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according to this article on heise, the restriction is no longer in effect. According to the press officer, a technician did it on his own and not in accordance with company policies.

But Germany is the country with the most tapped phones per 1000 inhabitants in the whole world, and still growing.

That they fund GnuPG hast something to do with the fact, that the european industry is afraid of Echelon.

But the government is really eager nowadays to enforce an Orwellian police state.

If you are able to understand german, there are some disturbing articles at telepolis about the new European cyber-police called Enfopol.

Anybody know a country which doesn't sacrifice freedom to "fight terrorism" these days ?

But Germany is the country with the most tapped phones per 1000 inhabitants in the whole world, and still growing.

That they fund GnuPG hast something to do with the fact, that the european industry is afraid of Echelon.

But the government is really eager nowadays to enforce an Orwellian police state.

If you are able to understand german, there are some disturbing articles at telepolis about the new European cyber-police called Enfopol.

Anybody know a country which doesn't sacrifice freedom to "fight terrorism" these days ?

• sending spam via SMS to cellular phones is illegal (strange: the sender aka spammer will pay the bill)
• sending spam via e-mail is legal (here the innocent receiver has to pay the BIG part of the bandwith involved)
• persistent cookies are illegal (only session cookies are allowed)
• nothing about spyware (as if it were less intrusive than cookies!!!)

long live our clueless politicians!

ms

I recently read that the cost of the (2nd) Gulf War cost $60 billion, 90% of which was paid for by several Arabic and European States. Article in German. The article claims the Pentagon got $3.8b for the first three months of the war from Congress (not including normal cost of operations nor $20b for "special measures" after 9/11).

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/hes-11.11.01-0 00/ - Heise Newsticker reports (in german), that the compiler switch -ipo (inter procedural optimization) can seriously mess up the compiled program. An example given (with image) is Povray under both Windows and Linux, which can tint some images.

From the artical (my Translation:)

"Possibly soon German judges will have to deal with the question whether intentional violation of the Red Book Standard by manipulating the TOC is a criminal use of 'incorrect or incomplete data'. It will be also important wether digitally reading an Audio CD into computer memory is considered as data processing."

The German Criminal Law has in the section "fraud" a the special Paragraph 263a about "computer fraud", which I translate as follows(IANAL, but I am married to one):

263a StGB Computer fraud

(1) Who damages the assets of another person with the intention of providing himself or a third person an illegal pecuniary advantage by the fact that he affects the result of a data processing procedure by incorrect design of the program, by use of incorrect or incomplete data, by unauthorized use of data or otherwise by unauthorized interference with the process is punished with imprisonment up to five years or with fine.

This paragraph is usually used against people tampering with ATMs or a company's computer systems, but I see no reason why my personal computer should not be protected by this law, and for me it is unquestionable that all these CD copy prevention systems are feeding incomplete an incorrect data to my computer, and reading a CD into the memory of my computer is definitely a data processing procedure.

As I know the courts, proving damage is often the crucial point. I think that a clear label stating "This CD is intentionally damaged so that it does not play on most computers and some CD players." would probably save the publisher, but anything short of this IMO constitutes fraud.

In this case there was no warning sign on the CD, so when I buy such a CD I do not get what I pay for. If I bought the CD just to listen to it on my MP3 Player or use a duplicate in my car stereo (my CDs do not last very long when using them in the car), then the value of the CD is zero. And even if I get a refund, it probably takes more than an hour to manage it all, which is a significant amount that easily surmounts the value of the CD: I am tricked, my assets are damaged. This is even simple fraud under 263 StGB, and even a particularly serious case under subsection 3 (repeatedly defrauding a large number of people), which is punished with imprisonement up to ten years.

I am very curious about the outcome of this case, but I would be happy if courts would stop greedy corporations trying to screw me with intentionally damaged products.

If not, I will react like many people: I will stop to buy any music at all; I will fill up a terabyte disk with enough music for the rest of my life in one afternoon, and those record companies can fuck themself.

p.

According to this recent comment (by me), the answer is no. The logo is owned by Sony and Philips (inventors/promotors of CD audio). According to a recent article in German c't magazine, Philips is looking into the violation of the Red Book / IEC 908 standard.

However, what AMD doesn't want you to know is that the XP range already contains 0.13um technology. AMD is eating its own future by doing this... too bad there's no such thing as a free lunch - even for AMD.

The famous German computer magazine c't reported the same as Tom in a recent article. (It was about coolers, IIRC.) They said that you have to be very careful to mount the cooler correctly. If it doesn't sit correctly, i.e. it doesn't contact the CPU flatly and there is a millimeter or so of air between cooler and CPU, then the CPU burns and is destroyed "within seconds" - the machine won't even boot anymore. They said so, because it happened to them during the tests. It was an 1.2 MP, IIRC.

However it makes often sense to save stuff locally, not only because for archival of interesting material (e.g. the Knuth and Minsky lectures and other very interesting videos from technetcast come to mind), but also it plays smooth once it is on the hard disk. Even if you have only a low bandwidth connection, you can enjoy higher quality versions this way.

An amazing program is Streambox VCR. Too bad it seems not available. However you can get old betas on the net.

This only for Win32 and there are some patches available to make it work with the latest Real servers. Obviously Real tried to get rid of programs like Streambox VCR, which are known as stream rippers.

There are other solutions:
In this Telepolis article (in German, but you will make sense of the given links, no doubt or use Babelfish) they discuss several approaches.

Very impressive statement, I completely agree with it.

I don't filter ads, but I have no special reason why I don't. I'm surfing the web about 8 hours a day for my work, and I got used to ads. They don't bother me if they aren't huge and don't try to catch my full attention.

There are only two sites where I look at or even click on the ads: slashdot and german newsticker Heise Online. Both have ads which are informing or sometimes funny.
I hope /.'s upcoming "new size" will not make me forget about this and ignore the ads. Because then, slashdot will be nothing but just another site full of ads - there are lots of them, I don't need another one.

In german language there's a saying: "Fewer is often more". I think this will also apply to your advertising revenues.

How about this one?

The first day of the robot contest is over and Heise Online has posted a report on some of the most memorable events. Here's the translation of the linked page:

Today was the first day of the c't robot challenge at the Systems in Munich and a rather simple construction based on Lego Mindstorms made for a genuine surprise: The roughly soccer ball sized robot, which isn't equipped with any kind of camera sensors und is thus called "Stevie Wonder" by its creators, completed the "cleaning bot" challenge in only 6 minutes and 24 seconds on its second attempt. On the first attempt it had erroneously moved one of the garbage objects out of the target area and on the third attempt it drove onto a wooden garbage object of the "cigarette box" type, making the tracks lose ground contact. According to the contest rules, the best - the second - attempt counts. "Stevie's" success was above all astounding because, though being a relatively simple robot compared to other constructions in this contest, it unerringly moved the red cans and wooden cuboids, which served as garbage objects, into the blue "recycling area". The construction team around Wolfgang Lang from Roetenbach first anticipated problems connected to the cigarette box sized wooden objects: The "Stevie" creators had expected real cigarette boxes and had therefore built the robot with that kind of less sturdy lightweight objects in mind. Then however, two hair ties, which they borrowed from a Heise employee, were successfully used to tune "Stevie's" mechanics.

This day's other candidates had to face more or less serious disappointments: Wolfgang Draxinger's Fishertechnik Computing based "Mr. Proper" suffered from blasted power transistors, which forced the student to do without the intelligently designed gathering mechanics of his robot and instead redesign concept and software to use only pushing. Since some contestants didn't show up, the referees could grant him some time for reprogramming, but in the end, "Mr. Propper" wouldn't move at all, or required interactive commands respectively, so Draxinger had to give up with a heavy heart.

Team Metavox from Meerbusch had some more success: Their swivel flap equipped "Metabot", which is based on a self-made platform, showed a heart-warming tendency to hug walls, but at least mastered part of the challenge. In the first two rounds, it didn't manage to leave the starting room. In order to create a secondary ranking for those robots, which couldn't find the target area on their own, the referees allowed the camera equipped "Metabot" to start right in the doorway to the room with the target area, after which it moved five of six garbage objects into the recycling area after all. In order to find the direction of choice, the robot turns in small steps and tries to estimate distances. Then it rushes in the direction with the most free space at rather high speed. In doing so it hit walls and corners several times. The design team around Christian Winkgen shrugged off the orientation weaknesses of the rolling speed merchant: "Metabot" had been built for fun, and maybe it simply had a hard time correctly telling the colors of the contest arena apart.

The contest continues. Right now, "Stevie" is not only the audience's favorite, it is also on top of the current rankings. But nothing is decided yet: If all contestants who have been assigned a timeslot show up, there will be 33 more performances. Today three of the candidates where absent without notice, so it can't be predicted what will happen in the next days, but the contest will certainly stay exciting.

Kiwaiti

Kiwaiti

a mixture of Linux and Windows but with a strong movement towards open source software. See also this story. The German Government nevertheless signed a large contract with Microsoft for future upgrades and deliverables (see here for a German article on that). One of the driving forces behind the open source movement has been the BSI, the german government agency for security in information technology (again Website is in German). They support open standards especially for security sensitive applications.

If cash desks count: A german chain of supermarkets uses Debian (german article).

See the c't article from heise:

Heise

Your comment violated the postercomment compression filter. Comment aborted

...or they have a pet judge...

Heise says it's in the shelves here on saturday. And they say that in german, of course, so use the fish.

Hey, I posted info about this more than a month ago... Here are the articles I linked to: Heise News Ticker and the posting at incidents.org in which Tom Liston first introduced his idea...

the various "International" (ie. American) trade organisations will force everyone to comply or lose the ability to do business with the USA.
Failure to apply encryption restrictions may get countries accused of harboring terrorists. Bombs away.

Then get ready to bomb Europe out of the world, as the European Parliament is currently advising people to use strong encryption to stop US industrial espionage, see here or here.

http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/te/9419/1.ht ml (in german).

c't magazine is one of the largest computer magazines in Germany (or maybe the largest? whatever!) and I don't think they are influenced by the advertisements. So it's possible.

OTOH, I do know that it's difficult. We have a heap of badly-done magazines here as well that are heavily biased towards MS. It makes me appreciate c't only more...

The "translation" is here:
Gegenreformation im Internet

What a nice way to make a statement without having the facts or arguments to support it. "I don't feel like saying the Earth is flat, so I am not going to say it is, even though I believe it is, and most serious scientists will eventually agree with me."

What I will say is that MS, even *if* they are a monopoly and we assume so

What is a monopoly by your definition? Are 90% of the marketshare enough? 95%?

has done nothing to prevent you, the user

*beep* Wrong line of argument. Monopolies are not about direct coercion. Monopolies, while they do have immense market power, are not governments, otherwise they would be called governments. Monopolies, through accumulation of capital and mindshare, may be able to create a market in which it is impossible or very hard for competitors to thrive, even though this may be in the best interest of the consumers. Microsoft is such a monopoly.

"Freedom of choice" arguments sound nice and are exactly the kind of rhetoric you would expect a Microsoft-propagandist to employ -- however, they are fundamentally flawed in that they omit an essential factor that determines our decisions: information. By being a monopoly, Microsoft has the advantage (and, rarely, the disadvantage) of being the focus of all media attention. And they have loads of money to spend on propaganda, too. Your decision to use or not to use a Microsoft OS may be free of direct coercion, but it is certainly not free of manipulation. And because of the nature of an operating system, being the basis for all other software run on a computer, any program that is written exclusively for a Microsoft OS strengthens Microsoft's monopoly. Thus, any switchover can obviously only be gradual, with many people using two or more operating systems at the same time (which, incidentally, has been confirmed in a recent survey of 10000 Linux users, where only 38% used no other OS besides Linux -- even many professionals boot Windows NT or 2K together with Linux).

Linux is now in a position where it can actually compete with Windows in most fields, even in spite of Microsoft's market domination (a fact which lends tremendous support to arguments for open, patent-free software development). But consumers know little about Linux because of Microsoft's media domination, and they can't give it a try easily because of Microsoft's coercive OEM licensing. These are clearly practices of a monopoly by any reasonable definition, and they make it hard for the little competition to gain market share. Whether such practices are illegal under US antitrust law, I cannot say -- I care more about morals than about law. On the basis of morals, I can see no reasonable argument why the kind of coercive OEM licensing Microsoft uses should be allowed.

...T-Propaganda...

The T is considered a non-registered trademark (German only, sorry) by Deutsche Telekom. Don't let yourself being caught using this letter without authorization.

It's not imposible at all. The german computer magazine "c't" had two articles about how to build an mp3-decoder for the parallel port back in 1999.. You can find the details on their website [heise.de, german only, sorry].

On the site I found a link to http://www.mp3pump.de/ which looks rather interesting. This "Pump II" named project supports ide for harddisc(s) and/or cdrom-drive(s), ethernet for network-access, serial ports for keyboard and mouse and, of course, digital and analog outputs. Additionally you can attach a display to it. I didn't take a close look yet, but it looks quite grown up.. According to the website it shouldn't be a problem to run linux on it and since everybody's welcome to develop their own software for this device I think it's a very interesting alternative to, let's say, audiotron..

It doesn't ship yet, though, but they already built 100 devices and are testing the software now.

Ciao

M

"For one thing, most of these attacks rely on sophisticated equipment that isn't readily available for people to use."

According to this article from Heise Online (German only), the sophisticated equipment consists of:

• a stock WLAN adaptor
• a computer (running Linux)
• software such as TCPDUMP or Ethreal

Check out this heise.de article (in German, sorry)!!! Somebody apparently programmed a little Linux tool that may be able to slow the spread of the worm down a little. The idea was first introduced in the incidents.org forum. May be worth a look.

They (mainly BMG in Germany) tried it in Europe already in 2000. I still have Ministry's CD that won't play on CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs but plays perfectly on an ordinary stereo CD player.

There is also an hidden article on Slashdot about the case: http://slashdot.org/articles/01/07/30/1558227.shtm l.

No. Abmahnungen (cease-and-desist letters) can be sent for various reasons, including trademark infringement.

It is also possible to send such letters on behalf of the public, to enforce consumer protection laws, but this can be done only by organizations that are registered as consumer protection organizations, and they only get registered if they're non-profit (I think). Most law firms are however working for profit, and thus cannot sue on behalf of the public.

(There has been a case recently where a "consumer protection organization" has lost their right to sue because they were also doing business for profit. Read this article (german) if you're interested.)

Also, a lawyer can't just act on behalf of someone who is not their client.

It is however possible - and I guess that's what Adobe did - to hire a law firm to "protect your trademarks", and them let them do so on their own, without asking you about each and every case.

Disclaimer: I am German, and live in Germany, but IANAL.

cool, thanks. I think I read an earlier incarnation of that article on the vbr encoding. He links to this c't article in German that looks like a nifty test. Problem is, I don't read (or speak) German and c't doesn't do English articles (what a shame). And of course it doesn't seem to go far enough, only comparing various bit rates with the mp3 format.

Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos

This study varies significantly from the study done in Heise link here . That study concluded that high quality mp3s were indistinguishable from CD recordings !!
I can only conclude that one of these two sets of tests were biased or did something wrong. They can't both be right and the quality of digital recordings can't decrease with time !

hhmhh ... i think adobe has damaged their own name with this, because i think a lot of people are now pissed off and will define "adobe" as "i hate them" or even assign the word "adobe" to bad things like "microsoft" ...

i have just read the article over at heise (in german)
and there is a good comment

and here are the things you find when you search for "illustrator", look what's with them:

http://www.roninillustrator.com/
http://www.tech-illustrator.com/
http://www.ezillustrator.com/
http://www.adirondackillustrator.com/

look for 'illustrator' on google ...

hhmhh ... i think adobe has damaged their own name with this, because i think a lot of people are now pissed off and will define "adobe" as "i hate them" or even assign the word "adobe" to bad things like "microsoft" ...

i have just read the article over at heise (in german)
and there is a good comment

and here are the things you find when you search for "illustrator", look what's with them:

http://www.roninillustrator.com/
http://www.tech-illustrator.com/
http://www.ezillustrator.com/
http://www.adirondackillustrator.com/

look for 'illustrator' on google ...

Actually, it's in 4686 German Mark (DM), which is (at least approximately) 2500 Euro.

The lawyers also refused to make a deal - the author offered to change the name if they would not demand the money. They added that lawyers wouldn't work for free.

See the article in the Heise.de newsticker. According to that article it is still unclear whether the lawyers work directly for Adobe. Adobe itself also didn't make a statement.

You can see similar effects with very lightweight pages such as heise Newsticker, where the pages load quickly with all other browsers, but for some reason there's a delay with Mozilla.

This makes me wonder what will happen to the SMT design. Alpha's overnext chip design (EV8) was desined with support for SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading (-tasking?)). I don't know a lot about that technology, but it's something like the processor running several tasks at the same time, in different pipelines.

The IA-64 runs only one process at a time, and relies on the compiler for optimization (which is a problem for JIT compilers). It also heavily relies on speculative execution, so many calculations might be thrown away later because the speculation was wrong. All of that draws lots of power, resulting in Intel processors being the most power-consuming CPUs around. German computer magazine c't recently tested an Itanium prototype system that had a heat production of 1.8 kilowatt!

I hope Intel didn't purchase Alpha just to get rid of competition, but somehow I doubt that we'll see a merger of IA-64 and EV8....

Well, a few days ago we've been standing outside, smoking and talking about wireless networking - just the usual fun - while a friend told us a story about the Dresdner Bank, who had recently installed wireless Logitech mice and keyboards in one (or even more ?) of their subsidiaries here in Berlin/Germany. The reason for that was that they didn't want to drill cabling holes into their brandnew desks and counters !
Our idea was - as a matter of course - to sniff their fingertips and micemoves, and with knowledge of their software's menu and operating structure, to make our red account balance become deep black again. A few days later we all laughed about the report of a security consultant concerning a German bank, which we first read about here (in German). They of course didn't mention the bank's name ... Funny that in a highly security sensitive environment like a bank somebody had the funny idea to use wireless keyboards and mice instead of leaving doors and safes wide open ...

In germany a court ruled, that a company has not to undergo linking from competition: heise (german).
Then again, 2600 is not what i would call competition to Ford ...

By the way, as Heise (in German) reports, The Royal Society has recently elected Tim Berners-Lee as a fellow for his work regarding the Web.

The funny thing was that the german page at Microsoft was just the summary. And on the bottom of that page there was a link to download the complete whitepaper. That link never worked, it always resulted in a 404 - Not found.

After a while with lots of comments on that newsticker even the summary on the microsoft site disappeared. And now its surfacing on the english part of Microsoft Europe :-)

I guess that commenting the lies in that whitepaper would only be a waste of resources. But maybe that's what Microsoft is up to: Spreading out lies and putting "comment load" on the experts. Like a little "Denial of Service" attack. Linux experts that have to comment our rubbish can't develop in the meanwhile :-)

For me the behaviour of Microsoft is really interesting: Putting an anonymous whitepaper (who really believes in the competence of an author called "Microsoft") and then removing it if the reaction to it is not what they obviously expected it to be.

Needless to say that direct feedback via the Microsoft website wasn't answered yet, despite they say "we usually answer within 72 hours" :-)

Well, I don't know about "on purpose", but I won't deny that a populace composed of individuals who are unwilling to think rationally for themselves has benefits for both big business AND big government...
I just read a very good article about DVD Region Codes. They violated Godwin's right from the start by comparing the Region Codes with the Nazi's Volksempfänger. In both cases, the hardware is crippled to enforce a non-obvious (but easy to make out) agenda.
According to the article, the countries where the Region Code is least contended are the US and Germany, where nearly everyone relevant is filled with material goods.

Stenography is just another form of encryption, and a weak one at that.

Actually, no. Certainly, steganography can additionally use encryption (of any kind, BTW, including the cipher of your choice), but it is not "just another kind of encryption".

The primary reason is simple - it is security through obscurity.

Not really. That's a bit like saying cryptography is security by obscurity, since you must'nt make public the password. True, there are stronger and weaker forms of steganography (just as with cryptogtaphy in general), and some are easier to detect than others.

It is mathematically impossible to hide information in another medium that cannot be figured out.

I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to prove that. The well-respected german computer magazine c't reviewed a few of the more popular steganography applications in their last-but-one issue. It is true that in many cases they were able to detect hidden information. (Which is enough to "break" it, since steganography is to designed to hide the mere fact that information has been exchanged).

The signal carrying the second data stream will always be recongnizable.

That's simply not true. You must not, of course, always overwrite the least significant bit or things like that, since this is relatively easy to figure out with statistical analysis.

Regular backups often only offer a false feeling of security: After a system crash Windows frequently doesn't even start up anymore, and this puts the restore program out of reach, too. Therefore, a bootable and virus-proof Windows installation on CD ROM should really be found in every well-stocked emergency kit.

'To start Windows 95 or 98 in GUI mode, it must be installed on a writeable medium. You cannot start Windows from CD.' Similar statements have been published in various PC magazines, and c't has said it, too. The time has come to revise this statement.

The reason for this assumption lies in the fact that Windows spits out masses of error messages when unable to access the registry during startup. However, this is essentially only cosmetic: If you can live with it, Windows 9x can indeed be started from a CD ROM. This article will deal with how to eliminate the error messages and optimize CD ROM booting.

Have fun!

-Pat

You can view it here without having to pay.

Gareth