Chaos Communication Camp 2007

EN: For those who haven't heard about it so far: There will be a Chaos Communication Camp this year which will takes place from the 8th - 12th August in Finowfurt (close to Berlin). If you are interested in Open Source, IT, hacking, art, knowledge distribution, science and the whole world this might be the right place for you to find more people of your kind. A lot of well known projects will be there and usually the program offers a lot of interesting talks. To get an impression how the camps look like you can watch a documentary video (around 20 mins) of the camp in 2003.



Update: The CCC event blog announced the call for participation which includes a list of the topics on the camp.

Improved Wikis for research

EN: As O'Reilly Radar reports the NFS announced an award for the development of wiki based systems that help to improve the research process. Unfortunately I get an error message when trying to connect to the original site with the announcement (also archive.org and Google Cache don't help). A comment on the O'Reilly Radar entry by Mac Cowell points out that OpenWetWare is already a project which is going that direction, but I think the development has to go further than that. Especially if you want to increase creativity more concepts have to be included. I like for example the FreeMindBrowser for the MoinMoin Wiki Engine that adds mind mapping functionality to a wiki.

Open Knowledge meeting in London

EN: The Open Knowledge Foundation will hold the Open Knowledge 1.0 meeting on March 17th 2007 in London. The program looks already interesting but it seems like there are still open slots for more contributions.

[Via Boing Boing]

Free your phone

EN: Finally the open source mobile communication platform OpenMoko has a proper web presence including a wiki, a news collection site (with RSS feeds) and more. It contains information about the software (Linux and X.org based) and the first hardware platform called Neo1973.

RSS hacking made easy - just pipe it!

EN: Today's "wow": Yahoo! Pipes looks really like a cool web application. You can use it to combine, filter, sort and do much more with RSS feeds just by using the Pipe web-editor. The result is dumped as a new RSS feed.

O'Reilly radar has three articles about it, one by Tim O'Reilly in which he compares the new service to the pipe concept of UNIX and two (first, second) by Brady Forrest. All of them are a very good introduction to Yahoo! Pipes.

The Web 2.0 propaganda Video

EN: I can recommend you to have a look at the fancy video Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us. Nicely done by Michael Wesch who is an assistant professor of cultural anthropology.

[Via lessig blog]

Make research results available for everybody

EN: Quick self-explaing link: Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results

No spying of computers by the state ... not yet

EN: Today The German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) announced that the spying of computers of suspected persons is illegitimate. The German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble wanted to introduce the possibility of monitoring PCs without the knowledge of the observed person (using Trojan horses). After the rejection of the proposal Schäuble will now try to introduce laws that give his plans a the a legal basis.

Again a great idea to get rid off another piece of the basis of democray and implemnt the surveillance state. Stay of my computer!

Update: Forgot to mention. If you're using Windows Vista you do not have to bother a Trojan horse from the authority at all. It might be installed already.

DE: Der Bundesgerichtshof hat heute verkündet, dass das Auspionieren von Computern von Verdächtigen unzulässig ist. Deutschlands Innenminister Wolfgang Schäuble hatte zuvor gefordert, die Möglichkeit zu schaffen, PC zu überwachen ohne das der Besitzer dies bemerken kann (mit Hilfe eines Trojanischen Pferdes). Schäuble will sich nun für eine Gesetzesänderung stark machen, die die rechtliche Basis für seinen abgewiesen Vorschlag bilden soll.

Ist mal wieder eine großartige Ideen um wieder ein Stück Basis für Demokratie zu beseitigen und den Überwachungsstaat auszubauen. Stay of my computer!

Update: Ich habe vergessen zu erwähnen: Wenn Du Windows Vista nutzen solltest, muss Du Dir um den Bundes-Trojaner keine Sorgen machen. Du hast etwas ähnliches wahrscheinlich schon installiert (vorteilhafterweise nur NSA-kompatibel).

Links:

• Announcement of the Bundesminsterium des Inneren (German)
• Article in Computerworld (Englisch)