'Pioneer-Anomalie': Mysterious Force in Space - something is slowing down our probes. No one knows exactly what yet.
Archive 22.3.2006 - 21.4.2006
YES, finally! me too! - how to deal with lawyer mail as well
Philips will to prevent switching during ad breaks - well, just another reason not to turn on the telly anymore ...
Incitement to hatred Part III - Public Prosecutor vs. Alvar Freude - Public Prosecutor's Block Wardens still on a censorship spree.
Open Letter to D-Link about their NTP vandalism - why you should simply avoid D-Link products.
SPD insists on de minimis clause for copies - "The SPD" probably does not include the federal justice incompetence. Maybe they should hand in their party membership?
Tibet at Wikipedia - and FAZ
Already quite cute how the FAZ, on behalf of the Tibet Initiative Germany, spins in front of their propaganda machine and accuses Wikipedia of naivety - but lacks any form of criticism itself. For example, the fact that a very large part of the refugees in India belong to the monasteries - whose feudal rule is certainly not what one would imagine under a free society ...
Update: what was also ignored/omitted is the fact of the connection of the author of the FAZ article with the TID. So much for professional journalism and the quality control by established editorial offices ...
Yummy mummy feeds young its skin - an amphibian. Looks like an earthworm. Lays eggs. And feeds the young with its own skin. Strange Nature ...
Virtual Worlds and Attack Scenarios
What do you get when you have virtual worlds with scriptable objects? Cracker attacks, of course. In this case, a user in Second Life built objects that, via script, produce further objects. This is a classic attack scenario in such worlds - overloading servers through high load, i.e., a classic DOS from within. What was interesting about this attack was that these objects catapulted every avatar a few million meters into the air - possibly to hinder cleanup efforts.
Cleanup efforts? Yes. The system of Second Life is a virtual world with many scripted objects - so you can't just throw everything away, as this would destroy the users' content. Instead, all regions (in principle, a region is a server in a large server farm) that were attacked had to be cleaned of exactly the affected objects. To do this, the Lindens (the employees of the operator) first approached these objects inworld (i.e., within the simulation environment) to examine them. Presumably, the operator will have tools for mass cleanup of malicious objects, but nevertheless, the entire work took several hours!
Well, one might say that this is trivial - after all, it's just a virtual world on a server cluster, nothing more. But Second Life is more - among other things, it is a micropayment system. And a lot of money is transacted there - thousands of US dollars per hour (and not just to the operator, but also among the users themselves!). There is therefore direct economic damage from the downtime. Not to mention the interactions of users in the system and events taking place - for example, on that evening, there were two major openings of new clubs with live music. The musicians were completely disconnected from the system by the events, as they no longer received any feedback, they did not know whether they were still live or not (although the streams usually continued to run) and of course, a lot of people's party was ruined. And the club owners certainly had a different idea of their opening party.
All in all, of course, predictable - because any system with influence possibilities will be misused by people, even if it is out of sheer malice - but nevertheless extremely annoying.
Hamburg Regional Court: Forum operators are liable for contributions - I hope this absurd ruling is overturned as soon as possible. Nonsensical nonsense that the judges are spouting, and absolutely not in line with previous case law.
2003 UB313: "Tenth Planet" barely larger than Pluto - I still support giving this object planetary status - or revoking it from Pluto.
Get A-Life: Core Wars / Tierra - a researcher lets a few Core-Wars algorithms loose in a digital primordial soup with simple mutation and simple death - and finds evolution and parasites shortly thereafter.
Texas Judge Orders Medication for Inmate - how perverse must a judge actually be if he first grants a mentally ill prisoner a stay of execution because of his mental illness - and then forces him to take his medication. Specifically so that he can be legally executed.
Using Vodafone and Sony Ericsson V600i / V600 UMTS via Bluetooth under Mac OS X - if it's the company phone.
Bundesrat considers software patents - and who cares about the Mittelstand and open source software. Certainly not the Prolethicians in Düsseldorf ...
PHI, the golden ratio - various definitions of the golden ratio.
The nonsense about AdSense - about the inconsistencies in Google's AdSense/AdWords programs.
Rights holders want information from providers without a court order
At the current development in copyright law, the demand for self-justice of the music industry was simply only logical. And with the currently sick thinking in Berlin, it would not be surprising if this were granted ...
Expert: Google Earth Endangers World Cup Security
I've heard that Paranoia can indeed be treated within certain limits.
Eiffel development environment becomes Open Source - yes, there was another object-oriented language.
Man Was Enduring the Dentist's Drill 9,000 Years Ago - a 9,000-year-old dentist? Scary ...
Patent Busting: EFF against patent on online exams - and no end in sight for the ridiculous patents.
Python 3000 - Adaptation or Generic Functions?
Python 3000 - Adaptation or Generic Functions? Wow. GvR sees the light! Generic functions in Python 3000! Hell freezes over, third time ...
Things nobody tells you about the south pole
What you never wanted to know about the South Pole, but you get told anyway.
Maemo Development Platform Roadmap - where the Nokia tablet with version 2.0 of the system is heading.
Colorblind Web Page Filter - a filter with which you can check websites for compatibility with various forms of color blindness.
Apple Converts Xserves from PowerPC to AMD
Wow, I didn't realize that Apple is transitioning the XServe to AMD processors. I wonder if Intel agrees with their assessment of server performance?
Deutsche Bahn becomes a DSL provider - ok, this is definitely one of them. For the WDR, this is damn good.
IP addresses for vanity - yes, the date can sometimes be important.
WordPattern - probably the next one for today?
Educational Goal: Myth Instead of Knowledge!
The Prolethicians in Düsseldorf have finally lost their minds, as they are advocating for a reference to God in the education law:
A draft law by the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia intends the following reformulation for §2 of the school law: "To awaken reverence for God, respect for the dignity of man, and willingness for social action is the highest goal of education."
As an atheist, I feel personally attacked and offended by such nonsense. We have a separation of state and religion in Germany - and it should stay that way. The demand for reverence towards a superstitious institution is an absurdity and an insult to every atheist and has simply no place there.
IBM offers bounty for Exchange customers - clear message (although Notes vs. Exchange is like "driving out the devil with Beelzebub" to me)
python-constraint - had I already seen this? Doesn't matter, there's a new link and everything is repeated on TV anyway. Constraint solver in Python. Could definitely be interesting for projects.
Geogen - a funny thing, even if it's quite boring with my common name (ok, at least rank 13 in the ranking!). But with the names of my grandparents, it's already easier ...
Merquery, Text Indexing and Search with a Focus - a full-text search engine in Python specifically for RAD frameworks? Let's see what comes out of this.
The Spider of Doom - ouch. Destructive GET and "security" through JavaScript, cookies, and redirects. You have only yourself to blame, one might say.
Backfire for Transparency International
In response to the demands of Transparency International, Udo Vetter from Law Blog certifies the lawyer of the association a disturbed relationship to freedom of the press and freedom of opinion. With something like this, one would almost wish for an RSS feed for a possible court hearing to take place.
Münte sends agreement on protection against dismissal back to the coalition committee - is his rudimentary conscience speaking up, or is it all just show again?
Ullrich postpones season debut - that won't happen anymore. He probably won't be able to take his last chance at the Tour victory either.
Microsoft threatens with patent lawsuits in the USA - a warning signal for Europe - but will the bureaucrats in Brussels understand the warning signal? I have my doubts.
Seed: Prime Numbers Get Hitched - about the distribution of prime numbers in the universe of numbers. And why the answer is 42 after all.
IQ researcher calls Germans smartest Europeans - sorry, but if we're so smart, why do we have Merkel as chancellor?
SPD-Fraktion lehnt neues Urheberrecht ab - they will probably flip-flop again. Or will simply be ignored, as with software patents.
NASA probe makes super photo of Mars - new image material on the way!
ajaxWrite - everyone's talking about it, so I am too. Word-compatible, web-based, Ajax included. Enough buzzwords? It will probably be bought by Google or Yahoo ...
The Mac OS MUD Zone: Clients - lots of MUD clients for OS X.
Transparency International does not like criticism and sends the lawyer
Transparency International doesn't like criticism and sends in the lawyer - an employee was fired, the circumstances seem a bit rude on the company's part. A blogger reports on this. And the lawyer from Transparency International pulls out the big stick. Well, ix has a fitting compilation of further facts about this NGO. Everyone reads for themselves and judges for themselves what to make of it.
Only one thing should TI have considered: if the main goal is to present oneself and one's members as pioneers against corruption (why just present oneself? Why not be?), then one should not make such blunders at the same time. Because otherwise, one presents oneself as something quite different in the long run ...
Virtual Big Brother
I agree with Ralle from Netzbuch - Riya and similar ideas are definitely very strange and the reaction to them, or rather the enthusiasm for them, shows a very unreflective use of these systems by users. I find it surprising how much information users voluntarily put about themselves into the various allegedly social software products - and thus give themselves and their environment to the advertising partners and potentially everyone else with access to the data (law enforcement agencies, burglars, data thieves). More and more networking and less and less privacy, that seems to be the motto of Web 2.0 for some.
Federal Minister of Justice without Insight
This federal windbag is really starting to get on my nerves. Is it now a prerequisite for a ministerial position to be completely brainless and not understand anything at all? The impact on private individuals is not the lawsuits of the public prosecutor's office - but the collection of personal data by the public prosecutor's office (which they still have to do even if they do not file a lawsuit themselves). That's what the mass claimants are after - so that they can then sue on a private basis. Where private individuals are left alone because copyright issues are not covered by many legal protection insurances.
A real blockbuster, how in Berlin once again the interests of citizens are traded for a dilapidated and money-greedy industry and their legal apparatus ...
Outrage over impending death sentence against ex-Muslim
The outrage of politicians over the impending death sentence against an ex-Muslim is already a bit absurd - what did you actually believe would emerge as a legal system in Afghanistan? Fiddled around for decades, then bombed to pieces, and now you're outraged about the madness they're pulling off there?
Not that I wanted to defend the verdict - any religiously motivated verdict is an audacity to me, because religion has no place in the state. But the outrage is quite hypocritical. Do they really believe that a great democracy has suddenly emerged there?
The current development was long foreseeable, but no one cared back then. Now there's outrage. But taking action against the madness won't happen anyway.