Let's try to keep some privacy

Happy new 2008 1984. Germany has now the data retention but this doesn't mean that we cannot fight back. Via Roland's delicious links I stumble across Anonymouse.org. This proxy lets you surf any page anonymously in a very easy solution if you don't want to set up Tor or JAP. Only disadvantage is it's low speed. For easy use have a look at the toolbar and/or Firefox search plug-in. If you want to use a Firefox keyword search (always handy!) enter

http://Anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-redirect.cgi?sourceid=Mozilla-search&what=%s

into the Location field.

An alternative for the data collector Google could be the metasearch enginge Ixquick. According to their private policy they delete user specific information after maximum 48 hours. There are also different Firefox search plug-ins available. For the above mentioned keyword search use

http://ixquick.com/do/metasearch.pl?query=%s

Any other suggestions for keeping privacy when surfing?

24C3 - report part 1 - intro

Today the 24 Chaos Communication Congress (24C3) the annually hacker meeting organized by the Chaos Computer Club started in Berlin. Here you can find lots of inspiring talks, cool workshops and interesting people. Hacking (in the broadest sense), making, privacy and politic issues and many other topics are covered. The theme"Volldampf voraus" (German for "full steam ahead") is inspired by the retrofuture steam punk genre and you can see at some place of the conference related accessories.


As usually I am mainly hanging out at the OpenBSD booth and am frequently visiting talks and workshops. I will report about some selected stuff in the next days. There are live streams of the talks if you want to watch them yourself and the videos will be available for download some month after the congress.

Stop data retention - Stop Vorratsdatenspeicherung

EN: Hacking-paragraph, biometric passports ... German politicians decided in the last time against the recommendations of IT/security specialists (german). Next law in the pipe: telecommunication data retention. The benefits of this law are very low, the effort of the implementation is quite high and the potential of abuse of the stored data (german) is tremendous. There is still the possibility to stop the law - visit www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de for more information.

DE: Hacking-Paragraph, biometrischer Reisepass ... in letzter Zeit haben deutsche Poliker entgegen den Empfehlungen von IT-/Sicherheitsspezialisten entschieden. Als nächstes steht die Verabschiedung der Gesetzes für Vorratsdatenspeicherung auf dem Plan. Der Nutzen dieses Gesetzes ist gering, der Aufwand der Umsetzung sehr hoch und das Potential des Missbrauches dieser Daten enorm. Noch kann das Gesetz verhindert werden. Mehr Informationen auf www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de.

Empfehlung: Chaosradio und Chaosradio Express haben in letzte Zeit viele verwandte Themen behandelt und bieten eine gute Einführung.

Welcome to Germany, black hats!

As was reported in the media (e.g. title story of the german Spiegel magazine) computers of the German government were compromised by Chinese black hat hackers. The Chaos Computer Club uses this incident to question the competence of the decision makers regarding IT security. Certain politicians are constantly proposing to use Trojan horses to infiltrate computers of "criminals", but are lacking the necessary knowledge to judge the risk of this approach (another proof of this can be found here on netzpolitik.org). The recently established German anti-hacking-tool-law (§ 202c StGB) makes the necessary tools for preventing these attacks illegal. There is something going really wrong.

Some quick links - Brave new web

Although I have not been out of office for so long (CCCamp and some other stuff) my dear office mates had the felling I am permanently on the road.


During the last time I collected some topics I would like to write about, which I will do today. Here are some links I just want to mention quickly.

Spock seems to be the new privacy killer. It harvests data about people from many different sources and users can add tags and even photos of others. This gives me a quite bad gut feeling. A prevention method that most social networks offer might be to make your profile only accessible by other members (well, or not to use any of them at all). A comment on netzpolitik.org (sorry, in German only) gives a hint how to sabotage this platform.

Scary, scary number two: Polar Rose offers face recognition via a browser plugin. It tells you who is in the photo you are looking at. Don't know if it works properly already but I don't like this.

An analysis on Blog Age (German again) shows that many web services make is hard for users to get rid of their account. I recently had a similar experience where I had to mail the support team to delete my account. That's not good practice!

To be no only pessimistic here are some good news: freebase is now in "public alpha" so everybody can read data while adding data is still only allowed to registered users.

Also nice: I can recommend the current CT Quarterly issue which has the title “The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communication & Cyberinfrastructure”. [via science commons blog]

After some month of waiting: Wikiproteins is online since beginning of August.

Mal langsam, Herr Innenminister

DE: Mann, in letzter Zeit kommt man einfach nicht mehr hinterher mit der Bloggerei, wenn es um Überwachung von Seiten Vater Staat geht. Unser ÜberwachungsInnenminister Schäuble hat montan einen Kreativitätsschub wie ein junger Picasso. Die Jungs von dataloo sind daraufhin ebenfalls kreativ geworden und haben ein Stasi 2.0 Bild zusammengebastelt.

EN: Hmm, no time to explain all this in english. Our current Interior Minister goes crazy and thinks loudly about a lot of surveillance... read more at these english pages to get the background.

(Dank an Michael für den Link!)

Day against DRM

EN: Today is the official Day against DRM. Also have looke at the freshly started drm.info website.

[via netzpolitik.org]

No censored Wikipedia in China

EN: Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, announced that he will not accept a censored version of the wiki encyclopedia for China. The access from China to Wikipedia is blocked (Great Firewall of China) since October 2005. Read the report in the Guardian and have a look at Irrepressible.info - a campaign fighting for freedom in the internet and against censorship.

[Via boinboing]

John Berners-Lee about net neutrality

EN: Tim Berners-Lee, father of the www, blogged his statement (also as video) on net neutrality.

Lawyers go crazy - Abmahnugsmissbrauch

DE: Das Gefühlt scheint nicht zu täuschen - in letzter Zeit nehmen die Meldungen über Abmahnungen von Webseitenbetreibern zu. Die c't berichtet in ihrer aktuellen Ausgabe (gekürzter Artikel) davon und beschreibt einige Beispiele. Grund für den Anstieg von Abmahnungen ist dem Artikel nach die steigende Anzahl an zugelassenen Anwälten (mehr ale eine Verdopplung seit 1990).

Die ganze Thematik ist ein trauriges Beispiel wie sich Teile des Rechtapparates verselbstständigen und nur der Selbsterhaltung wegen wider der Vernuft handeln.

Quelle. Lücke im System, Holger Bleich, c't 13/2006, S. 146

[via Netzpolitik]

Demo "Freiheit statt Sicherheitswahn"

DE: Am 17. Juni finden in Berlin die Demonstration "Freiheit statt Sicherheitswahn" statt, die sich gegen die zunehmende Überwachung durch Staat und Wirtschaft richtet.

Stop DRM

EN: Do you want to keep the ability to do what you want with the content of cds, e-books, etc. you bought? Not keen on DRM (Digital Rights Management)? Have a look at defectivebydesign.org before it's too late.

Save Net Neutrality

EN: The risk of losing the internet we know today is increasing. Especially big ISP are threatening net neutrality. Read more at
savetheinternet.com. [via netzpolitik.de]

See a video explaining net neutrality. (Did I mention already that I don't like flash ...).

Also a nice source: Joi Ito mentioned this problem in great keynote speech (video download via bittorrent) at the 22C3.

Zapping Blocker

EN: The Multimedia Home Platform is supposed to bring some new features to tv, but not all of them are meant to be good for the consumer (well, what ever usually good means for a tv consumer). This patent by Philips describes a method making it possible to prevent people or recording devices to change channel during advertisement.

I hope this patent will not be applied and if will not be accepted by consumers. Why should anybody buy a tv with this feature. Maybe it could be used for a new marketing strategy where you get the tv for free and have to watch the advertisement. But similar concepts have been applied (as far as I know) unsuccessfully to the computer business.

But be fair sometimes the advertiment seems to be better than the trashy shows. What ever, the easiest way to avoid this brainwashing is not watching tv.

via Spiegel online - Technik soll Umschalten in Werbepausen verhindern

Get your anonymity back

EN: The Freenet Project released yesterday the version 0.7 (Alpha) of their darknet software. Freenet is a decentralised "peer-to-peer" system designed to allow the anonymous sharing of information on the Internet.

[Via Netzzeitung]

Privatheit in der digitalen Welt

DE: Auf heise online gab es heute eine Zusammenfassung über eine Tagung in der berliner Evangelischen Akademie zum Thema Privatheit und Überwachung in der digitalen Welt.

nosoftwarepatents-award

EN: www.nosoftwarepatents-award.com presents every month a selection of software patents and discusses their consequences.

DE: www.nosoftwarepatents-award.com präsentiert jeden Monat eine Auswahl an Softwarepatenten und zeigt derren Auswirkungen.

OpenBSD based, anonymity focused Live-CD

EN: I just read on netzpolitik.org about the Anonym.OS LiveCD. It's built on OpenBSD 3.8 and has Tor installed per default. ... so if you like to get your anomity back give it a try.

Softwarepatente - nicht schon wieder

DE: Wie auf heise-online berichtet besteht wieder die Gefahr der Einführung von Softwarepatenten. Diese könnte im Zuge eines Maßnahmenpacketes zur Verbesserung des gewerblichen Rechtsschutz auf EU-Ebene geschehen. Wir können also wieder die Banner rauskramen...