English - 19

The first talk I watched today was about Terminator Genes and, as the speakers called it, biological restriction management. An important subject to come up that should be looked at, I suggest reading this telepolis-article about the subject.
Terminator genes are techniques in producing genetically modified organisms that can't reproduce themself to forbit »illegal« reproduction of them (that's why they used the analogy »biological restriction management«).

I just watched a talk about The very early Computer Game History. What I found interesting that some of the games that were implemented on the very first computers were the same that I used to implement when I started coding (e. g. Tic Tac Toe).

I also bought an RFID stopping metal case from the FoeBUD shop to store my student pass in it. It's probably really time to do such things and protect from surveillance threats.

Second day, finally uploaded some pictures and just found some time to blog between two talks.

Yesterday the We lost the war talk. Maybe I'll write something more in german when I find time for it. In short: IMHO this was an obscure mixture of political nonsense. This should at least be clear when reading the article with similar content in the last »Datenschleuder«, where the author claims something like »till 9.11. hackers ruled the world and everything was good« (to cite, »The big corporations were at our merce, because we knew what the future would look like and we had the technology to built it).
Lars wrote very drastically about it.

Today, the first interesting talk was5 Thesis on Informational-Cognitive Capitalism. I think I didn't really get what the autor wanted to say (surely related to missing sleep and lack of motivation to listen to english), but he was at least quite entertaining.

Next was Hashing Trusted Computing by Rüdiger Weis, as always quite funny, Rüdiger maybe should become the first professional math comedian. The content is obvious, at least for regular readers of my blog: Trusted Computing is evil and SHA1 is broken.

There was a nice presentation by fukami and Markus Beckedahl about the Sony BMG rootkit. They presented a lot of information, Markus has also collected it in his blog.

Next one was Technological art off the trodden tracks by two media artists that presented art which is related to hacking subjects and suggested that media artists and hackers come more together to share thoughts and projects. I hope they'll put their materials online, they had a lot of videos from nice stuff.

Just came from Learning cryptography through handcyphers by Benno de Winter. It was a basic introduction to some simple algorithms, not really new to me, but the speaker was worth watching because of the fun factor.

More to come.

One of the first talk I watched was Grey Commons by the swedish Group Piratbyrån.
They're a very sympatic organization completely opposed to copyright. That's a view I often miss in the discussions about »Intellectual property«. Protests are often limited to specific cases or copyrights getting more restrictive (like DMCA, software patents etc.), but nearly nobody questions if »IP rights« are of any use at all for the society.

The guys had a lot of good thoughts and especially criticized »low level« opposition like finding »alternatives to copyright«. I could agree very much with their arguments and I hope that their more radical views are taken up by people in other countries.

Just arirved at the 22th chaos communication congress. Together with Lars I took the Nachtzug from Augsburg.

We are in a very nice hostel called Generator Hostel, which is very nice for a quite moderate price. Although we arrived at 8 o'clock in the morning, we already could enter our rooms and get a breakfast on arrival day. Very recommendable.

Pictures will follow from time to time.

Yesterday del.icio.us, the well known social bookmark service, has been bought by Yahoo. This brings me to share some thoughts I had recently about the thing that everyone calls »Web 2.0«.
Although probably nobody can provide an exact definition on what Web 2.0 is, it's mostly surrounding »social software«, i. e. web-software that is not organized as top-down-communication, but as communication between the users.
The most common example for social software are probably wikis and blogs. What I always saw very critical is that centralized services like flickr and del.icio.us are so popular in the blogosphere and the internet community. They are often called »Web 2.0« as well, although they work completely different. My vision of a free net is a different one.

Now with yahoo buying del.icio.us, the two probably most popular »Web 2.0«-services belong to the same company. The problems with this are obvious: You don't know what Yahoo does with your data (Data Mining), you never know if they're gonna change their terms of use from one day to the other (e. g. limit the number of pictures/links, take money for services that were free before) or even shut down a service because it doesn't match the »shareholder value« (Remember GiMiX? That was social software as well).

In my opinion there is a big discrepance between the ideals of »social software« and letting it depend on one centralized service. I have no problem with hosters that provide free/ad-financed blogs. As long as I can trackback them with my self-hosted blog-software, as long as they can link me and as long as I don't need an account at some companies service to comment them. With flickr, this is different. I cannot add pictures on someone else's flickr-group from my own web-gallery. All the »social« aspect of flickr are completely based on everyone having an account at yahoo. Same goes with del.icio.us.

If we really want »Web 2.0« to be something that has to do with more freedom, more control from us / the users / the single person on the net, we should provide alternatives to centralized services. Alternatives that are not based on »just another web-service«, but on decentralized open standards and (at least as a possibility) free software. A fine example how this works is jabber (as an alternative to the IM-chaos of ICQ/AIM/MSN).
An alternative to del.icio.us could work like the PGP-keyservers. An alternative to flickr would be interoperability-standards to the various web-galleries (coppermine, menalto gallery), maybe some function similar to trackbacks for collective albums. If that's the direction »Web 2.0« goes, I'm really looking foward to »Web 3.0«. If »Web 2.0« means monopolies of Yahoo, Google and Microsoft, then it's not »MyWeb 2.0«.

After my system came pretty unusable because of various reasons, I decided that it's time for a re-install. To keep things funny, I switched to the gcc 4.1 snapshot ebuilds. Although gcc 4.1 is not even released, it performs pretty well. Fixing most apps was quite trivial, most of the patches are now commited to the tree and sent to the upstream developers.

To try this, you need to add sys-libs/glibc and sys-devel/gcc to your package.keywords, set I_PROMISE_TO_SUPPLY_PATCHES_WITH_BUGS=1 in make.conf. Be prepared to fix things yourself and don't do this if you don't know what you're doing.

Remaining problems are some errors with wxGTK-compilation I wasn't able to figure out how to fix, tunepimp doesn't compile (there's a fix for it in bugzilla, but that's against 0.4.0, that breaks amarok and you'll have to patch amarok as well, so things are a bit complex) and some things aren't compiled till now.

Okay, let's be a bit sentimental. Years ago, back when I started using linux, I found a nice little browser called galeon, the default browser of gnome in that time (yes, I also was a gnome-user back then), based on the mozilla/gecko engine. I liked it, because in those days, it was the only browser really having all those features I wanted to have (I especially remember that it was near to impossible to get browsers to open *everything* in a tab).
Someday some gnome people started another browser called epiphany, which quickly became the default for gnome. I never liked it. It lacked features all over, it had no real bookmark management (yes, I know that some people state that it's bookmark management is great), it opened everything in a new window, it just sucked.

Well, in the meantime I've switched 90% of my apps to KDE ones, I'm happily browsing with konqueror, while I' still maintaining the gentoo package of galeon and I start it from time to time when I need to check something with gecko. Recently the galeon-devs announced to stop the development and concentrate their work on epiphany-extensions. It seems that epiphany isn't the feature-lacking piece of code it was back then, they even have something that can be called a bookmark management I heard. Today the galeon-team released 2.0.0, one of the probably last versions, you can expect continuing updates for the gentoo-packages from me as long as there are new releases and they can be built against new firefox versions.

As I belong to the people being so crazy to build their gentoo with gcc 4, I also need the -*-keyworded glibc, finding out that the latest version says:

Portage have a serious bug in regards to symlinks, and merging this with current versions will fail!

!!! ERROR: sys-libs/glibc-2.3.6 failed.
!!! Function pkg_setup, Line 1071, Exitcode 0
!!! Portage sucks.

As Netzpolitik is reporting about the german Tagesschau having a video podcast, I was looking around for free video podcasting (or vlogging) clients.

While with amarok, we have a great audio player supporting podcasts, the most common free video players don't have any support for feeds (xine, totem, kaffeine). vlc seems to have something in svn, but not for the current and the next version. I've once tried this, but failed to get it running.

After some googling around, kmplayer seems to be the solution. kmplayer can use rss-feeds from podcasts as playlists, supports several backends (mplayer, xine, gstreamer) and is probably worth having a closer look at it.

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.

After blogging for more than a year with the default design of my blog software (at first bblog, now serendipity), I finally managed to create my own design. So if you are reading this in a RSS-reader, on some planet or some other place, today it's worth watching my page live in a real web browser.

As you may expect, the layout is 100% valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2. It works fine in all common browsers known to have basic support for CSS (tested in Konqueror, Mozilla Firefox and Opera). It's a well known fact that the so-called browser from Microsoft, the Internet Explorer, fails to support modern web standards, so it'll look ugly. For IE-visitors, I implemented a browser-check and they'll get a note. I've tried to create the check in a way that won't hurt browsers with user agent forging. If you see this message and aren't using the IE, I'd like to hear from you.
I don't know how this layout performs in the Internet Explorer 7 beta versions, as Microsoft doesn't provide them to the public. If you have access to those betas, I'd also like to hear about it.

For the technical side: The html is created with various text-editors, with the smarty template system used by serendipity. The graphics were edited with the great GIMP, using latest technology like the SIOX-algorithm, the sign was created with a wacom graphire graphics tablet, also in GIMP.

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.

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.