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Heise Security released an script called Offline Updater.

This script will allow you to create all-inclusive, fully-automated update cds for the English and German versions of Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows 2003. The script will create a CD .iso for each OS and/or it can also create an all-inclusive DVD .iso for all of the above versions. You then burn the .isos you created and the installation is entirely automated (some reboots required but automatically continues with the install).

Here is an short and sweet write-up on this - http://www.heise-security.co.uk/articles/80682/3
Here is where you download the file (.zip) - http://www.heise.de/ct/ftp/projekte/offlineupdate/ ctupdate302.zip
Here is Heise Security's Forum on the script - http://www.heise-security.co.uk/forums/go.shtml?li st=1&forum_id=108277

I'm a european, and about every european country has their tech blog, for example heise in germany, and tweakers or webwereld in holland. 'Limiting' point is, they're all in the language of the respective country. For the rest they're pretty good, news can be in there faster than it would on slashdot, and they're all moderated, therefore no junk as with digg. So the quality is ok, I just don't have the time to read them all and find the comment moderation system on slashdot the most pleasant and efficient to read.

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/46094 (it's german, you might want to put that into the google translator). It basically says that the police raided Crytek because the Business Software Alliance (BSA) got several evidence that Crytek was using unlicensed software

Now I'm not sure what came out of this, but I think if the police raids a whole company it's quite standard procedure to come up with some armed guys.

We had a shooting at school several years ago. At that time ego-shooters were pulled out as cause of the shooting. Nevertheless there were ohter, better explanations. (Problems with the schooling system, no future etc.) Right now we have a second incident but this time the suicide note was published. http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/24/24030/1.html

Beckstein also currently has to draw attention away from a scandal around overspending for the country's faulty new police managment software. The sociopathic half-human breed known colloquially as "gamers" are being a useful distraction.

I just learnt this from the German IT news site heise.de http://www.heise.de/newsticker/foren/go.shtml?read =1&msg_id=11722667&forum_id=109109

On following sites you can test your webpage via an online renderer

For IE 6 and 7: http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/
For Safari: http://www.danvine.com/icapture/
For Firefox and many others: http://browsershots.org/

hth

Ok, for those of you who can read the language:
http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/24/24032/1.html
I personally find it pretty insightfully, almost as much as the fact that it, together with the boys website was immediately taken off the net. It just goes to show, how repressive the German state is, and how such a terrible incident is used as justification to make laws designed to take away my freedom as a gamer and my responsibility as a sane/more-or-less-moral person in general.

Combine your statement with this:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/result.xhtml?url=/n ewsticker/meldung/80242
and the results would be quite interesting...

heise.de is somewhat comparable to slashdot. It's the biggest IT news site in German language. Trolling is even worse.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holger_VossWikipedia article on the incident

After all, this is an achievment, yes. However there's an http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/77185EU law (pdf) being considered that not only allows but forces ISPs to save logs starting 2009. Oh, and did I mention that some politicians are actually trying to incriminate so called "hacker tools", here? Oh, surely they will think of Nessus and Wireshark as needed security tools. They are politicians, they know that.

Eh... this article appears to say that the leet hax0rs only put a link to the German article about W32.Blaster, and then used ordinary phishing techniques (i.e., set up a fake domain wikipedia-download.org, misused the Wikipedia logo, etc, etc...)

In other words, plain ordinary ho-hum phishing attack. Where's the blood? Where's the guts? Where's the annoyances?

I was already worried that there would have been some serious problems with the way MediaWiki handles JavaScript or something. Like back when someone added javascript:$1 to interwiki map...

Authors of malware are trying to exploit the good reputation of Wikipedia to infect PCs with their malicious software. In a mass e-mail, recipients were told to download a "security update" for windows from a Wikipedia site.

The attackers had used a Wikipedia feature that archives all previous versions of articles when changes have been made. The malicious page thus continued to exist in the archive, and the attackers were able to point to it in mass emails.

See here , here and here.

It's been past time to start worrying a long time ago. There used to be a slim chance to fight spam by closing open relays (or blacklisting them) and using legal methods. But going through the legal system to fight spam is not easy in countries such as China and Russia (let alone Vietnam or Nigeria). The German computer magazine c't had an article on bot nets sending spam in april 2005:

http://www.heise.de/kiosk/archiv/ct/04/05/018/

That was pretty much the time I started worrying.

When I read that Microsoft or some other large company celebrate a legal victory against a known spammer (mostly people using their own mail servers) I really have to wonder why so many publications take part in those public relations stunts. In spam sending the supply is much greater than the demand. I get spam mail without content, or without any monetary compensation to be gained (no fraud attempt or product offer) very frequently. So by closing down the spam houses that actually have an address (those are pricks as well and should be thrown in jail nevertheless) does not make a difference in the total amount of spam. It just moves the market to bet nets, which has some added drawbacks.

They only banned SDU-machines and will now use those from nedap, which are also proven to be unsecure: http://www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/Engli sh green light for nedap: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/80316/from/ atom10 (sorry, german only, babelfish it)

voting machines raised to cost per election in amsterdam from 1,6 million euros to 2,7, source: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/76905 (german)

"They have migrated less than 200 work stations. Can we wait till the project actually approaches completion before deciding upon its success", ffs

"By the end of the year, some 200 workstations close to Lord Mayor Christian Ude and a number of nearby organizational units will be running on a special LiMux client."

"The base client mainly runs on the Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 distribution and uses Desktop KDE 3.5 and OpenOffice 2."

'Furthermore, the City Council aims to use Linux to become politically "independent of monopolists like Microsoft."'

"The largest share of that budget -- 38 percent -- is set aside for training courses, but apparently these courses do not have to be as intensive as initially feared."

"After a decision was made in 2003 to migrate to Linux, a number of obstacles had to be overcome over the past three years, causing months of delays. Two years ago, the administration temporarily mothballed the project so it could clear up software patent issues,"

Full steam ahead for Linux in Munich

was ffs (Score:-5, negativity)

Actually the law in question also says that if the device only allows one to stream with great technical effort, you don't have to pay this tax (source: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/79171 [german]) On a different note I'd like to mention that this law originates from the idea that german public media is state financed under the condition that it covers topics which might not be popular enough to show up in private media otherwise. So what this law implies is that if you have the technical possibility to receive the content that public media offers to everybody you will do so.

I did read about that before that murder story. I think it was on Heise.de. I think that conclusively proves it has nothing to do with that.

Ah yes, here we go: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/result.xhtml?url=%2 Fnewsticker%2Fmeldung%2F79035&words=Reiser - that was dated 10/04, 7 days before the murder story broke.

If authors had any sense, they'd be jumping onto the anti-copyright bandwagon.

Well, publishers are beginning to do just that. During the book fair in Frankfurt, Germany (biggest in the world), industry representatives called for unrestricted access to ISP customer data to fight (audio) book piracy, stating that there's no need to involve the courts. This would violate lots of constitutional principles we have here, but noone seemed to care. If they've learned anything from the **AAs, they'll probably get what they want by lobbying and bribes...

Article in German here

The german newsticker heise.de cites 80 watts for a X1900 card while folding.

The chip is not a kludge. It may seem that the right way would have been to build the four cores into one die instead of two, but according to some information Intel accidently slipped during the IDF (in German) due to the yield they get for Core2 chips the price for a monolithic 4-core die would be $36,13 compared to $29,37 for two 2-core dies. So this might simply be driven by economic reasons, till the process and the yield.

Prospect: a potential or likely candidate.

Potentially you can say 'oops sorry' unless of course there is a smoking gun or it meets some legal 'should have known better' test. IANAL.

But if your hardware device contains GPL code, oh I don't know say maybe it is a router, do you open the rest of your code? or pay for a recall of millions of devices and refunds/returns and piss off customers with the hassle and have to rewrite and retest the code? Having to open up the whole product is absolutely a potential outcome.

In Germany, all voting is also paper-based only and everything is counted by hand.

Wrong. 2200 of about 80000 electoral districts used Nedap voting machines in the last Bundestag election. Our German readers might find these articles (2005) informative (2006).

In Germany, all voting is also paper-based only and everything is counted by hand.

Wrong. 2200 of about 80000 electoral districts used Nedap voting machines in the last Bundestag election. Our German readers might find these articles (2005) informative (2006).

These are pure lies by Microsoft to gain some PR-advantage against the European Union. The EU has issued a statement that the release-date of Vista is 100% in the hands of Microsoft and that it does not intend to interfere(see http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/77945 for a german news-post about it). The EU had issued in january a questionaire to MS about the conformity of Vista to the several sentences MS got because of it's monopoly. MS answered LAST WEEK. This is not different to the US-market: MS has to conform to certain rules because of several past lawsuits. MS knew this from the start. If it does not conform, it is 100% MS's fault.

... over here, not members of opposing parties are opening the respective other boxes, but email is illegaly read by members of the own conservative party CDU without consent... See http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/77680 for further information (or Googlelated)

Red Steel has implemented full "real" sword fighting on the latest builds and managing the screen has been greatly improved; you can not judge an early build of a game on the polish of the control mechanism because they will continue to improve in any good game, this is something that bloggers (and fanboys) don't seem to get.

Red Steel was the first official Wii titel that we got to see, so I would have expected that they've shown us the best they have, if however *that* was the best they have, poor Nintendo. Now of course they can polish and improve the titel and maybe they will end up with something good, but so far I prefer to judge the games but what they are, not by what they might have been and so far Wii just couldn't deliever much of the initial hype.

Can I get a link to at least 10 articles (you did say most didn't you?) complaining about the Wii controller?

You can basically pick whatever hands on review you want, most of them have quite some negatives in it, some examples Heise, 1up and Kikizo. Some quotes "Using the controller with the bow & arrow for example doesn't make things much easier than using a standard controller,", "For a system whose agenda is to be more accessible, Wii sure makes Zelda complicated.". Now of course that doesn't mean that Wii will flop, but it means that programming for the Wiimote is hard if even Nintendo can't get it right for its most prominent launch title, for third party titles that could mean that the results are devestating.

No, the main thing that Nintendo has going with the Wii is that it is a unique product in a market full of generic products;

Uniqueness doesn't sell consoles, good games do. If Wiimote helps Nintendo to create better games, so be it, but there is still huge risk that plenty of games on Wii will turn out to look much worse and control much worse then on PS3 or XBox360, since they are just so many ways to use the Wiimote in a shitty way (see Tony Hawk...).

I'd say that a number of those you listed can be replaced all by one with some autohotkey (http://www.autohotkey.com/) scripts. (see also: http://www.heise.de/ct/activaid/ - unfortunately in germany, but lists many useful scripts).

You recall correctly. In december 2005, Dell recalled about 20000 batteries in the US, and about 35000 worldwide. I can still remember checking my own laptop's battery on dellbatteryprogram.com, and beeing dissapointed that I didn't get a fresh one for free. This time however, my old and worn battery will be replaced.

Frankly, I don't believe any EU country could have laws like this. Could you provide a reference or quotation?

I'm german, and I follow the subject closely: It is true.
http://www.heise.de/ct/06/05/110/ sums it up - in german, sorry.

The third section is the interesting one:

"Generally, everybody is allowed to copy a legally purchased CD, Cassette or (vinyl) record for his own use. According to a 1978 ruling by the Bundesgerichtshof (the german supreme court) the interpretation is that 5-7 copies are OK. The copyright law itself doesn't contain an upper limit. These copies can also be given away to close friends or family, because this is not considered distribution. Who makes more copies, sells copies or gives away copies to strangers leaves legality. Even selling at cost price is considered sale."

Oh, and even breaking a copy protection to copy a medium is not illegal, as long it is done for personal use only ( 108b UrhG).
http://bundesrecht.juris.de/urhg/__108b.html

t doesn't matter -- it's a development device intended for developers, not a product for the general public. You'll likely not be able to get hold of one... unless you have a Qtopia License and/or are an active developer.

_Today_ they are larger. But tomorrow Freescale

plans to shrink their new chips (29nm) under the

scales of the future standard 6T-SRAMs (still 45nm).

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/75243

I like how people keep saying "in the months before 9/11". As if these programs were instituted by der furher the day he was inaugurated. The truth is that these programs have been going on for years but none of you cared.

1. Carnivore first hit slashdot during the Clinton Administration. The oldest reference I found on slashdot is about Earthlink refusing to install it in 2000 - which means it had been in development for several years before that.

2. The legendary "Echelon" - the NSA program for monitoring all telecom traffic has been bandied about for many years - Slashdot posted several articles about it in May of 1999 but the news about it first broke in 1998. The program itself is probably 50 years old.

The idea of a world where things like money are obsolete? A simply amazing thing.

Haven't you been paying attention lately? We might already be at that world. Economists are speaking of the Economy of Attention (1, 2, 3) as the natural economic laws of Internet. As online human attention is a scarce resource, it may actually be more valuable than, say, a bunch of metal discs (or paper rectangles) with a face on them.

Of course, that can also mean that we will place the value of 15 min. of fame above the hunger of our neighbors. But it can also be a change on the way things are done nowadays. Gossip magazines point to the first, GPL to the second.

Since they are knowingly creating a corrupt version of what is or should be a standard format (compact disc)...

Unfortuately that's not disproportionate by their own standards: There are countries where (for several years already) one could not go (or take one's kids!) to the movies without being exposed to media companies' threats of detention and rape.

Details at http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/37300 (German).

Learning German is probably an effort on par with trying to replicate their years of work and experience. ;-)

There was even a database detailing which application caused how much trouble without administrator privileges.

However, in all of this the question comes to mind whether the best way to obtain as much as possible of Mac-like security and ease of use on PCs wouldn't simply be installing Linux in the first place.

• Windows backdoor
• Lotus Notes backdoor

• Windows backdoor
• Lotus Notes backdoor

But the only way they could prevent the above is by locking the machine down at the BIOS level with TCPM support.

And that's what they are doing, with a special TrustedCore-BIOS-Version (more info(unfortunately in german)). A net connection is also mentioned but only that a modem connection is adequate, not if it is necessary. So good luck on simulating the whole hardware with wine etc.

For years rumors about NSA backdoor in Windows has circulated the Net.

Yet another reason for migrating to GNU/Linux worldwide.

Well, but think that the US has already performed industrial and commercial espionage too agains EU and Japan, using the Echelon data.

"using this machine may cause Bush"...
as if we had not known before.

The same might become real in germany: a german court ruled, that the company producing electronical election machines must not give details on it.

James Flynn of the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) about the value of the SMB information:
...these information are not kept secret because they are valuable, they are valuable because they are kept secret.

Source in german from heise.de: ...die Informationen würden nicht geheim gehalten, weil sie wertvoll seien, sondern seien wertvoll, weil sie geheim gehalten werden.

don't have a link in english, just one in german, but just one year ago, avril was lobbying heavily _IN FAVOR_ of tougher legislation. talk about multiple personalities...

(btw: here's the german link: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/55571 )

extremely off topic, somone needs to submit a story to slashdot about this, my writing sucks to much to do so

http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/7208 5
forum operators are liable for comments

First-instance district court of Hamburg says forum operators are liable for comments

After more than four months, the first-instance district court of Hamburg has handed down its written statement on its widely reported ruling of December 02, 2005 on liability for forums. The statements refers to web forums as an "especially dangerous feature." Those who operate such a source of trouble, the court argued, must be held especially liable.

The previous legislation held that forum providers were only liable for illegal content that they had knowledge of and were not obligated to actively search for such; now, the judges in Hamburg have overruled that interpretation. Providing Internet forums is, they argued, a type of business operation. Operators therefore have to be able to hire enough staff with legal training to be able to handle such operations. "If the number of forums and comments in them is so great that the opposing party does not have the staff or technical means to review comments before they are published, they either have to expand their in-house resources or [...] reduce the scope of their business operations," the first-instance district court of Hamburg argued.

I HIGHLY doubt that. Do you really think they want to be accused of enabling terrorists?

Your doubt is well founded.

That may be, but the site popularity is comparable in at least some metrics. For example, a Digg link can generate more traffic to target sites than even the notorious Slashdot Effect. For example, the big Nmap 4.00 release was covered by both Slashdot and Digg. According to my referrer logs, Slashdot delivered a respectable 4,934 hits, while Digg brought more than twice as many (11,349). An article in Heise.De generated more traffic than either of them.

Of course there could be other explanations for these results. Maybe it is just more evidence for the sterotype that Sladhot readers don't RTFA. And I realize there are many other variables involved -- but the results surprised me.

-Fyodor (still a loyal /. reader)

I expect to see more of this in the future. It's the new end run around having a real debate in the U.S. or Europe.

Its called policy laundering. The "data retention"* idea dates back to at least 2000. (it predates 9/11 and madrid by more than a year, obiously) A bit later it got discussed at a G8 meeting. This may when it officially crossed the ocean, though god knows in which direction... The idea of "lawfull interception" of Internet traffic went from the US to the EU through "ILETS". ILETS may be mostly the FBI or UKUSA... who knows.

Now if you look at the years of trouble the UK goverment is going trough with getting "entitlement cards" (mandatory ID cards) then you will be amazed at how smoothly it got this policy trough. And not just in the UK but in the entire European union.

The UK didn`t want the EU parliament to vote on this. It just wanted to push it through as a deal between justice ministers. But the EU Parliament desperately wanted a say in this. So the UK set a deadline (before the end of its rotating presidency). Before this the parliament had to admend and vote the legislation. Commision were formed, debate started and then when everyone was just getting to grips whith the idea... Wham...an agreement, a vote, done.

Now if anybody knows why the two big coalition parties in the parliament suddenly agreed to the artificial deadline, throwing overboard work on an compromise, please respond. The deadline was worthless anyway because the Netherlands had blocked voting on this as a justice minister backroom deal. I hope they got something good out of th UK for this, but who knows what these crazy christian democrats are up to.

Now before everyone shouts "just encrypt everything", remember as long as internet traffic isn`t signed the only identity traffic might possibly be linked to is some easy to fake billing information though an notoriously unprotected identification mechanisms (IP address, IRC nick, E-mail addres). That is unless you start signing your traffic, traffic data isn`t explicitly protected agianst forgery which is why this billion dollar plan produces stuff that isn`t worth as much in court as some people might imagine. But hey, think of the children, right...

* More correctly: "data collection, rentention and mining at the providers cost" The internet typically doesn`t really have designated traffic data though.

I don't know anything about Brandon Robinson but Martin Schulze (Debians Stable Release Manager) also resigned because of the ftpmaster (http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/70616, german).

O. Wyss

I can give you the link to the heise story. Doesn't mention the specific cases in the NYT article though, just 'eine neue Klagewelle'. Babelfish for whoever's interested.