Friday, January 27. 2006Web 0.1 - Channel 4, IT Crowd
Channel 4, a UK television channel, has a new series called IT Crowd. As they are very modern and as the series is about an IT company, they may have thought:
»We've heard of this bleeding-edge thing called internet. Maybe we should do something about that.« And here is what they did: They provided an obscure mix of javascript and flash to play an embedded wmv-file (which doesn't work in my konqueror, although I have the appropriate plugins installed). Julian wrote about it and was able to extract the download URL. WMV9, so no chance without win32codecs atm. More and more tv stations provide some stuff online and this is really fine. It could be more, it could be better quality, there should be more free licensed stuff etc., but still, it's a step in the right direction. But hey, providing proprietary file formats embedded in proprietary is not how the web should look like in 2006. RSS-Feeds are made for stuff like that. Why can't they just use them? We have a bunch of formats that can at least be played on nearly every platform (and, not to forget that I'd always prefer an mpeg/patent-free format like ogg theora). Sidenote: Recently I wrote to the german tv magazine Monitor, that provides it's files as real-streams, why they couldn't provide RSS with other formats. Their answer was that it's due to copyright reasons so people cannot download the files ... ... with their Internet Explorer. If you come over an rtsp/mms/whatever-stream and want to download it, mplayer is your friend. mplayer -dumpstream [url] fetched every stream I ever wanted to download.
Posted by Hanno Böck
in Copyright, English, Linux, Movies, Webdesign
at
22:45
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Wednesday, January 18. 2006Firefox implementing spy-feature
As reported on several news-pages, Firefox is going to implement a »ping« that implements a new »feature« to the link-tag to send a ping out to some URL defined. This has a very bad taste to me.
What I always liked in the free software world was that not every app is sending »something« to »someone« in the net, as it's quite common in Windows apps. I remember on the last days I were using Windows (98) on a regular basis, I had some of those »personal firewalls« installed. Apps that had absolutely nothing to do with the net wanted to connect to their home-server, apps where I've selected »no internet connection« still tried to do »something« online (the last one for example was winamp). Now, I know that the design of the world wide web is really privacy-unfriendly. Yes, you can filter out a lot of things with stuff like privoxy, but in the end, you have the only possibility to disable everything (javascript, image loading from foreign servers, cookies) and lose the possibility to use a bunch of web-services. The browser can't do much about this, as this is how the web is designed. But still, I think this firefox »feature« is a big mistake. Especially free software applications should be much more precautious about their users privacy. I can't see a big use of it for the user. But I can think of a bunch of possibilities to misuse it. We are always crying about the »evil ones«, the spyware-producers out there, just remember the recent buzz about the iTunes-spyware-functionality. That's perfectly right. But in the end, we need to do better in free software to provide an alternative. I hope that the firefox developers re-think about this and remove or at least disable-by-default these website-pings before their next release. Friday, January 13. 2006Howto install xgl with glxcompmgr and fancy effects
Warning: By following the instructions below, you are probalby replacing some base libs from your system (mesa, glitz). This can and will seriously break your whole system if you don't know what you're doing. You may likely face other problems than I, so be prepared to play around yourself if you try this.
Ok, now for the fun part. Xgl is some experimental code for the next generation of X systems, with rendering completely done in OpenGL. Recently, David Reveman presented some major updates of the xgl-code. The instructions should be generic so you can do this on any distribution, however if you're using Gentoo, it'll be much easier, because you can get my xgl-overlay containing ebuilds for everything you need (get xgl-overlay-xxxx.tar.bz2 from here, I'll put up updated versions if neccessary). Non-Gentooers should also fetch this tarball, cause it contains all patches you'll need to follow the instructions. I did this with an ATI Radeon 9200, till now this only works with the proprietary drivers from ATI or Nvidia. I haven't tried this with Nvidia, but it should work mostly the same way.
Problems so far:
Update: I just found a problem some people had according to a portage bug. I've put a fixed portage-ebuild into the overlay (this may lead to problems if portage-devs decide to release an update called 2.1_pre3-r2). Finally xgl
What you can see here is my first screenshot running xgl with glxcompmgr and the wobbling windows effect. Yes, it's not really smooth, gimp couldn't manage to take a real screenshot (in reality, there were no such glitches). This effect looks very similar to the luminocity-one I presented some months ago, but that was the only effect I was able to run.
So you really want to know how I managed to get this running? Well, the short version: Created a bunch of cvs-ebuilds (glitz, mesa, xgl, glxcompmgr), added patches, patched around myself, did some strange thing with my libGL, ... Long version, together with portage-overlay, will follow tomorrow, now I'll go asleep ;-)
Posted by Hanno Böck
in Computer culture, English, Gentoo, Linux
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01:15
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Tuesday, January 3. 2006Make security more easy
Today I held a talk about »Technical defense against surveillance« on an event with rather non-technical visitors.
I noticed that we still really have a lot of problems when providing easy-to-use security. Things like "yes, you can do gpg with jabber, but only with a few clients, there's also another thing called otr, that's better from a cryptographic point of view but it is not based on the gpg-key-infrastructure and it's also only supported by some (other) clients" are really horrible to say if you always fear that nobody understands you. A short list of things that came me to mind: - I found no easy way on encrypting partitions with linux. Maybe I missed something, but I googled for it, tried it in ubuntu, found nothing. Had to tell them "there are some console-apps, dm-crypt, cryptsetup, etc.". - Apps should enable ssl by default. Servers should forbid login without ssl. No more pop3, smtp, imap, jabber, webmail, whatever-web-login without ssl-encryption. - Jabber should have a standard for encryption, based on gpg, with the cryptographic features of otr. - We need to get rid of all unsecure algorithms (MD5, SHA1, RSA/DSA/ElGamal with 1024 bit) by default (yes, I know I said this hundred times before). GPG still creates 1024bit DSA-keys. - Things like tor could be integrated into distributions, to be enabled by a click or similar. Just some random ideas. It is possible to create much more secure systems. We just need to do it. (And to not only cry, I hope I'll find some time and motivation to push some of the things I suggested in the near future)
Posted by Hanno Böck
in Cryptography, English, Gentoo, Linux
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23:48
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