No Such Weblog

The At Large Study Committee has official presented its final report. (PDF version / PalmReader e-book)

I've finally come around to have a look at a few Euro calculators for the Palm. Of course, there are quite a few of these around, of varying quality. My recommendation is Currency by H.M. Martins, who seems to have disappeared from the net. However, Stefan Braunstein has made copies of the latest versions available, and also continues to provide the public with currency update PDBs for currencies with floating exchange rates. His download site is here.

District authorities of Düsseldorf have been trying to get ISPs to block certain harmful web sites (including rotten.com) for quite some time. According to this report at Heise Online, Düsseldorf ISP ISIS has implemented such a block by tampering with name server records for at least rotten.com, effectively redirecting surfers to a web page at the Düsseldorf district authority (this was reported on FITUG's debate mailing list; the report should show up in the web archives later today). Today, ISIS ended their blocking attempt, saying that it had been initiated by a single technician without proper authority, and was inefficient anyway, according to this news item. The district authority, in a press release, regretted ISIS' latest step, and noted that 12 other (as of yet unnamed) ISPs continue to block the various harmful sites.

A press release from the Chaos Computer Club is available here.

More information on the Düsseldorf web blocking attempts is available from CCC Düsseldorf.

$ nslookup Default Server: localhost Address: 127.0.0.1 > server 195.158.131.2 Default Server: issv0099.isis.de Address: 195.158.131.2 > ls -d rotten.com [issv0099.isis.de] $ORIGIN rotten.com. @ 1D IN SOA issv0099.isis.de. webmaster.isis.de. ( 2001072601 ; serial 13h23m20s ; refresh 2H ; retry 1W ; expiry 1D ) ; minimum 1D IN NS issv0099.isis.de. 1D IN A 195.158.131.132 * 1D IN CNAME www www 1D IN A 195.158.131.132 @ 1D IN SOA issv0099.isis.de. webmaster.isis.de. ( 2001072601 ; serial 13h23m20s ; refresh 2H ; retry 1W ; expiry 1D ) ; minimum > Note, in particular, that they are not just blocking web access, but also e-mail and all other services offered under that domain.

In a press release published in the evening, ISIS gives its version of the day's events: According to this press release, a technician had been experimenting with blocking the relevant web sites since the beginning of the week, despite the fact that the ISP originally didn't want to implement the block (the district government had originally called for the block in early October). This experiment was then stopped in the morning, and reactivated in the late afternoon after an ISIS executive had met the head of the district government to discuss the issue. ISIS then complains about the situation of ISPs which are either perceived as censors, or as fostering right-wing radicalism. It is emphasized that ISIS maintains its criticism of the technical solution used to block the sites - in particular because the solution leaves so many back doors that the effort can't actually be justified. According to the press release, ISIS will meet the district government in December, in order to discuss further activities and work on a political solution.

Since Friday, another news release from the Düsseldorf district authority has been available. In this release, the authority justifies the blocking attempts by referring to disgusting content on the pages blocked. The allegation that the authority has been wrongly declaring the authors of protest e-mails to be right-wing extremists is rebutted: "There may be many e-mail senders who want to defend the Internet's liberty on principle. But the content of many other Internet messages clearly demonstrates - by style and content - that the authors show right-wing extremist thinking. In those cases in which my employees have been threatened directly [...], the prosecuting attorney will investigate." For some discussions on this press release, have a look at the authority's web forum.

I've just released the next mutt beta, version 1.3.24i.

Some of the more interesting changes against mutt-1.3.23i:

• New and improved threading code from Daniel Eisenbud. See also $duplicate_threads, $hide_missing, $thread_received.
• ANSI colors in the builtin pager are now controlled by a variable $allow_ansi, and are turned OFF by default. The colorization of attachment markers (and PGP output messages) in the pager is done a bit different, and more difficult to cheat. In particular, it's not possible to consistently trick two instances of mutt which were started at different points of time.
• There's a $wrapmargin variable which gives users some control over mutt's wrapping in the pager, and in the text/plain; format=flowed handler. The default value of this variable is 0.
• Of course, bug fixes.

There's an outstanding mail loss problem with this version: On system where write(2) lies about the success of an operation (for instance, with NFS folders or when quotas are enabled), mutt may not detect such errors when writing to mbox folders, possibly even losing mail. The bug is mutt's, and will be fixed next week (I hope). Since it's present in all mutt versions, there's no point in holding up this release due to the problem. See the bug tracking system for details.

Mutt 1.3.24i can be found here.