High-Tech Heroin

There are certainly ways out of dependency: free software, independent music, privately organized providers, etc.

The sad thing about it is that media and business often go hand in hand, and therefore the alternatives get less public attention than the mainstream (okay, in the Linux area that's just changing — but what about the other alternatives like the BSD variants?)

If there were still well-researched journalism, reports about the RIAA would have to be followed by reports and mentions of the quite active independent scene — but these are often missing. And that applies, for example, also in the area of internet providers — who has already reported on the small, privately organized ones? Even back when the IN e.V. still existed, such reports were scarce.

Ultimately, consumers do have it in their hands how strong their dependency really becomes. Sure, not every area is overflowing with alternatives — for example, mobile networks are beyond private feasibility. Still, the consumer can certainly strive for a certain degree of technical competence and doesn't have to subject themselves to dependency on rip-off artists in all matters.

Unfortunately, dependency is much more convenient though...

At anoteron weblog there's the original article.

Pursuing the 17th-Century Origins of the Hacker's Grail

Here are a few teasers about the new Neal Stephenson novel

At New York Times: Technology you can find the original article.

taz 20.9.03 Stoiber achieves clear victory

The CSU won the Bavarian state election on Sunday with an overwhelming majority. The party of Minister-President Edmund Stoiber received 59 percent of the vote according to initial projections. The SPD, with its top candidate Franz Maget, only achieved 20 percent. - that's how an article begins in the DigiTAZ that has just been released. The commentary also refers to Sunday in the past tense. Truly remarkable. But what I find really remarkable are the lottery numbers from Saturday's drawing that are already available at the TAZ today at 01:12. They revealed it: a white gloss on a white background. To scare an old man like that so late in the day is really almost criminal.

Here's the original article.

Case modding of a very special kind

Just plain awesome (found at delta-c) Here you can find the original article.

Computer makers sued over hard-drive size claims

Great class. People are upset that the disk capacity in gigabytes is in the decimal system, but computers work in the binary system. Dumbasses - the binary information on a 1024 basis would not be called gigabytes, but gibibytes. Specifying disk capacities in decimal basis is completely correct, as you can read for example at Wolfram Research. Here's the original article.

The future for Hesse's women is secure

Great prospects for women in Hesse. And of course Koch will announce his rubbish as an absolutely important program and of course he will demand that the same garbage is also done at the federal level. Koch would really be a worthy successor to Kohl - just as corrupt, just as contemptuous of humanity, just as a catastrophe for the Federal Republic.

At Der Rollberg you can find the original article.

Just a Brown Bear

Nessie doesn't exist, the Yeti is just a brown bear - where will this end?

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

Canned Meat

Just a warning: I'm still using an outdated version of POPFile. Jutta uses a newer one, but not Mailsmith, rather Mail.app - anyway, you can easily combine the two scripts. The main difference is that my script looks for a colon and space and uses what comes after as a link, while Jutta's version uses the text between a < and a > as a link. If someone could just tell me how to do string manipulation properly in AppleScript, I could clean up the somewhat cumbersome source a bit - because at the moment I'm breaking the string down completely into individual characters and working through them. Somehow inelegant.

What was nice, however, was that porting from MailSmith to Mail.app only required minimal changes. These standard dictionaries of Mac programs are really a fine thing ...

Over at Der Schockwellenreiter you can find the original article.

Effective Measures Against Comment Spam

Great explanation. Unfortunately, that occasionally also drives away commenters of the human variety. Maybe an upgrade to a somewhat more powerful platform would make sense? Nochn Blogg. has the original article.

200 Dollar Note with Bush Picture

Ouch.

Here's the original article.

eBay Happy to Give Away All Personal Info

A quite interesting article with discussion on Kuro5hin about statements from an eBay official regarding their practice of releasing data to law enforcement. If things really happen as described there - release of data that goes far beyond mere personal information, and based solely on fax or email requests - then that's a massive scandal. And as stupid as the whole thing sounds, it's very likely that things really do work that way. The original article can be found on kuro5hin.org here.

False Crime Statistics in Hamburg

Well - did anyone really believe that Schill actually took effective action against crime? But it's nice that it's now definite that he only lied. Another nail in his political coffin.

At tagesschau im Internet you can find the original article.

Integration of Mailsmith with POPFile

Translation

Who uses POPFile for spam filtering and Mailsmith as a mail client can quickly jump from an email to the reclassification page in POPFile with the linked AppleScript. The script simply extracts the X-POPFile-Link header from the email and navigates to the specified URL. Without this script, you always have to first show the headers, find the link, click on it, and then hide the headers again. Annoying. But solvable with AppleScript. Here's the original article.

Hunting Criminals with Linux

Now that's really something. Hopefully the project organizers have done their homework properly, then such a large project - if it runs successfully - could finally put the brakes on these silly anti-Linux discussions. I also like the reference to the increased comfort that has been achieved with Linux.

At heise online news you can find the original article.

Nordkirchen Castle

Schloss Nordkirchen

One of the most beautiful (and largest) moated castles in Westphalia. Not for nothing also called the Versailles of Westphalia.

RTL raises the stakes in poker over tour rights

Lucky. If I imagine having to watch the Tour on RTL, I feel sick. What on earth does RTL think they can do better? Their commentators are even worse than the already appallingly bad public broadcasters' commentators. Best to watch the Tour with the sound off anyway, but with RTL the constant commercial breaks would be even more annoying ...

At RADSPORT-NEWS.COM - News Overview you can find the original article.

Nordkirchen Castle

We were there again today. Nice park, and the light was great. So here are the photos without much ado:

Here's the original article.

wouthit a porbelm huh?

Wired. It works. At least for me.

At Industrial Technology & Witchcraft you can find the original article.

All your .com are belong to us :: hebig.org/blog

One aspect of the latest VeriSign nonsense that I stumbled upon through Haiko Hebig is mail delivery for non-existent domains. Here's an analysis of what happens with a non-existent domain:

 muenster:~# exim -bt gb@blubberfaselblubb.com gb@blubberfaselblubb.com deliver to gb@blubberfaselblubb.com router = lookuphost, transport = remote_smtp host blubberfaselblubb.com [64.94.110.11]

So an email is sent normally to the A-record (the one with the wildcard). What happens there? You can see it here:

 telnet blubberfaselblubb.com smtp Trying 64.94.110.11... Connected to sitefinder-idn.verisign.com. Escape character is '^]'. 220 snubby3-wceast Snubby Mail Rejector Daemon v1.3 ready HELO blubberfaselblubb.com 250 OK MAIL FROM: blah@blubberfaselblubb.com 250 OK RCPT TO: blah@blubberfaselblubb.com 550 User domain does not exist. DATA 250 OK quit 221 snubby3-wceast Snubby Mail Rejector Daemon v1.3 closing transmission channel Connection closed by foreign host.

So there's a mail rejector running at that address that rejects every mail delivery with 550 - User domain doesn't exist. Want some paranoia? Sure? OK: it's trivial to modify the mail rejector so that it collects and archives the sender addresses provided at MAIL FROM: of the misdirected emails. I'm not saying VeriSign does that - but wildcard A-records at such a central location are an abuse waiting to happen ...

Here's the original article.

Apple Expo: Radio with Timeshift

Cool!

At heise online news you can find the original article.

CEO Performance Poll

At Forbes, anyone can tell the CEO of VeriSign in a poll whether he's doing his job well or poorly. Oddly enough, he's polling pretty negatively. I wonder why that could be?

Here's the original article.

Interview with Udo Bölts

I think it's great the way he's starting it, not letting his career fade out like a Cipollini, but stopping the way he's always been known: as a workhorse among cyclists. And perhaps he'll get one more chance to finish things off at the Rhineland-Palatinate Tour. He'd deserve it.

At RADSPORT-NEWS.COM - Nachrichten-Gesamtübersicht you can find the original article.

OpenSSH 3.7 closes security hole [2nd update]

That's what's great about Debian: the updated patches are already available on http://security.debian.org/, simply:

 apt-get update apt-get install ssh

and the system is up to date again with all patches. That's what I like about it.

Apple has not yet released a software update for OS X ...

At heise online news you can find the original article.

RegTP instead of DENIC? Take action!

Get involved, generate a letter and send it!

At Wortfeld you can find the original article.

Turn Your Radio On

Well - I hope that this isn't implemented the way Jake Savin announced it on the radio-dev mailing list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/radio-dev/message/7946

The problem: for weblogs that don't yet have comment notification, it's quite easy to hijack the comment notification, even if option 2 from the email is used (option 1 isn't an option anyway because of its immutability).

The scenario is quite straightforward: since the setPrefs function doesn't just send the password (or rather its MD5 hash), but also all the data to query another server for validity, you can simply set up a small XMLRPC server that generally returns "ok, password is correct". You then include this in the setPrefs calls as the server to be queried. And just like that, you can use a loop to steal comment notifications from all numeric users on Userland. A classic case of not thinking things through far enough. It's quite astonishing how few people actually think about security and what it ultimately means. Too often you encounter half-baked solutions. Granted, comment notifications aren't really critical. But the function that's supposed to be protected here is called setPrefs - it's foreseeable that programmers will soon store additional settings there, and how these can then be set externally.

Where exactly is the error here? In communication with the server, that's clear. But the real error lies in the fact that a security-relevant area is implemented using a coupled system, where the coupling of systems is determined by the end user. And that last small part - determined by the end user - is the problem. System couplings in security-relevant areas must be pre-configured by the administrator; users may at best be able to choose from options. Because only the administrator can determine which sources are trustworthy for authorization. At Der Schockwellenreiter there's the original article.

VeriSign Hijacks Traffic

A few more comments and opinions on the VeriSign nonsense.

At heise online news there's the original article.

Clippy for the Web

A few more links to Verisign's wildcard A record. However, the extremely critical monopoly status of Verisign as the operator of a TLD (and the associated registry) is not addressed here. But the peripheral areas are also not without problems - such as the aforementioned issue that users can no longer decide for themselves how they want to respond to such problems.

Apart from the fact that this procedure doesn't help against typosquatters anyway: they can continue to register their typo domains and will of course be preferentially served (a wildcard A record only applies if no explicit A record is available).

At Wortfeld you'll find the original article.

Comments on the New Apple Gadgets

Of course. I bought myself a 12 inch PowerBook and an iPod. Of course, these exact things were just updated in the technical specs and naturally cheaper than I bought them. I should really offer myself as a price barometer: whenever I buy something, it comes out cheaper and more powerful a short time later.

Here you can find the original article.

Kris Delmhorst

Nice music - guitar, voice, not much else. Melodic and pleasant to listen to. Also has audio samples to download (complete songs, not just 30-second clips!).

Here's the original article.

Münsterland Tour of Juniors starting Friday

Ahlen, Borken, Coesfeld and Ibbenbüren. Somehow they interpreted the Münsterland quite freely.

At RADSPORT-NEWS.COM - News Overview you can find the original article.

nickijaine.com

And since we're on the subject of voice and guitar: Nicki Jaine. Wow. You get chills down your spine listening to "Animals" or "A Pigeon named Crow". I think I've featured her here before, but her music is so great that it's worth promoting again. Oh, and here too there are complete audio samples available for download.

Here's the original article.

Post without title

After a long time, I took my digital camera with me again and shot a few pictures of the city library.

Here's a picture of the main entrance. Lots of glass, lots of metal, slanted sides and impractical corners. No idea what possessed the architect, apparently it's supposed to be a special feature, but it doesn't suit my taste. But at least it provides a few motifs.

And here's the view back from the main entrance. A small passage that runs between the main building and an aimlessly standing side building and is crossed by a kind of bridge.

And to match the architecture, the lamps too, which somehow look like they could only illuminate the lower part of the building. Which is actually also true.

If architects want to call me a philistine now, go ahead, I can take it. I still think the building is ugly.

Lamps at the City Library

Lamps at the City Library

Fitting the strange architecture of the city library, the lamps are also a bit different ...

Münster City Library, Main Entrance

Münster Municipal Library, Main Entrance

The main entrance of the municipal library in Münster. A rather convoluted building, apparently meant to symbolize a book or a ship or something else. Externally composed of many corners and edges, lots of sheet metal and glass, and actually looks completely out of place, especially since it stands among buildings of completely different architectural styles.

Münster City Library, Side Corridor

Münster City Library, Side Corridor

The main entrance of the City Library in Münster. A rather chaotic building, probably meant to symbolize a book or a ship or something else. Externally consists of many corners and edges, lots of metal and glass, and actually looks completely out of place, especially since it stands among buildings of completely different architectural styles.

Shared Space 2.0

Looks quite interesting: something like a cross between TinderBox (Outliner/Mindmapper) and Voodoo (version control, unfortunately no longer available in its old form). Could develop into a quite interesting application - if all features are implemented at some point. The original article is here.

VeriSign has entered a wildcard A record on *.net

That's audacious. Every query for a domain under .net is now answered with an A-record from Verisign. From there it gets redirected to a Verisign page containing a search engine and web directory. Great. Probably soon there will also be a request to register a free domain cheaply at Verisign. Verisign can of course, as the operator of .net and .com, enter something like this - but only Verisign can do it. None of the alternative .net or .com registrars can do it. That's free competition on the Internet. At Advogato there's the original article.

When bright light goes up the nose

I knew it, it really is the light that makes me sneeze now and then! Nobody wanted to believe me, apparently everyone in my surroundings doesn't have this problem.

I found the original article on RP-Online: Wissenschaft.

Whole Wheat Radio - Home

And right another one to follow: Internet radio from the independent scene. Nice stuff they play there. And above all, the whole thing is available in really good quality as an MP3 stream, if your connection can handle it. By the way, I found this tip (as well as the one about Kris Delmhorst) at Phil Ringnalda. Here's the original article.

black cat white tom

Came on TV again today - on NDR. Very much worth watching! I should get the DVD for it at some point Here's the original article.

SenderBase

SenderBase is a server that performs evaluations of email traffic based on senders and domains. You can use it to find out which organizations and servers use domains, what belongs to organizations, which servers are mail servers, etc.

Quite an interesting thing, based on log data from (according to their own statements) approximately 9000 companies that receive email.

Here's the original article.

Vuelta: Virenque disqualified

So, he just let himself get dragged along. And everyone had been raving about his comeback, and then something like this ...

At RADSPORT-NEWS.COM - Nachrichten-Gesamtübersicht you can find the original article.

Zülle gives up Vuelta: "Never again a grand tour"

Ouch, that's quite a motivation slump. And this at a time when Phonak is buying up louder-sounding names to compete in the Tour next year.

At RADSPORT-NEWS.COM - News Overview you can find the original article.

Attack on Arafat 'legitimate' option for Israel

So this is what de-escalation policy looks like today - open death threats against the president of a country one refuses to tolerate. The Americans are setting the example and Israel of course sees itself as legitimized to do the same shit. So that the madness never ends.

I found the original article at RP-Online: Politik.

Baroque Mercury

New books from one of my favorite authors? Awesome!

The "Virtual Light - Idoru - Futurematic" cycle by William Gibson, which I read on vacation, was rather disappointing. It's possible that the translation had something to do with it, but somehow the first two books felt quite unfinished—a lot started and hinted at, but nothing really polished. The fact that everything was brought together in Futurematic was some compensation (and I think the third part is also the strongest), but the whole thing couldn't really excite me.

Let's hope Neal Stephenson doesn't fall victim to the cycle sickness known as "running out of breath, producing boring filler material." After all, he's only written standalone novels so far. But Cryptonomicon is such a brilliant thing that it deserves to be expanded.

At Telepolis News you'll find the original article.

eBay discriminates against non-Windows users!

Cool class. Great idea - making image uploads with Active-X controls under Windows and offering no alternative for non-Windows users. Idiotic

At MacGuardians there's the original article.

Lint in the Belly Button

An important question is finally being clarified: where the lint in your belly button comes from.

Here you can find the original article.

Possible Credit Card Fraud

Weird. Something like this was previously just something that happened to others. But today I had an email in my inbox from Amazon saying my credit card had been registered to someone else's account (and the email seemed authentic based on the data and similar details), and the account and orders were canceled due to abuse. It must have been flagged during data comparisons. So I had my credit card blocked right away and tomorrow I get to go through things with the fraud prevention department of my credit card company to see if anything was already purchased with it.

It's a weird feeling, after all these years of problem-free card use, especially on the internet, to finally experience firsthand what all that entails.

Fortunately, I have almost nothing fixed or recurring charged to the credit card, so it's not such a hassle if I get a new number. But if I imagine I still had all those foreign magazine subscriptions, that would be quite annoying.

The whole thing also produces a strange feeling because I only have an email as a point of reference, but no concrete data. Theoretically the email could be fake and this whole mess for nothing (okay, unlikely, because at least the email sender knows parts of my credit card number). It's just a weird feeling about the whole thing...

Hundt wants maximum twelve months of unemployment benefits

When it comes to the Töle, our labor market goes completely to the dogs.

I found the original article at RP-Online: Politik.

Marco's world

From time to time you have to take another look at geourl, there are indeed occasionally new neighbors, even here in the provinces. When exactly is the critical threshold reached where someone voluntarily agrees to build a blogplan for Münster? Here's the original article.