Computer culture - 17

The Hugi Diskmag, which is a diskmag (ok, not really on disks any more) of the demoscene, just released it's 31th issue, containing my article about the demoscene and free software I've published here a while bag.

Hugi is released as a windows-executable, the windowed mode works fine in WINE, the fullscreen-mode doesn't (any wine-hackers around that want to fix this?).

As reported on several news-pages the last days, the author of the rootkit-protection sofware RootkitRevealer discovered that some Sony Audio CDs install rootkit-like software on your PC.
This is only a very grave case that shows why Digital Rights Management is bad.

The way this and several other copy protected CDs work: You cannot play them with your usual CD-player software on your PC, only if you install some special software delivered on the CD itself.
Beside the fact that you can only use such software if you're using the operating system they write the software for (which is usually Windows) and the fact that you cannot use the audio player of your choice, this leads to a number of other problems.
What this case shows: If you want to play DRM music, you often have to install "something" on your PC you don't know what it really does. You have to trust some unknown software just to play a CD you've bought, and in this case some software that probably leads to security problems, stays on your system without your knowledge and always uses some system ressources.

But think about some other scenarios: You find the CD in let's say 20 years, want to hear it just to find out that nobody uses Windows XP any more, that the software doesn't run on current computers (whatever they'll look like in 20 years). You have no access to the content any more. This is one big issue with DRM-systems: You'll never know how long they'll work.
If you buy a song in iTunes today, you don't know if apple still exists in 20, 30, or even let's say 50 years and if their online-DRM-check finds anything. Same goes with MS/WMA-based DRM-systems. Let's even imagine you want to access some DRM-proted content when the content is no longer copyrighted, you have the right to copy it, but cannot do so.

DRM-systems will have big consequences on the accessibility of older content in the future and that's a big threat to culture at all.

As you may have heard, the WINE-project, which let's you run Windows programs in Linux, released it's first beta version after a long time.
I've been a demoscener for a long time, while with my switch to linux some years ago, I couldn't watch most demos any more (and having a windows partition just because of that was too much hassle, I like my laptop windows-free).

Today I was playing around how well WINE performs with Demos and was quite impressed. My experiences in the past were mostly that WINE only produces error messages and never runs anything. After DasTier (still not blogging) told me that probably my sound settings are wrong and I have to set it to "driver emulation" in winecfg, I could run a couple of older windows-demos and intros, I had at least The Product (FarbRausch), Kötterdämmerung (SquoQuo), Störfall Ost (Freestyle) and Raving Tomatoes - Biomutating Planet Acid running (just some random ones I tried out).
I failed to run more recent stuff, at first because my graphics hardware won't manage that (just a Radeon 9200) and second because of the limited shader support in WINE.

Motivated by that, I also could run the legendary Second Reality (Future Crew) (hey, did you know that it has a hidden part?) in DosBox.

I'm thinking about creating a project for building a database of working demos and writing qualified bug-reports/patches for non-working ones.

Auf der Hobby & Elektronik Messe in Stuttgart gibt es seit Jahren einen Bereich von Computerclubs. Dieses Jahr wird die LUG Stuttgart dort eine Reihe von Vorträgen unter dem Motto "Linux zum selber ausprobieren" halten.
Ich werde dort morgen (Sonntag) um 15 Uhr einen Vortrag unter dem Titel "Linux Next Generation" halten, wo ich einige aktuelle und zukünftige Entwicklungen auf dem Linux-Desktop präsentieren werde. Die Vortragsfolien gibt es dann nach dem Vortrag unter http://www.int21.de/slides/.

Update: Slides jetzt online, als OpenDocument, als PDF.

Some years ago I started the webpage dosdriver.de, cause I permanently had problems running old DOS games and demos, the lack of proper VESA-support, missing sound drivers and things like that. I forgot to upload this again when I moved all my webpages to our little server project, so it was offline for the last months.
I noticed when the free-domain-provider I'm hosting dosdriver.de mailed me that I'm violating their AGB if I don't use the domain for a real webpage. Today I took the page from a backup, removed old eMail-adresses, made xhtml 1.1, added a small section about emulators and some general rework. Most of the information is still valid, so if you intend to run a real DOS on some up-to-date PC, you might find it useful.
The domain is still a free-domain with ads, but as most of you probably have popup-blockers, you won't mind.

Everybody seems to talk about flock today (via BoingBoing). Flock is a web browser based on Firefox supporting features like direct tagging of links, uploading them to del.icio.us, blogging, uploading images to flickr and things like that.

It's surely a nice idea to integrate all those social software into easy to use applications, so more people get to know blogs and all that stuff. Although I'm a bit sceptically about centralised services like flick or del.icio.us, I prefere more standardised, decentralized services that everyone can use with his own software (Blogs, Podcasts and things like that).

I'd prefer to blog this entry with flock, but it seems not to support serendipity yet, at least I couldn't get it to work.

Get Flock today, probably no distribution packages for anything yet, but the binary just works when running from it's unpacked dir without installing anything.

Wie ich heute erfahren durfte, laufen die Beamboards am Stuttgarter Hauptbahnhof mit BeamCon 2.04, außerdem läuft die Lampe schon über 2000 Stunden und noch einige andere Debugging-Informationen sind zu erfahren.

Soweit ganz nett hier, gestern hab ich mir n Vortrag zu elliptischen Kurven angeschaut, der ganz nett war. Heute gab's n interessanten Vortrag zu IPv6 mit anschließendem Workshop, wo ich erstmals IPv6 lokal bei mir am laufen hatte. Muss mich mal bei Gelegenheit drum kümmern, dass auch mein Blog über IPv6 erreichbar ist.

Gleich werd ich nen Vortrag zu kryptografischen Hash-Funktionen halten, die Folien gibt's hier schonmal als OpenDocument oder PDF.

Tomorrow I'll attend the mrmcd11b from the Chaos Computer Club in Darmstadt. Seems they have some interesting talks there and I'm looking forward on meeting some chaos-people and having a nice time there.

Sometimes you think the world is really small - so I met my room-neighbor Julian in Cologne. He was hanging around in a location called "Kletterfabrik" near the Evoke-location, where some cool people did some art installations. I made pictures, but they are quite dark (it was in the night).
I'll upload some more pictures in the next days.

The 64k-Intro Bloom from Styx made the second place and he was quite happy about that.

After coming home I was really tired (you don't get too much sleep on a demoparty) and angry about the "Deutsche Telekom", because our DSL isn't working at the moment.

I'm here at the Evoke 2005 demoparty with Tom, StyX and TS.

I tried to create a 4k-Intro on friday evening, but stopped due to the late time and the deadline, which was at 10 (although it was moved for hours later). StyX has created a 64k-Intro, which has probably good chances to gain a good place, maybe even the first.
The network is always sucking here (and we're asking us why it is so difficult to provide a working network), so if this entry reaches you, I managed to get internet for some minutes ;-)

Pictures I made are here

In about two hours I'll leave to have a trip to the demoparty Evoke. If netcologne manages it to provide internet this year you may see live-reports from me. I have no releases prepared, as I'm mostly a passive scener in recent times.
If you don't know what a demoparty is, it's basically an event where people are creating art with computers, in form of self-running programs, while their only use is that they provide nice graphics and sound.

If you are a loyal reader of my blog, you might know that one of the very first entries in this blog was about my Evoke-Trip last year.

I found this a while ago and thought it's worth mentioning. Secret Maryo Chronicles is a Mario-Clone and seems to be one of the better ones. It's in a quite early stage, but with some talented level designers it could evolve to something really nice.
The gameplay is a bit different from the original games, it doesn't have a speedup-button. It's features are comparable to Super Mario Bros, while it's graphics are more like Super Mario World.
It's free software and it's available for Windows and Linux.

Ok, die Überschrift ist vielleicht ein bißchen arg euphorisch gewählt, aber ich wollte im nachfolgenden auf ein imho sehr interessantes Projekt aufmerksam machen.
Die Aktivisten von Downhill Battle haben die Organisation Participatory Culture Foundation ins Leben gerufen und betreiben in dem Rahmen ein Projekt für die Verbreitung von Videos im Netz.

Bislang gibt's die Web-Software Broadcast Machine, in den nächsten Tagen soll ein Player dafür folgen. Natürlich alles freie Software, der Player basiert auf vlc und soll für Linux, Windows und MacOS zur Verfügung stehen.

Ich hab mal ein bißchen damit rumgespielt, das Ergebnis könnt ihr unter broadcast.hboeck.de bewundern. Den Player (CVS-Version) hab ich leider noch nicht an's laufen gebracht, mal das Release abwarten.
Da ich schon öfters über kostenlos im Netz herunterladbare Filme gebloggt habe, hab ich dazu mal einen Channel gestartet. Die Software wirkt noch etwas buggy und in frühem Stadium, ist aber trotzdem ganz nett.

Finally I managed to upload some pictures. Last day on "What the Hack" and I'm pretty tired. I decided to go back home today, although I originally planned to travel to some other outdoor-camp, but after these rainy days, I'm no longer motivated for this.
This morning I was watching a talk by John Gilmore about Digital Rights Management and the DMCA. He's a member of the EFF. It was interesting to hear from someone involved in those issues in the USA.