In Tiny Courts of N.Y., Abuses of Law and Power - Part-time judges without adequate education (not just training, but also general knowledge). With the possibility to put others in jail. Not in some banana republic, but in New York State in the USA.
Archive 15.8.2006 - 26.9.2006
Rübstiel (Stielmus) - from the culinary hotspots of the world: Rhineland, Westphalia, Cameroon, Namibia.
Pottery will phase out nuclear power and criticizes industrialized nations - strange. Somehow I remember his speeches from his active time in federal politics quite differently ...
SpamCop as incompetent as SORBS
In my popular series about idiotic blocklists, this time a particularly brilliant stupid idea from SpamCop.net. They now list a server if it routes emails to downstream systems and then routes error messages back out. Short, our company scenario: our customers are served via our central mail server, but usually have their own mail systems (Exchange or Linux systems). For this reason, we have to accept emails for some of the customers, regardless of what the local part is - we have no control over who is all configured in the Exchange. Furthermore, these systems are dynamically connected, which is why a live check is also out of the question. Of course, the mail systems generate bounces for these incorrect addresses - and of course, bounces also occur on virus spam. However, our customers have a legitimate interest in these bounces, as only then do their partners find out about typos in addresses.
Spamcop, on the other hand, now believes that bounces should not be forwarded, that one must absolutely check at the SMTP level at the very front. Or one must route bounces via a separate IP, which is then blocked by Spamcop, which would be no problem (huh? but the legitimate bounces do not reach the recipient if they are behind someone who uses this incompetently administered list).
Technically, this means that Spamcop arrogates to itself the decision that a mail server may not forward bounces if it has accepted a mail. According to Spamcop's opinion, bounces may only pass as a rejection at the SMTP level, the classic bounce mails are in their opinion a reason to enter someone in a blocklist. They even go so far as to say that any form of autoresponders is forbidden and leads to an entry in their blocklist.
A blocklist, by the way, whose alleged goal is to reject spam. Which is clearly refuted here once again - SpamCop has just as much of its own agenda as any other blocklist operator, and as usual (see SORBS with the entries as a hacked server, for example, if FTP is running on an unusual port) it shines through incompetence.
By the way, we have activated Sender-Verify on our mail servers, which means that only emails get through whose technical sender is certified as valid by their own MX. Therefore, we only bounce on addresses that are at least considered valid by their own MX. These are no "misdirected bounces" on invalid addresses, unless the MX of these addresses lies (then it is their own problem).
Mail operators who use such blocklists to reject mail server connections are acting irresponsibly. One of them is at Microsoft ...
Virtual fashion as a livelihood - and again, the media only see the business in SecondLife. They don't see the fun, the free projects, the (often free) live music - none of that. Well, it's still better than the other big topic that keeps coming up in the press with SL: cybersex. It's funny that reporters seem to only react to money or sex.
EU will hand over connection data to the USA - because data protection doesn't matter these days in Europe either.
Network operators ignore Thoben deadline - oh yes, and how they all complained in the winter about being unfairly criticized, claiming they were doing everything to solve the problem... as if. Instead, flimsy justifications for price increases to secure record revenues are presented and customers are ripped off. And the next winter with wet snow is sure to come.
Popkomm: Musikwirtschaft will Zugangsanbieter zur Kasse bitten - Pure nonsense. What comes out of this nonsense would at best be another GEZ-like structure. And yes, this also means a rejection of the culture flat rate on my part. People, look at what is happening in other areas with similar structures today and realize that you don't want this any more than the absurd criminalization of paying customers by the music industry. The solution lies in Creative Commons and similar approaches - and in the exclusion of the music industry as a rights extortionist. Direct marketing of works by artists over the Internet is no longer a utopia.
Understanding HTML, XML and XHTML - HTML is probably what you want. Written by someone who knows what they're talking about: one of the programmers of Safari. I don't know how many times I've had to listen to the nonsense about "XHTML is the better HTML". If you don't explicitly want to use the advantages of XHTML - e.g. embedding other XML dialects - you should simply take HTML.
Microsoft's Masterpiece of FUD - analyzed and interpreted. Worth reading.
Nova 1 photo selection - Photos from the stratosphere. From a self-built spaceship. By three students. Wow.
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 ...
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.