No Such Weblog

Yes, it has happened: I've finally thrown away the self-brewn perl code which used to power this weblog for over a year, and have changed over to movable type. Old links and permalinks should continue to work; if anything stops working, please let me know.

Computerworld has a theory that attempts to explain SCO's threats against anything Linux: Driving up the stock price.

The change of software also brings some change with respect to the feeds provided by this site: There's an RSS 0.91 feed, an RSS 1.0 feed, and a dedicated ICANN items RSS 1.0 feed. Please update your subscriptions accordingly.

The United States Attorney's Office for the Western District of Washington has announced a press conference regarding Blaster for 1:30 p.m. PST.

Reports AFP (through Yahoo): Ferrero (known in domain name circles for the kinder.at case and known to the general public for Kinderschokolade and chocolate surprise eggs) attempted to keep competitor Haribo from using the word "Kinder" (children) in the product designation "Kinder Kram" (kids' stuff) for sweeties, and failed in Germany's highest civil court. The court decision is not yet available online.

Luxembourg is a good example when it comes to the consequences of an Internet market that isn't sufficiently competitive.

Suppose you want to set up a small business, with a .lu domain name, a little web site and some e-mail addresses. You can purchase an "all-inclusive" Internet access and hosting package for small businesses with the leading (almost monopoly) provider, the national P&T. The domain name is registered directly with dns-lu, though, by faxing or snail-mailing a form to them. (Change requests are to be submitted in writing as well.)

Fortunately, dns-lu is relatively quick when compared to P&T. After you have set up your web hosting and initial set of e-mail addresses (by, again, faxing a form), customer service degrades: You can call an always-busy hotline. You can send e-mail which is ignored. To successfully get an additional e-mail address, though, you have to resort to fax and postal mail again. They may even react to that -- after four months.

Ross Rader seems to be bored and points to a Wired article that explores the background of time-travelling spam. Also via Wired: A watch powered by snake oil that allegedly protects against "electronic pollution", by creating a frequency that neutralizes the electromagnetic fields emanating from devices like cell phones, computers, and radios. As an appropriate countermeasure, I'd recommend the hi-fi garden chair.

In other breaking news (from the BBC), UK police from Blackpool is helping Greek police on Rhodes deal with British tourists. Says one of the officers: I must stress that Blackpool should not be directly compared to Faliraki, although there are obviously some common issues such as people drinking excessively and engaging in criminal behaviour.

Funny (but not outright mad) is the shock and awe expressed in this Associated Press item about RIAA's investigation techniques. Writes AP: The RIAA's latest court papers describe in unprecedented detail some sophisticated forensic techniques used by its investigators. For example, the industry disclosed its use of a library of digital fingerprints, called "hashes," that it said can uniquely identify MP3 music files that had been traded on the Napster service as far back as May 2000. The FBI and other computer investigators commonly examine hashes in hacker cases. Now, that must mean that the RIAA is technically more advanced than file sharers...

Oh well. Time for the week-end.

Reuters: Clinton narrates Wolf-Friendly Peter and the Wolf. (And Gorbachev provides introduction and epilogue.)

Through Dave Farber's IP List: Flawed Routers Flood University of Wisconsin Internet Time Server. Netgear had deployed DSL routers that sent requests to a hard-coded time server at a high rate, causing operational problems to the University. The article details how the University of Wisconsin has been dealing with this, how they plan to proceed, and what kinds of lessons to learn from this.

SatireWire , via GrepLaw: 41 U.S. states and six European countries today announced that the act of creating an attachment-based computer virus will now be considered a hate crime because it intentionally targets stupid people. Objections are allegedly coming from the ACLU, though: "Hate crime statutes are specifically designed to protect minority groups," said ACLU President Nadine Strossen. "I'm not sure the number of stupid computer users meets that criterion."

The Hulk wasn't as successful as anticipated due to illegal copies of an early version that made it to the Internet -- at least that's what a report on German TV tonight wanted to make viewers believe, in the context of some IP-perspective reporting about our localized version of the DMCA. I don't buy that propaganda, though: The cinema trailer I saw earlier this year was certainly enough to keep me from watching that film.

Via Dave Farber's IP list: Reporters sans frontières has published a worldwide press freedom index that attempts to assess the actual freedom of the press throughout the globe. Surprisingly, the US is only on place 17 -- behind much of the EU, Canada, and even Costa Rica.

Via EUpolitix.com: European commissioner with responsibility for data protection Frits Bolkestein will tell colleagues that the EU has failed to obtain key safeguards on information European air carriers are compelled to give to the US authorities.

A large collection of documents related to communications interception (and its implementation), air line passenger data transfer, and related topics has made it to the web.

Ian Clarke -- founder of the Freenet project -- is planning to leave the US. GrepLaw serial interviewer Mikael Pawlo has talked to him.

(void *) (it's pronounced "elsewhere") is where I'm going to post those short little links without much of a comment. The main purpose of that blog is to make an RSS feed available which can be syndicated into the side bar of this one.

Writes Dave Wiener: After the recent email meltdown, I didn't send today's DaveNet out via email. He might have given up on e-mail -- but why force others who are able to cope with its problems to give up on it, too? RSS might be a good additional offer for making content available. But for many things, it can't replace e-mail.

A brief remark I wrote two years ago -- I can't access msn.com any more; MSN displayed a stupid IE advertising page for users of Mozilla and similar browsers back then -- is gaining unexpected popularity thanks to Google. I can't access MSN seems to be a common query there today -- kind of comical, given MSN's ambitions to compete with Google.

(Maybe these people are looking for this information.)

Here are the scripts that I use to send out daily "CVS repository changes" messages to the mutt-dev mailing list. Terse documentation inside.

Here are the tools I used to de-spam mutt's bug-tracking system over the week-end. The underlying software is debbugs, the Debian Bug Tracking System.

Is it just me, or does the Copyright Office's favicon (the small version, in red) look amazingly like a "don't write" sign?

Sobig.F has recently deactivated itself. The impact on e-mail bandwidth is amazing -- green for spam + virus bandwidth, blue for legitimate e-mail bandwidth.

Germany's new copyright law has been published in the official journal today, and becomes applicable tomorrow.

Here's an updated version of my debbugs tools. cli.pl is now able to interactively spamassassinate bug logs; also, there is a script named fix-utimes.pl that will adjust log files' modification times according to the date of the last message received with respect to a specific bug report. (This is important to prevent done bugs from staying in the system forever just because of spam.)

Seems like we're living in bad times for the open, end-to-end Internet.

First, Verisign believes it is a smart idea to move error handling away from the network's edges towards its center, and to limit it to a single application-level protocol. Now David Isenberg and Cory Doctorow point to a company named CloudShield. This company believes that the notion that the network should remain "dumb" and simply perform transport is outdated, and develops the tools to make that notion enforceable.

Escapable Logic has a piece named "Publicize the Internet" that looks at the Internet as an important tool for democracy, and hopes that a president named Dean might help rescue it from losing its end-to-end character even further.

Elliot Noss is more optimistic and suggests that it's all, in fact, quite easy: Just make sure that you get most of your services from "competitive service providers," i.e., from those who innovate and offer services at the net's edges -- and have a natural incentive to defend the net's end-to-end character, as it enables their business models.

This AFP story (in German) reassures readers that Gov. Schwarzenegger at least won't be able to become POTUS, under the current US constitution.

The story's category at Yahoo: Cinema News.

You know your economy is in bad regard when standard Nigeria-style spam claims it comes from an auditor with Deutsche Bank.

This must be the most stupid outgoing anti-virus filter software feature I have seen so far: Instead of a virus, the "intended" recipient gets a notification that someone tried to send a virus to them, but that this virus was caught by a filtering service. Basically, this replaces outgoing viruses by outgoing spam.

A close second (and long-time favorite) is e-mail scanning software that adds "certified virus-free" notices to outgoing messages. These notices are, of course, about as trustworthy as the words "I love you" in an e-mail's subject line.

I've been playing around quite a bit with Fedora Core recently, the successor to the non-enterprise versions of RedHat Linux -- RedHat 9.1, if you want.

Phone: *99***1#
Username: any
Password: t-d1

Germany's movie industry has started an awareness campaign about our localized version of the DMCA; the message is that movie "pirates" are criminals. The campaign's strategy is to insinuate that casual, non-commercial users of file sharing networks may face the maximum penalties available for commercial movie pirates.

Out of the three main motives of the campaign, one is tellingly similar to the EFF's Let the Music Play campaign (and, ultimately, backfires); one is obscene, alluding to music pirates possibly being raped by fellow prison inmates (and, ultimately, backfires); and one puts the Lord of the Rings into a wholly new perspective (and, ultimately, backfires too).

One Ring Law to rule them all, One Ring Law to find them,
One Ring Law to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

A recent project by a local foundation has installed a simple, yet amazing form of cultural commons in Bonn: A public bookshelf, in a public place. Anyone is free to take any book from the shelf; the organizers ask that books either be returned when read, or replaced by a different book.

It will be interesting to observe whether this project succeeds in creating a place for freely exchanging books (and, also, ideas), or whether it becomes a victim of either vandalism or egoism.

Writes Lawrence Lessig: The Europeans have traditionally been committed to deploying the internet in the least convenient and most expensive way possible.

Sounds like a description of the official WiFi available at the latest CeBIT in Hannover. Expensive, over-organized, and unusable.

(Then again, the GPRS service I'm using when on the road, domestically, is reasonably affordable, easy to use, and stable.)

So I was searching the net for a 2004 wall calendar featuring the old quarters and fortifications of Luxembourg city (UNESCO world heritage list entry here).

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the mainstream taste in wall calendars, which appears to consist in Terriers, swimsuits, cats, more Terriers, even more Terriers, still more Terriers, yet more Terriers, and occasionally Spaniels, Pomeranians, other kinds of Terriers, Dachshunds, more swimsuits -- and FDNY Firefighters.

Any help in finding a non-swimsuit, non-firefighter, and non-cute-animal calendar featuring old Luxembourg would be welcome.

From the Arrow Books edition of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea:

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

(Almost) from IP: I wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2004, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make Europe great (not to imply that Europe is necessarily greater than any other continent or economic entity), and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith, or sexual preference of the wishes.

SMTP SPF: Senders Permitted From is a spam-avoiding proposal that looks like it might be adopted widely; it gives senders of e-mail a way to describe through DNS records what their messages look like and where they come from. E-Mails that don't match the description can then be discarded.

The proposal is likely to be adopted widely because it creates interesting incentives: If significant e-mail receivers apply SPF checks where available (and don't require senders to use SPF), and require existing sender domain names, this creates incentives for spammers to abuse non-SPF-enabled domain names. This will be painful for the holders and users of these domains, who in turn have strong incentives to publish SPF records. The same incentives apply for SPF records that are so loose that they are ineffective, or almost ineffective.

Later: Steve Bellovin (on IP) has a number of problems with the scheme.

So I finally couldn't resist: Keine Photos bitte ("no photos please") is where I'm posting the occasional picture. The text that comes with the photos will be in German.

At work, I share my office with our systems administrator. Enters a colleague, puts on her sweetest "I neeed computer support" smile. "Hi, you've got this 'my computer does something I don't want it to do' expression in your face." -- "Errm, well, couldn't you remove the games from my computer? They are, well, preventing me from getting my work done. I mean, it would be nice if you could remove them, but it's not that urgent. Oh, by the way, the games that come with Fedora are not as good as the ones with the previous Redhat."

As Kris Köhntopp points out over and over again, file sharing can give consumers a level of comfort and value that money, unfortunately, can't buy these days.

A friend points me to a great recording of Brahms' German Requiem (Leinsdorf with the Boston Symphony). I want to buy that recording as a christmas gift for my father -- it's not available on this side of the Atlantic, I'm told.

I order the sound track for Chicago (dozed through the movie on a trans-Atlantc flight some time ago, still want to get the sound track) from Amazon -- it's three weeks and counting now, and I was just told that it may take some more weeks.

Add to this Kris' observation that CDs often come with copy protection mechanisms these days which aren't effective against determined attackers, but can break players; that digital music is either unavailable legally, or DRMed to the extent that it's not portable across player platforms (and technology generations); add to this that MP3s are not so encumbered.

Then, why on earth, should people pay money to be allowed to wait a month for a product that may quite well be inferior to what's available almost freely and almost immediately, can be used across platforms, and is available in formats that are suitable for long-time archival?

The Washington Post reports that Sunday's British Airways flight 223 from London to Dulles has been canceled again; the Department for Homeland Security says that cancellations for security reasons are going to be routine activities.

The article has two quotes, though, that sound like BA believes their flights are being cancelled because of false positives: (1) The airline was able to accommodate all of the 184 passengers scheduled for Sunday's flight to Washington on its two other daily flights from London to Dulles or at later dates. (2) British Airways officials, concerned that the focus on the flight has something to do with its number, are discussing whether to change the number or slightly alter the departure time, an aviation source said.

Assume there's really a terrorist that wants to board that flight. Then that terrorist isn't a danger on one of the other flights the same day? And that terrorist isn't a danger when the flight is given a different number, or the departure time is slightly altered?

I've started looking for a new laptop -- that trusty old Dell is asking ever louder questions about retirement benefits and less travel.

There are three key criteria: The machine must be robust. It must have a good and extremely robust keyboard, since I'm typing much and fast. And Linux must run on it. By "Linux must run on it", I don't just mean "Linux boots", but rather "can be used as a daily Linux workhorse." That includes well-working networking and Wi-Fi equipment (though continued use of the good old PCMCIA cards I use with the Dell is an option), and that also includes that the graphics adapter must be supported by X11 -- including that external VGA plug I need to plug in a beamer now and then! (Bad past experience with the Dell.) I don't care much about Megahertz numbers and the like -- in terms of processing power, about anything that's availabe now would do.

I don't think a new Dell is an option -- I've made some bad experiences in terms of hardware robustness (including a mouse button breaking off just because it's being used), and the keyboard is so worn off it's torturing me daily (after two years of not being used by the original owner, and one and a half years of heavy use under my hands). Right now, an IBM Thinkpad looks tempting; maybe one of the R40 or R50 devices.

Thoughts, experiences, recommendations?

So the new Laptop is an IBM Thinkpad R40, and I'm pleasantly surprised how smoothly Fedora Core 1 works with this machine. While some stumbling blocks remain in getting Linux to run smoothly, solutions for most are readily available -- and the rest just works.

Some lessons: In order to actually use the entire mouse assembly (touchpad with two mouse buttons, trackpoint with three (!) mouse buttons), it's best to use a patched version of GPM in repeater mode. For the internal modem, the only thing that works so far is a recent SmartLink driver. Note that the Agere drivers recommended by IBM don't seem to work. The final and surprising problem was getting the laptop's infrared to work: An old-style IRQ collision between te I