Warning of "unbearable escalation" of data retention - it was clear that this nonsense would come. With our prolethic leaders in Berlin, terrorism and copyright infringement are the same thing. Will a BGH or a Federal Constitutional Court protect us from this madness?
BGH: "Militant group" not a terrorist organization - Sometimes reason prevails. Maybe now, in light of this ruling, the terrorism card will be played less often - and not every sneeze classified as an attack.
LKA-Director Hüttemann has resigned - well, now we know where all the "isolated cases" are going ...
OLPC sued in Nigeria for patent infringement - and the fact that multi-shift keyboards have existed with all kinds of mini systems for decades (sorry, but there were already such things on Casio calculators and HP calculators), and that programming a keyboard driver hardly poses a challenge to anyone and therefore probably does not fall under "protectable," of course, is of no interest. You can only make money from shit if you patent the shit first.
Richter hält Vorratsdatenspeicherung für verfassungswidrig - well, whether this will impress the paranoid wheelchair user? Even with a constitutional complaint and a corresponding assessment by the Federal Constitutional Court - there is still Schäuble's "Yes and, then we change the constitution" hanging in the air ...
Telekom exits cycling - quite hypocritical, first profiting from doping-related victories and press for years and then wanting to distance themselves by ending sponsorship. Sorry, Telekom, but you were part of the problem for years (yes, I know, Telekom never pushed for doping, just as they certainly never sought positive press by paying reporters, we naturally believe them on that), you won't get out of it that easily. But well, in a potentially cleaner cycling sport, Telekom as a sponsor then no longer plays a role ... maybe the sport has a chance again with less gigantomania.
The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) - a nice compilation by Mark Pilgrim about the Kindle (Amazon's eBook reader). eBook readers that can't even display PDFs (and thus fail as display devices for a lot of the electronic books on my hard drive) are just nonsense to me.
Carnival Association with TÃœV Seal - ISO certification is just a silly carnival event.
Bundestag approves agreement on the transfer of passenger data - how the prolethikers pat themselves on the back for the nonsense they spout. Disgusting.
Encrypted E-Mail Company Hushmail Spills to Feds - too bad, and this from a company that has awarded itself the corresponding advance laurels.
iP2F - looks nice Flickr uploader, stumbled upon it at Schockwellenreiter. Looks quite nice. Might be an idea for my SL snapshots, instead of collecting them all in a big pile on the disk (and uploading them with an external uploader).
Patent lawsuit against Apple, Microsoft and 21 other companies - yet it is still claimed that patents secure the development interest of companies. Hello? The patent exploiters have, in the rarest of cases, developed anything. They just sit there and look for the most absurd possible interpretation of some nonsense patents.
Schäuble steps up software development - Golem.de - because the Interior Minister doesn't need to think about trivial matters like proportionality and constitutional compliance.
Tarimporter - and this one even looks into other formats. Unfortunately, both only look at filenames, not contents. Too bad.
Encryption standard under backdoor suspicion - hmm. Would actually only be consistent if, in the current paranoia situation of intelligence agencies, the infiltration of algorithms from cryptography were addressed.
Warner Music CEO: We Were Wrong - huh? Are they finally realizing something?
Ziplight - Search ZIP Files with Spotlight - maybe old news for some, but new and practical for me.
Police hand over computers of suspects to music industry lawyer - even more goats, even more gardeners.
Is the Federal Eavesdropping Center coming? - and those who previously believed that Stasi 2.0 was only a satirical exaggeration will now slowly realize that it is deadly serious.
Court of Auditors wastes millions - by goats and gardeners?
reinteract - interesting interactive shell for Python with a nice idea for editing history. And a mode to integrate certain objects directly into the output - could be interesting as a math sheet. Or simply as a nice interface for playing with Python libraries.
rsnapshot - creates snapshots with rsync and hardlinks. On the other hand, I have been using rdiff-backup quite successfully for a while now. And good old tar works quite well too (I just don't have much to back up under Linux).
The Terrifying Toothpick Fish - ugh. There are things you really don't want to know. Ewww.
Upside-Down-Ternet - cool. Split WLAN and send unauthorized users through a proxy that turns every image upside down. Awesome.
E-Vergabe: Nutzer von Linux oder Mac müssen draußen bleiben - that's just pathetic: when you create a new platform, you can immediately build on platform independence. But that would mean thinking about such stupid projects.
Zope: Using UTF-8 in the Management Interface (ZMI) - because I needed it just now.
"Spiegel": Evidence of Power Company Collusion - fits well, as the power companies are just trying to turn the price screw again ...
Zypries accuses critics of data retention of lacking expertise - reading such statements from the federal incompetence (some insist on calling her the Federal Minister of Justice) is quite amusing. If we talk about lack of expertise here, then this first and foremost applies to our politicians, who are completely ignorant of facts and realities. When she then makes such an accusation, among other things, to the Federal Data Protection Commissioner, it only becomes ridiculous.
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review - a very good overview of all possible aspects of 10.5 - from the kernel inside to the GUI on top.
Doing the Leopard Moan - I think I'll wait a bit with the update ... (until the manufacturers of the many little helper tools have converted the first quirks of the system and Apple's new ideas into usable tools that help you get over them). Am I actually a Mac heretic if I say that I would prefer to have this stupid Dock completely unplugged? I mean even the one from older versions, not just the one from Leopard.
TidBITS Macs & Mac OS X: Getting to Know Time Machine - sorry, but after all the features that Apple apparently left out of the release (AirPort Disc for backups, controlled archiving of old files, etc.), Time Machine sounds anything but impressive.
CCC hackt Hamburger Wahlstift - "The CCC particularly criticizes that, according to the new Hamburg election law, only the digital crosses recorded by the voting pen should be considered as an expression of the voters' will. The paper serves only as a voter-soothing decoration, as the votes on the paper are to be recounted for verification in only 17 of the approximately 1,300 polling stations. Votes that are clearly cast with a conventional ballpoint pen or fountain pen are to be sorted out as invalid, so that in case of doubt, the computer is decisive, not the votes on the paper."
Cowboy Programming: Mature Optimization - Mature optimization is any optimization done early in development that you know in advance will provide a significant performance boost without unmanageable side effects. Mature optimizations are often well-known techniques that were successfully used before. Mature optimizations include small local modifications, coding standards, and architecture-level design decisions.
heise online -Softwarepatent-Gegner beklagen Deal der EU-Kommission mit Microsoft - "The Commission does not understand how Open Source works," Benjamin Henrion, the Brussels representative of the FFII, also shakes his head at the negotiated agreement. The authority has naively accepted the promises of the Redmonders that they will now abide by the rules. Meanwhile, Microsoft has been planning for years to control the Open Source economy through commercial property rights on computer programs. This plan has now advanced considerably. "Kroes has ensured that software patents of the EPA, which the EU rejected in 2005, now strengthen the monopolist's grip for years to come."
Is the inflation rate really alarming? - if "economic experts" dismiss the price increase of milk by saying that computers and TVs have become cheaper, then I'm not surprised at the miserable state of our society anymore. How mentally impoverished must one be to actually compare a product that almost everyone buys regularly with something that is rather a rare purchase? With these flimsy arguments, everything has been twisted into a "perfect world" for years. No matter how ridiculous it is upon closer inspection. Experts? Really? Sorry, I call such people blabbermouths.
Lawyers prohibit viewing the HTML code of their website - and linking is absolutely forbidden. Very naughty, these links ...
Clozure CL IDE for Tiger - OpenMCL is now called Clozure CL and a first demo of the upcoming IDE is available. Unfortunately, the Clozure CL people have no interest in making an Intel-32 version, which is why my MacBook Pro (with Core Duo and not Core 2 Duo) is left out.
Arcor must block YouPorn - not that I want to defend large porn offers now. But what is visible here is how the internet is increasingly being destroyed with warnings, court orders and all that machinery. Because the collateral damage is quickly large - but that doesn't interest anyone. Ultimately, it's all about someone wanting to make more money and, without their own ideas, simply playing the lawsuit card. No matter how absurd and nonsensical the approach (blocking websites) is. Some people are bothered by porn without age verification, others might be bothered by virtual worlds without proper age verification, the next person is bothered by bread images. And the state is bothered by all kinds of information offers if they do not correspond to their own ideology. And so everyone happily runs around, uninformed by facts, and screams for blocks. No matter how ridiculous the whole thing is.
Concern for user rights due to copyright filters for Web 2.0 - I don't like either the greedy vultures of the media companies or those of the Web 2.0 companies. Neither really cares about the content or the actual customers - both are only interested in how they can make as much profit as possible with as little investment of their own from the creativity of others. Choosing between the big media companies and the big Web 2.0 platforms is like deciding between Microsoft and IBM - just because one of them has swallowed more chalk than the other, that doesn't change the fact that both are wolves. Those who think differently should read the Terms of Service of various Web 2.0 platforms - content appropriation and cover-your-ass at the expense of the user are common practice. Believing that Google and Co. are the good guys is highly stupid.
annalist - about life under general suspicion and observation by the BKA. Because the man researches certain topics that then stand out in cross-references to search queries. And does anyone still believe that this whole surveillance fetishism in Germany is completely harmless?
How does one become a terrorist? - about the background of the proceedings against Andrej H. (about whose surveillance by the BKA his wife reports in her blog)
CL-OBJC project - Cocoa applications with sbcl or Allegro.
Hello, Bob. Hello Joe. - Bob Ippolito on Erlang development and his (good) experiences.
Jobs looks forward to hundreds of iPhone applications - oops, this is coming faster than expected. It could get exciting to see what appears when the SDK is available.
First Impressions of the Nikon D3 - wow, I rarely read such an enthusiastic review on Luminous Landscape.