Olympic Cease and Desist: Saftblog Gives Up - it's been a while since an utterly absurd and ridiculous cease and desist has been circulating on the net. Well, the "German Olympic Sports Confederation" will probably know why it wants to ruin its reputation before it's even known ...
Archive 27.11.2006 - 15.12.2006
Real-World Passwords - Bruce Schneier analyzes user data from a phishing attack and reports on password distributions, lengths, frequencies, etc. Very interesting, "password1" is the new "password".
john sore & his afro-safety - funky macho gangsta blues.
Man with no pulse considered a medical breakthrough - interesting alternative to the classic heart simulation: a continuous pump.
ajp-wsgi - an implementation of WSGI (the abstract Python server protocol) based on AJP (the Java Server Protocol), written entirely in C and executing Python applications via embedded Python interpreters. Could be very interesting for efficient operation of Python applications.
EU Parliament votes for liberalization of television advertising - well, this will make television even more uninteresting than it already is. If I want advertising, I look at the junk mail in the mailbox, which is at least local. What can you do, I hardly ever turn on the TV anyway - besides the internet, this simple ad-infested broadcast medium makes a rather pitiful impression ...
LibSecondLife-Java - a port of the SL protocols to Java (so far there was only the libsecondlife story written in C#). And not everyone has or wants to install Mono ...
Object Debugger - new toy for the best Scheme system in the world: DrScheme. This time a very interesting debugging tool for object-oriented programs, which expands the already impressive toolbox.
Retired from security@php.net - "The reasons for this are many, but the most important one is that I have realised that any attempt to improve the security of PHP from the inside is futile".
BGH bans online searches of computer systems - interesting, how this comes at the same time as Schäuble's rant. And how this article already assumes that politics will bluntly ignore the court's opinion and simply create legal foundations.
Map of the Internet - interesting projection of IP address allocation onto a two-dimensional map.
Schäuble: Internet is "distance learning university and training camp" for terrorists - especially for state-sponsored terrorists and hate preachers, who then create viruses and trojans to spy on the hard drives of innocent citizens due to their own paranoia. What kind of banana republic do we actually live in ...
Flowing Water on Mars - Klemptner called.
Online searches of PCs by law enforcement and intelligence agencies - no statements from the proponents on how they technically envision this nonsense - Trojans forcibly installed on all systems? What about different operating systems - will the use of exotic systems like BeOS soon be an obstruction of authorities and punishable? The demand alone is absurd: that the authorities have too much work with actual on-site operations and therefore want online access. Is that my problem if they have too much work? The demands of the interior ministers have always been stupid and anti-constitutional, but meanwhile they are completely out of their minds.
Cute from the blogosphere - sometimes I just have to link to such meta-internal discussions. Because of the humor value.
Apparently 200,000 German-language bomb-making instructions on the net - by goats and gardeners. And how interest groups shamelessly cooperate with corporate interests when it suits them. That the demands ultimately mean a sell-out of our rights doesn't bother anyone.
Crossroads - a TCP load balancer and failover proxy under GPL.
Swivel Aims To Become The Internet Archive For Data - how many people will upload company-internal or research-internal data without thinking about data protection? Nobody thinks about asking the people whose faces are on the picture if they should be published at least when it comes to videos and images ...
Ball gegen Bahn: 1 to 0 - or also "hit, sunk".
Giving It Away - Cory Doctorow on Creative-Commons licensed eBooks.
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern remains stuck with the bulk of the G8 costs - but strangely enough, the federal government decided in 2004 to hold the G8 summit there? Did none of them check the financing security beforehand? Are there only incompetent bunglers at work in Berlin? Apart from this small - ahem - election problem in MeckPomm ...
Musicovery : interactive webRadio - cool stuff, that.
You cannot rely on JavaScript being available. Period. - always offer fallbacks. Anything else is just uncool and lame.
Database test: dual Intel Xeon 5160 (6/6) - could all MySQL advocates now please take a look at the graphics and finally shut up? MySQL is a hyped flash-in-the-pan with mediocre performance (which you have to buy with self-destructing indexes) and inadequate features. Period.
Search for Hamburg's former Senator Schill - oh yes, there's also Schill.
You can find it everywhere - Polonium doesn't necessarily have to come from Russia. Interesting - it's in antistatic filter systems. Well, airbags do contain explosives too. Funny enough, no politician has yet demanded the abolition of airbags ...
Richard Dawkins - in an email interview with readers.
Seven billion for the Bundeswehr's IT project - going to SBS. Just as a reminder for me, for possible connections with the previous link ... (and Banana Republic because I honestly don't quite see how a state can be so stupid as to let a private company operate the communication system of its army)
Siemens manager spills the beans in corruption scandal - by the way, Siemens (yes, yes, ok, a subsidiary, namely SBS) has just received the contract for operating the new communication system of the Bundeswehr. Even the majority in the operating company for the project.
The Post-Rapture Post - Send Messages to Loved Ones! - hilarious!
Constitutional protector would use torture confessions - isn't it cute how the top constitutional protector tramples the protected good with his feet. And all this to protect us from a danger that has caused exactly 0 deaths in the last few years? I am sure that if we demanded a speed limit of 100 km/h on highways to reduce the number of traffic fatalities, he would also protest - after all, he can then no longer drive his Benz through the republic (I assume he has a Benz, anything less is not good enough for someone like him ...)
Adobe Photoshop Textures and Patterns Tutorials - tons of tutorials, for example on creating textures.
"Satan and the Damned" shock customers - well, I find the sickly-sweet Christmas chatter in the stores much worse than "Christmas in Hell" ...
Startling Discovery: The First Human Ritual - also includes hints of the first cleric's fraud ...
VRML / X3D and 3D Presentations - VRML Tutorial in German. For some, perhaps easier to read than the new-Westphalian that you usually find on the internet ...
Antique Precision Engineering - wow. Ancient computer for calculating astronomical objects and events.
Firefox - on Google Maps!
Cabinet decides on retirement at 67 - "Where are the jobs supposed to come from when millions of older and even younger people are already out of work," asked DGB executive board member Annelie Buntenbach on ARD.
Sofanet starts neighborhood Wi-Fi - with this name, it won't work. Way too uncool.
Stop Motion Piano And Drums - crazy. I love it!
Censorship allegations against EU report on IT future - when you make goats into gardeners (like making an SAP employee the committee chairman).
3D Game Programming All in One with CDROM (Course Technology PTR Game Development Series): English Books: Kenneth C. Finney - Book about game design with TGE. Be careful, Amazon.
Leap Back - Microsoft defines 1900 as a leap year. And in their XML Office format, which they also proposed as a standard ...
The Official QuArK website - Map editor for games. Can be used with TGE.
10 Minute Mail - brilliant idea. A 10-minute-valid disposable address with a simple web interface and only the option to reply. So not misusable as a spam cannon, but ideal to register e.g. with these stupid newspaper archives or similar.
4 years of blogging - even a bit more. Because I always forget when my first post was. Well, it's not really that important ...
Microsoft's Zune DRM cracked - cute. Just rename the files and Microsoft DRM on the Zune no longer works ...
3D-Atlas Gaia no longer available - one would actually expect Google to understand things like open protocols. But the Google cheerleaders will surely be able to justify why such actions by Google are completely correct, but by Microsoft are evil ...
hexfiend - nice, now free, hex editor.