Content-type: matter-transport/sentient-life-form

Debunking Linus's Latest

Debunking Linus's Latest - Shapiro also has a few thoughts to share about Linus's latest misstep.

Nokia kündigt das Internet Tablet 2006 OS Update an

Nokia Announces the Internet Tablet 2006 OS Update - very nice, especially since the new release will also work for the old tablet. However, the update is a bit tricky - reinstallation of all applications and data ...

Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate, Part II

Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate, Part II - Tanenbaum's counterarguments to Linus' Microkernel-stupid claim ...

In the Mills of Care

In the mills of welfare - what it used to mean to be a foster child - and what it might mean again?

RWE: The Profit That Came from the Cold

RWE: The profit that came from the cold - if anyone now thinks this will change the prices downward, forget it. We also have to continue financing RWE's nonsensical expenses in other industries.

Nokia will preinstall Google Talk

Nokia will preinstall Google Talk - not bad, especially since Google Talk is based on Jabber.

Schneier on Security: Major Vulnerability Found in Diebold Voting Machines

Schneier on Security: Major Vulnerability Found in Diebold Election Machines - is this finally the end for this dreadful Diebold disaster? Or will they try to wriggle out of it again and suppress the reports?

Bluetooth SIG - Idiots at the Helm

Whoever wonders which Bluetooth hardware works with BlueZ (Bluetooth stack for Linux) will come across the following statement from the Bluetooth SIG on the compatibility list:

Whether or not you're selling them makes no difference. The problem is due to the distribution of them from your Web site. Please note that the use and distribution of non-qualified products is a violation of the Bluetooth License Agreement. As neither of these products have been qualified using Linux it is illegal to make them available for public use.

Due to this idiotic attitude, it is no longer possible to refer to the compatibility of Bluetooth products with Linux on holtmann.org. Can it get any more stupid?

heise online - LG Düsseldorf: Liability for forums only after knowledge of the violation

heise online - LG Düsseldorf: Forenhaftung erst ab Kenntnis des Rechtsverstoßes - great legal certainty. Now there are two contradictory rulings on the same topic.

Rotten Effort

Rotten Effort - how Microsoft tries to pressure consultants in companies with almost extortionate tactics ...

HashCaml

HashCaml - an extension of Objective Caml, which allows type-safe data to be serialized and deserialized. Basis for example for remote function calls.

Off to the Welfare State?

ZAF does not recognize the FRG at all - and I also have my difficulties finding what I once understood as a youngster under the FRG. That I once took an oath to a constitution in a Trachtenverein, which was so undermined and shattered by the proletarians in Berlin, is somehow absurd. Ok, the whole Trachtenverein is absurd, but the oath to the constitution is completely ridiculed if it is so easy for politics to throw the basic values overboard.

Django for non-programmers

Django for non-programmers - Django from a web designer's perspective.

Aldag wins his own farewell race

Rolf wins his own farewell race - Goodbye Rolf!

Django Blog "magic-removal" Branch Merged

Django Weblog "magic-removal" branch merged - gaaaah. Work. Crap.

How to cure your asthma or hayfever using hookworm - a practical guide || kuro5hin.org

How to cure your asthma or hayfever using hookworm - a practical guide || kuro5hin.org - well. doesn't sound very nice, the method.

Workbench: Settlement Reached with Dave Winer

Workbench: Settlement Reached with Dave Winer - and now Dave Winer has lost his last advocate that one could still take seriously. Well. Will Dave now taste his own medicine? So far, he was the one who has put others down in blogs ...

When Companies Meet Their Doppelgänger

When companies meet their doppelgänger - A particularly creative form of piracy

This is what Roots was all about: How the Internet came to Germany

This was the Roots: How the Internet came to Germany - and not a word about the IN e.V. at Heise either - which was also significantly involved in private internet activity.

Rumor: Apple has disbanded Aperture development team

Rumor: Apple has disbanded Aperture development team - Ouch.

Oberon Script. A Lightweight Compiler and Runtime System for the Web

Oberon Script. A Lightweight Compiler and Runtime System for the Web - an Oberon compiler in JavaScript. Now that's weird.

World Press Photos 2005: German Premiere in Hamburg

World Press Photos 2005: Germany Premiere in Hamburg - and starting this Saturday, I'll be in Hamburg for a few days.

Mamiya to sell camera division

Mamiya to sell camera division - and the next old name in photography is sold off

Member of the WASG federal executive board switches to the NPD

WASG-Bundesvorstandsmitglied switches to NPD - because there's no difference between left and right in Germany anyway ...

Hyperlink Process: Net Activist Acquitted Again

Hyperlink-Prozess: Netzaktivist erneut freigesprochen - good. Very good!

Network Games

Well, that's the thing with games or virtual worlds that are operated somewhere on the internet. You have access, your own access is running smoothly. And the operator's servers are also working fine. Only some stupid backbone provider in between has a faulty router in the route, with around 30 percent packet loss over longer periods of time. Which of course makes playing significantly more difficult.

But: where do you complain now? I mean, he's taking away my evening entertainment, that damn place

Pur3d.de | TEXTURES

Pur3d.de | TEXTURES - a lot of textures that can also be tiled.

UVMapper - 2.5D Software

AOL.de Access

AOL.de Zugang - WiFi Hotspots. And yes, that's the devil. But what can you do when network withdrawal threatens ...

Critical Security Vulnerabilities in Mac OS X

Critical security vulnerabilities in Mac OS X - yuck. Please people at Apple - get your act together and use current and fixed versions of the various libraries. Otherwise, I might as well install Windows in the long run ...

Outrage over Schäuble

Outrage over Schäuble - oh kids, now you're suddenly outraged about him. Do you really think he only came up with his ideas today?

Gazprom Threatens EU with Gas Cutoff

Gazprom threatens EU with gas cut-off - again, great surprise all around. Did you really believe it would just stay with the threats against e.g. Ukraine?

Metasploit: Exploit Development: GroupWise Messenger Server

Metasploit: Exploit Development: GroupWise Messenger Server - those who still convince themselves that the time from the discovery of a software vulnerability to an exploit is correspondingly long: forget it. Here someone shows an example development of a complete exploit one day after a hole in the GroupWise Messenger Server became known ...

News from the Christianism Mullahs

No Church!

«Education Alliance» with Churches launched - what is this nonsense? The church has no place in the state. And why on earth should their outdated and partly simply absurd (I'm thinking of their stance on abortion, birth control, homosexuality, etc.) now also be state-sanctioned? Are we in America, or what?

And the press? They are at most outraged that other religions were excluded. What is this nonsense - we should finally leave this behind. If someone thinks that values education is necessary, then introduce ethics classes, but please ones that are free of religious nonsense!

''Pioneer Anomaly'': Mysterious Force in the Al

'Pioneer-Anomalie': Mysterious Force in Space - something is slowing down our probes. No one knows exactly what yet.

YES, finally! me too!

YES, finally! me too! - how to deal with lawyer mail as well

Philips will switching during advertising breaks prevent

Philips will to prevent switching during ad breaks - well, just another reason not to turn on the telly anymore ...

Incitement to Hatred Part III - Prosecutor vs. Alvar Freude

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

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

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

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

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" Slightly Larger Than Pluto

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

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

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.