flickragentur - this is how business works. Utilization of images from private users in a print medium. Without paying the photographers. Convenient. Have you already canceled your Flickr account and deleted the pictures?
FireWire-Ultra SCSI Converter FR1SX[RATOC] - Use SCSI devices with Firewire.
Going for a Walk - walking on a treadmill in Second Life.
Pluto no longer a planet - Rewrite textbooks. Pluto is now just a dwarf planet, along with Ceres and Xena. And Charon remains a moon. Too bad - a double planet would have been cool for our solar system.
Kiel's Justice Minister criticizes anonymization service - hasty activism and populist bleating instead of serious concepts.
SPD debating cutting the widow's pension - to improve women's earnings situation. Because, instead of forcing the economy to implement quota regulations (and thus ensuring that women in underrepresented professions are promoted more strongly), it is of course a good idea to blackmail the women themselves. Either go to work or perish. Women are just too lazy to work because of the widow's pension and the splitting of spouses. Is there actually any stupid idea that a German politician hasn't had?
Tom Cruise soon unemployed? - Paramount has fired him. It's about time.
Boom of the Riester pension continues - just to clarify: the Riester pension is a private pension insurance model that is co-financed with tax money. What is there to celebrate here? The stupidity of voters who accept such nonsense? If the money went directly into the regular pension fund, it would be used more efficiently. But once again, tax money is used to subsidize the private sector ...
Sternwarte Bochum has original recordings of the Apollo mission - only part of it, and certainly recorded differently than at NASA, but it still helps as a bulwark against all the moon hoax fanatics.
Kurt advises Telekom to talk about VDSL - you can think what you want about Telekom, like or not, but doesn't it seem strange to anyone but me that a supposedly now private corporation is being forced to make millions of investments, to which other large corporations like British Telecom (which was also subsidized for a long time, just by the British) expect "unrestricted access"? Is that all that the alleged free marketeers can come up with - forced giving away of services that are pushed with our tax money and built with our contributions? To foreign corporations that are also well subsidized themselves?
Uncertainty about the legal validity of ElsterOnline - handcrafted errors, my Ass.
Vampire sea spiders suck on prey - Deep-sea monster spiders.
Fishermen missing for nine months rescued - wow. The three fishermen should sell the film rights as quickly as possible.
Basic mit Come From - written in Lisp. Insane.
DM's Esoteric Programming Languages - Piet Samples - Sample programs in the Piet programming language, whose source code looks like Mondrian paintings. Insane.
OFF - Owner Free Filesystem. An interesting idea where only XOR-diffs between files are stored in a distributed manner and are designed so that each block of numbers can be combined with others to create various original files - which, according to the authors, makes the individual blocks of numbers not copyrightable, as they belong to different originals at the same time.
A naive idea - not even that naive. Probably too obvious for politicians. Well, one thing is clear: our politicians hate our freedom far more than the attackers - because our politicians constantly attack our freedom. Again and again. At all levels.
Merlin XU870 3G HSDPA 7.2 ExpressCard - Direct UMTS in the MacBook Pro?
AMD talks about ATI - possible open-sourcing of the drivers?
Bill Biggart's Final Exposures - Images from the WTC attack by a photographer who was killed by debris on that day.
Idaho Observer: Aspartame - The World’s Best Ant Poison - Diet Cola? Perfect Ant Poison. At least the sweetener used - developed as ant poison, but as a sweetener it makes more money ...
An AOL Searcher No. 4417749 Is Identified - it's one thing to say that the search queries published by AOL can be traced back to names. Another thing is to actually do it - the NY Times can not only fake photos, but sometimes also be investigative ...
O'Reilly's list of the most popular programming languages - absurd, how a publisher, who has long been facing competition in its core area from others (e.g. apress and manning), still acts as if they could provide some definitions. And not just trying to boost their own sales and define the market by selecting the topics published.
Update accelerates Parallels Desktop for Mac OS X - hopefully the support for non-US keyboards will finally be worth something. That is currently the most severe drawback of Parallels.
ApplicationRepositories - Maemo Wiki - a list of all currently known application pools for integration into the installer on the Nokia Tablet.