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.

Business IT - OpenBSD and nothing else

EN: Just a quick link belonging to my "let's-promote-OpenBSD"-postings: The company Echothrust published recently a series (1, 2 ,3) of short articles in which they describe how they use exclusive OpenBSD-based systems in their daily business. It is an informative introduction which clearly shows that OpenBSD is a reliable alternative on all application fronts.

[Via undeadly.org]

Update: The fourth and last part is online now.

OpenBSD 4.1 released

EN: Puffy Baba arrived. Our favorite operating system OpenBSD is now available in version 4.1. To see what's new check out the release notes.

23C3 media online

EN: Quick link - As announced the video and audio files of the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress (23C3) are online now. Same for the official proceedings.

Freebase - semantic web for the community

EN: This looks very promising - Freebase combines the Web 2.0 (community based data generation/maintenance) and semantic web (using meta data for making information better "understandable" for machines) philosophy in one application. It's the first child of the company Metaweb (nomen est omen) and will be Creative Commons licensed (nice!). Tim O'Really wrote a helpful introduction (that was bashed because of an "outdated view" about the semantic web). bbgm mentioned briefly the potential for science. At the moment you have to be invited to sign in, however you should keep an eye on it.

Update: Freebase has now a blog called Freebasics.

Secured computers - no SPAM

EN: O'Reilly Radar has a interesting discussion about the technologies to fight e-mail SPAM. But I am not sure if fighting SPAM alone makes the world a better place. SPAM is a symptom that shows that (1) there are too many unsecured computers connected to the net and (2) there is enough criminal energy out there that makes use of them. If the SPAM problem is solved somehow (some proposals are mentioned in the article) both points aren't solved. It might lead to an increase of other computer crimes like blackmailing companies with DDOS attacks using botnets. Crime is partly the result of missing options of legal work for the people committing the crimes, but well ... that's hard to solve. Increasing general security of computers is easier. Unfortunately the focus in most companies/communities seems to be on implementing as much features as possible while increasing complexity and reducing security.

Using an unsecured machine in the net is like driving drunk ... you don't endager only yourself but also others. My personal solution is using OpenBSD (but sure there are others ;)).

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.

Jabber - open instant messaging

The 23C3 offered a lot of excellent and inspiring talks and the official recording will hopefully be online soon. One talk (german) about Jabber/XMPP reminded me on a Chaos Radio broadcast (german, too) about the same topic that I heard recently. As it seems that not too many people know about Jabber/XMPP I would like to propagate it here.

The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is mainly for instant messaging but but has much more potential as it is an open standard and a design that makes it easy to extended it.

I started to use Jabber years ago but most people I wanted to chat with had already other (proprietary) instant massaging solution like ICQ. So they did not want to register to another IM service (actually this is much easier in Jabber). Luckily Google uses now XMPP for Google Talk. This means everybody with a Google mail account can use and be contacted via a jabber client and the amount of jabber users is increased the dramatically.

Among other functions it is possible to use XMPP for VoIP (Jingle) and or RSS-like notifying (PubSub). There are a lot of clients for many platforms. As it is easy to extent and libraries for nearly every programming language are available you might be able to hack another useful service with XMPP.

If you like instant messaging give Jabber a try. For a quick introduction have a look the Wikipedia page about Jabber and find more information on the Jabber homepage.

OpenBSD 4.0 released

EN: As every half year OpenBSD the open-source unix flavour for the practical paranoid released it's newest version. Some new features are the support for three new platforms (armish, sparc64, zaurus) the Zaurus 3200 (in zaurus), for UltraSparc III (in sparc64) and for various ARM-platforms in the newly introduced armish, the replacement of GNU RCS by OpenRCS, more IPSec functions and new network card drivers.

Install it and make the internet a safer place!

The sniffing net

EN: Ubiquitous computing and "web of things" can be scary and exiting at the same time: The company Gentag develops combinations of cell phone, geolocation, sensors and RFID technologies to make a network of detecting systems possible. There are sensors for different chemicals including toxic agents and allergens but they advertise it also as system against terroristic attacks.

[Via Spiegel Online]

First signs of the 23C3

EN: New artwork and the event wiki for the upcoming 23rd Chaos Communication Congress (23C3) are online.


[Via The Lunatic Fringe]

Google Code Search

EN: Google Labs just lauchend Goolge Code Search - I think the name is selfexplaining ;). Searches can be perfomed with fixed strings or regular expressions. Nice that even the wanted license of the code can be specified in the query.

Update: There some nice posting (e.g. on O'Reilly's ONLamp or Bugle) about using this new service for searching for security bugs in software. It is again really interesting how much influence the interfaces has. The sources are out there for quite a while but Google gives now a possibilty to search certain patterns so easily. I hope this makes people more focused on security aspects when coding.

Be Open(BSD)

EN: The waiting is over: The OpenBSD project released the new artwork and song for the upcoming 4.0 release. The song is an homage to the source of inspiration for (nearly) every OpenBSD developer (at least at the parties): Humppa mostly coming in this form*. An additional track - OpenVOX - to the 10th anniversary of OpenBSD artwork can also be found on that site.

(*) If you want to listen to the combination of Humppa and OpenBSD developers I can recommend a radio show (**) recorded at the What the Hack.

(**) Please serve with Golden Drake.

Intel's unfulfilled promises regarding open source

EN: Intel claims to be a supporter of the open source community (e.g. James Ketrenos on OSDL 2006), but reality looks absolutely different. The development and usage of software for Intel products is a pain because of (promised but) lacking support/documentation. Read a call on undeadly by Theo de Raadt (a little rude but hounest ... usual).

Update: Theo now also accuses Red Hat for their practice of signing NDA of hardware vendors. By doing so Red Hat reduces pressure on vendors to pusblish open documentation of the devices (necessary for coding open source drivers) and is working against the sprit of open source. Read more at undeadly.

Eben Moglen on software, sharing, and society

EN: Eben Moglen gave a great talk about the sharing of knowledge and its benefits at the OSCON 2006. It's now available on O'Reilly's Distributing the future as an mp3 file.

It has come back from the grave as a belief that only exclusive property rights in ideas will produce creativity, inventiveness, discovery. You have proven that's wrong [...]. It is instead the sharing of knowledge and ideas which produces creativity, which enables invention, which produces innovation.

Next Version - Web 3.0

EN: Tim O'Reilly writes on the O'Reilly radar his definition of Web 3.0:

"[I]t's when we apply all the principles we're learning about aggregating human-generated data and turning it into collective intelligence, and apply that to sensor-generated (machine-generated) data."

He also mentioned the expression "the semantic earth" dubbed by David Weinberger.

Break both hands - keep on coding!

EN: Coding without typing - here is VoiceCode. It's working so far only for Python (good choice! ;)). The site also offers a demo video.

[Via golem]

Linux based Palm OS

EN: In the smartphone community there have been rumours about a Linux base Palm OS around for quite a while. David Beers writes in his blog that a Palm close informant has confirmed the existence of such a project at Palm (not PalmSource!) and also of a Treo 650 prototype running with this. An official release of the system is mentioned to be planned for 2007.

The Blob in your OS

EN: Here it is - the new OpenBSD release song Blob! (mp3, ogg). The song should make people aware of blobs - binary firmware that vendors give to opensource projects making it possible to use the vendors hardware. Unfortunately they don't give the specification of the devices or the source code of the drivers but just these binary blobs which are black boxes and cannot be checked or fixed. Lot of opensource operating system projects (e.g. Linux) simply include them into their software. Going the hard way OpenBSD refuses to do so, builds its own drivers (mainly by reverser engineering) and make the world a better place.

The OpenBSD 3.9 will be released in May 1st.

DE: Der neue OpenBSD release song Blob! (mp3, ogg) ist draußen. Mit diesem Lied möchte das OpenBSD-Projekt auf Binary Blobs aufmerksam machen. Das sind Binärtreiber, die Firmen Opensource-Projekten zur Verfügung stellen, damit ihre Hardware genutzt werden kann. Leider veröffentlichen sie keine Spezifikation der Hardware oder den Quellcode der Treiber sondern nur diese Blobs, die eine Blackbox darstellen und sich weder überprüfen noch verbessern lassen. Viele Opensource Betriebsysteme machen es sich einfach und binden diese in ihre Software ein. OpenBSD dagegen lehnt das ab, programmiert eigene Treiber (hauptsächlich durch reverse engineering) und macht die Welt damit ein bisschen besser.

Die neue OpenBSD Version 3.9 wird am 1. May veröffentlicht.

M$ in trouble - ajaxWrite

EN: Some days ago Google bought Writley, now the mp3.com and Linspire founder Michael Robertson presented ajaxWrite, another web-based textprocessor. The functionality is quite limited at the moment but if you extrapolate the trend you can see the end of classical, locally installed office packages in the near future.