AK's weblog

21C3 was just "w00t!" To me, it's been definitely the best Congress I've been to, with so many great talks and lectures, so much interesting discussions and fun with other people. To all those people who haven't been there: you definitely missed something.

I'm just coming from the 21C7 award ceremony, even with a prize, although I didn't win. I "only" got a special prize for the most inventive entry. The prize itself is a Toll Collect propaganda CD, sponsored by Volker Birk. Hooray! You can download my entry here.

64 bytes from xxx.xx.xxx.xx: icmp_seq=412 ttl=53 time=16678.5 ms
I only experienced such huge RTTs before only once, and that was when one of our switches at work was b0rken due to evil electrons that came through the network cables (i.e. creeping current).

Today I had my lightning talk, starting at around 11. I was the second in row, it took me only 4:32 to present TPP, and about one more minute to answer all the open questions. I even got scene applause for showing the slide-in feature. Then, I watched the other lightning talks, some of which were quite interesting, too. After that, Thomas Warwaris presented some really funny and new things about software patents, followed by Richard who gave interesting insight into the area of natural language steganography. Even though Richard had explained the whole topic to me before, I heard a lot of new things about steganography in general and ways of breaking steganography. Unfortunately, there are not really any good lectures until the late evening, so I have to find something else to waste time without getting too bored.

Time for a first update on the 21C3: Yesterday, we arrived here in Berlin. At the airport in Vienna, we met Jule who was taking the same flight. The flight itself was extremely turbulent, from Vienna as far as the border from Czechia to Germany, from 3000 to 30000 feet. And just when the turbulences ended, we started the sinking flight again. Oh, and I spilled my apple juice all over Richard.

After we landed, we first brought our luggage to the youth hostel, and then bought our tickets for the 3 days. After that, we went for a quick snack and a long chat, and then Richard and me back to the hostel. Then night was turbulent, too, as we were woken up 3 times by different events...

Today started w/ coffee and donuts, and then lectures all day. Quick lunch at Burger King, then back to BCC. I bought the Conference Proceedings of 21C3 (finally they have some! with ISBN! Hooray!), 400 pages of hacker-related papers for EUR 25, a fair price methinks. Right now, I'm enjoying real net that actually works for the first time. Thanks to Teemu for the beer!

Today, I'm going to Berlin. First, from Linz to Vienna by train, then a shuttle bus to Vienna Airport, and from Vienna Airport to Berlin Tegel. We should arrive at around 13:50. Afterwards we will first bring our stuff to our hostel, and then go to BCC to buy our tickets for 21C3. After that... we don't know yet. If anybody needs to contact me, here's my mobile phone number: +43/699/17778107.

This year, I got a really cool thing: a reflector telescope. I haven't been able to adjust it correctly, yet, but that's going to happen tomorrow. Anyway, that was a present that I definitely didn't expect, but it was just perfect (besides vouchers for buying beer, a cookbook for male singles, and a sci-fi radio drama on 6 CDs -- "Otherworld").

All packages are wrapped, the christmas tree is being decorated, and I'm totally bored already. Merry christmas and a happy new year, BTW (produced with OSX's say(1) utility).

Which flock do you follow?

this quiz was made by alanna

I just sent an email to Amnesty International, where I told them that they are fucking hypocrites (and they ARE indeed hypocritical, just read here), and that I quit my membership. Anyway, here's the email:

From: Andreas Krennmair <ak@synflood.at>
To: info@amnesty.at
Subject: Kuendigung der Mitgliedschaft

Hiermit teile ich ihnen mit, dass ich unverzueglich meine Mitgliedschaft bei Amnesty International kuendige. Als Grund kann ich die Erklaerung zum Urteil des Falls Wolfgang Daschner nennen, zu finden bei ihren deutschen Kollegen unter http://www2.amnesty.de/internet/deall.nsf/windexde/PR2004099

Einerseits schreibt sich Amnesty International den Kampf gegen Folter an die Fahnen, andererseits wird begruesst, dass Folter in Deutschland lediglich mit einer laecherlichen Geldstrafe auf Bewaehrung (!! d.h. wenn Herr Daschner ein Jahr keine weiteren Folterungen anweist, muss er nicht einmal diese zahlen!) "bestraft" wird, und voraussichtlich ohne weiteren disziplinaeren Konsequenzen bleiben wird! Entweder ist Amnesty zu verpeilt, um die wahre Problematik des Falls zu erkennen, oder AI betreibt pure HEUCHELEI! Mit diesem Urteil wurde ein Praezedenzfall geschaffen, der Folter unter eine praktisch zu vernachlaessigende Strafe stellt, der fuer die Exekutive einen Anreiz darstellen koennte, auch in weiteren Faellen zu aehnlichen Foltermethoden zu greifen.

Sollten sie diese Kuendigung in schriftlicher oder telefonischer Form benoetigen, so teilen sie mir dieses bitte mit, sodass ich das so schnell als moeglich nachholen kann.

Andreas Krennmair
--
Die so genannte Ohnmacht des einzelnen ist vielleicht die gefährlichste Illusion, die ein Mensch überhaupt haben kann.
-- Joseph Weizenbaum

Update: AI officially confirmed that I'm not a member anymore. But yesterday, they called and tried to get some additional money from me, for their next year's actions. I told the guy on the phone that I'm not a member anymore, and explained to him why.

You've probably heard about the other torture scandal in Germany, ending in a very mild conviction (1 year of probation for a EUR 10800 fine). Here's my letter to the editor that I sent to Der Standard:

Es ist beschämend, dass ein so sensibles Thema wie Folter quasi ohne Konsequenzen behandelt wird, schließlich darf man nie vergessen, dass Folter nicht der Wahrheitsfindung dient (das ist auch in unserem Rechtssystem fundamental verankert), weder früher, noch jetzt, noch in der Zukunft. Wenn die Anwendung von Folter (schon die bloße Androhung ist das!) quasi straffrei endet und die Polizei das als "Schaffung von Rechtssicherheit" proklamiert, so könnte das ein gefährlicher Präzedenzfall werden, nach dem die Exekutive eher dazu bereit sehen könnte, zu foltern, weil das Handeln nach der Art von Wolfgang Daschner von der Justiz toleriert wird. Und das, obwohl Deutschland selbst dem "Internationalen Pakt über bürgerliche und politische Rechte" beigetreten ist, der Folter strengstens verbietet. Schlussendlich möchte ich noch auf die Bemerkung der deutschen Bundesregierung zum Thema Folter hinweisen: "ein Rechtsstaat, der [zulässt], dass es innerhalb seiner Grenzen plötzlich wieder Folter und Gefolterte gibt, [verliert] jegliche Legitimation und Glaubwürdigkeit."

Update: the letter was published in today's (22 Dec 2004) Der Standard.

The following thing just happened to me: I plugged by iPod into my iBook via FireWire, and suddenly, iTunes quit. I wondered, "did it crash?", clicked on the iTunes icon in the panel, and turned around to get something else prepared. When I had another look at the screen, I will suddenly logged out! I though, "damn, what is happening to my computer?", and I tried to log in again, but it failed. Suddenly, the computer started to show the shutdown symbol below the center of the screen, but it hung after a while. So I switched the iBook off, and powered it on again, and now it runs smoothly again. Has anybody of you experienced anything like that before? Weird, just weird.

Today I stumbled across The Heirloom Toolchest, a collection of standard Unix utilities, taken from all the ancient Unix source code published by Caldera a few years ago. They're packaged ready-to-compile, and quite small, yet providing all the functionality you usually need. This package is definitely a good thing, as it provides a good base for building a small system based on diet libc.

Today, I got my certificate for the final class of vocational school. Of course, I passed all subject with the grade "Sehr gut" (the best one). That means I only have to do my final exams, and then I'm finished with education (forever!). At least I don't plan to do any further things within the "official" school system (taking Spanish lessions at Wifi for example is something "outside" the normal school system, and I will do that in January). Actually, this kind of makes me feel free, and that's definitely a good feeling.

All I want is to upload a drupal directory structure onto a server where I have FTP-only access. First client I tried: NcFTP. Problem: doesn't want to upload complete directories. Fails at "mput -r *", hangs or fails at "mput -r ." (depends on NcFTP's current mood). The next client I tried: Finder.app of OSX. OK, selected "Go -> Connect to server" from the menu, entered the FTP URL, logged in without problems. But it (falsely) recognizes the mounted FTP share (that's how access to an FTP server is represented by OSX, pretty nifty actually, if it only worked correctly) as read-only. gna Why can't both clients Just Work(tm)?!

Update: ncftpput now does the trick, with some trial-and-error.

Update 2: ncftpput was only a partial solution, here comes a better one:

for d in `find . -type d` ; do
files=`find $d -type f -maxdepth 1`
if [ -n "$files" ] ; then
ncftpput -u $user -p $password -m $host /$d $files
else
echo "XXX $d is empty and was probably not created!"
fi
done