Warum machen Leute sowas? //at 19:32 //by abe

Da bekomme ich doch von jemandem, der auch hier auf Planet Symlink schreibt, eine ICQ-Message mit dem Inhalt “ich werde alle chat netze bis auf skype deaktivieren und in zukunft nur noch via skype erreichbar sein.”.

Wieso machen Leute sowas? Ich mein’, kein ICQ mehr zu nutzen, das ist sicher ein Schritt in die richtige Richtung — den würde ich auch gerne mal machen, wenn nicht soviele gute alte Freunde ICQ als einziges IM-Protokoll verwenden würden. (Von AOL-, MSN- und Yahoo!-Messengern bin ich zum Glück verschont geblieben. :-)

Es stößt bei mir aber auf massives Unverständnis, sich stattdessen als einziges auf das proprietäre Chat-System einer unseriösen Firma zu verlassen, deren Vorgängerfirma bereits bekannt dafür ist, Spyware, Adware und andere Malware mit ihren Produkten zu vertreiben, deren Code und Protokolle durchtränkt sind von Verschleierung und deren Lizenzbestimnmungen der Firma mehr oder weniger erlauben mit den Rechnern der OpferKunden alles zu machen, wozu sie grade Lust haben, insbesondere zur Installation zusätzlicher, nicht für Skype notwendiger Software Dritter:

Sie erkennen an und stimmen zu, dass Skype-Software in andere Software und sonstige Technologie, die im Besitz und der Kontrolle von Drittparteien steht, integriert sein oder diese integrieren kann. Jegliche derartige Drittparteisoftware oder -technologie, die in die Skype-Software integriert ist, unterliegt dem Gültigkeitsbereich dieses Vertrags.

Wie war das nochmal mit Kazaa, was war bei Kazaa mit dabei? Was haben die Kazaa-Lite-Macher entfernt und deswegen Ärger bekommen?

Soviel zum Benutzerstandpunkt und dem gesunden Menschenverstand. Wenn man als Netzwerkadministrator mal eine sog. Skype-Supernode (vgl. Salman A. Baset, Henning Schulzrinne: An Analysis of the Skype Peer-to-Peer Internet Telephony Protocol) im Netz hatte, dann ist das Unverständnis für die Benutzung eines solchen Dienstes noch viel größer.

Für die Verwendung von ICQ habe ich doch noch deutlich mehr Verständnis, dort ist (oder war?) vorallem ein Bestandteil der Nutzungslizenz unschön: ICQ Inc. hat das Copyright an allem, was im ICQ-Chat übertragen wird, zumindest war das Ende 2005 Stand der Dinge. Die Lizenzbestimmungen von ICQ wurden allerdings zuletzt im April 2006 geändert und der von Netzpolitik.org zitierte Abschnitt ist in dieser oder ähnlicher Formulierung nicht mehr in den Lizenzbestimmungen zu finden. Was nicht heißen muß, daß dessen Bedeutung nicht nachwievor irgendwo in den Lizenzbestimmungen verklausuliert drinsteht. Dem sollte man sich einfach bewußt sein, wenn man ICQ nutzt. .oO( Hmmm, heißt das, daß ich für o.g. Zitat nun Lizenzgebühren an ICQ Inc. zahlen muß? )

Nichtsdestotrotz gibt es eine freie und verschlüsselbare Alternativen zu Skype und ICQ, bei denen man auch nicht auf die Software und den Goodwill (hmmm, das klingt fast schon zynisch an dieser Stelle ;-) einer einzelnen Firma angewiesen ist: Jabber (XMPP) und IP-Telefonie mit SIP. Von weniger auf 1:1-Kommunikation ausgelegten Chat-Systemen wie IRC, SILC oder PSYC mal ganz abgesehen.

Und wenn dann mal mein geliebtes IRC-to-IM-Gateway Bitlbee auch mal das verschlüsselte OTR Messaging unterstützt, dann juckt mich auch obiger Abschnitt aus den ICQ-Lizenzbestimmungen nicht mehr so sehr.

Now playing: Hackerfunk

I finally ordered //at 22:29 //by abe

After a three and a half week test drive during my last year’s summer holidays and much consideration about the configuration, I finally ordered a Brompton folding bike at Velofix.

Since the apple green was much nicer in the catalogue than in real life, I decided that I need a bike in colours that clearly mark it as my bike: Orange frame and black front and rear swinging fork. ;-)

It will have 6 gears (a 3-gear internal hub and a 2-gear dérailleur, both at the rear axle), a lowered transmission ratio for hilly Zurich and sprints in the city, a SON axle dynamo, Kevlar reinforced, reflecting tyres, and a bicycle luggage rack which also serves as kick stand when (partially) folded.

Options I thought about but then dismissed for miscellaneous reasons: Schlumpf MountainDrive (can’t say if will be really worthwile) and Rohloff Speedhub (not available although I already saw a Brompton with a red Speedhub — funnily just in front of the place I live, and probably also more expensive than I remembered).

Segmentation faulty tree //at 21:28 //by abe

aptitude on Etch just gave me a funny error message:

1/0/0 root@c2:pts/2 21:14:24 [~] # aptitude upgrade 
Reading package lists... Done
Segmentation faulty tree... 87%
2/139/0 root@c2:pts/2 21:14:43 [~] # 

Ctrl-Ms can be nice sometimes…

Why I’m happy that FreeWRT doesn’t need a web interface //at 15:37 //by abe

When I have to read things like drive-by pharming (via Heise, Symlink article), I’m really happy that there are free 3rd party router firmwares out there, that don’t need any shitty web interface.

My ASUS WL-500g Premium runs FreeWRT and the only possibility to change the configuration is to login via ssh and edit the configuration files as root.

I really pity all those out there who have to cope with the partially really sleazy web interfaces home routers currently offer.

Following Bleeding Edge Software and still using Debian Stable //at 23:47 //by abe

Many Linux fans know that Debian Stable usually already lost the “b” when it’s being released. ;-) What seems not so well known (especially not by some DesktopBSD Marketing guy at last year’s LinuxDay.at :-) is that there is really a lot of people who really like this “stale” software collection — because it’s rock solid — especially compared to the ports in FreeBSD or DesktopBSD *evilgrin* which unnecessarily follow every new feature upstream introduces. This is really annoying in a server environment where you want as less changes as possible when updates are necessary due to security issues. My personal favourites here are Samba and CUPS. *grmpf*

Although I belong to those people who run Debian Stable even on brand-new hardware, I sometimes have to use the newest beta or alpha versions of some software to get it even only running. And doing so is fun but feels strange somehow, though. Currently I follow the pre-releases of three software makers quite close, due to a new laptop:

At the beginning of last semester I bought a brand-new Lenovo ThinkPad T61 (2,2 GHz Intel Core2 Duo T7500, 4 GB RAM, 160 GB HD, 1440x900 14” Widescreen) without preinstalled operating system (possible thanks to the ETHZ Neptun Project) and installed — of course — 64-bit Debian Stable on it.

While the Debian Installer from Etch worked fine even on such new hardware, not all features worked out of the box because some components were just too new.

So the first thing I did was installing 2.6.22 from Backports.org, quickly moving farther to vanilla 2.6.23. Nearly everything I needed worked except the wireless network card. It needs the iwlwifi driver which is officially in the Linux kernel starting at the upcoming 2.6.24 (said to be released during the next few days). So I run 2.6.24 pre-releases on the laptop since the first release candidate, always eagerly waiting for either the next RC or the final release. (And 2.6.24 looks impressively stable to me — even since the early release candidates. :-)

I even got the fingerprint reader working for login and sudo (but not xscreensaver) using libthinkfinger backported to Etch from Debian Experimental. I’m just not sure if this is a good idea since the back of the screen already has enough of my fingerprints on it. ;-)

The next software of which I’m currently running an alpha version is 64-bit Opera 9.50 (aka Kestrel, available at snapshot.opera.com) because no earlier Opera version is available for 64-bit Linuxes. Here I had different experiences: The builds from October and November were already quite stable, but since December it crashes usually several times a day.

At work I also run the 64-bit Opera on my workstation, but stalled updating it when I noticed that it became so unstable. So my Opera at work has currently an uptime of nearly four weeks — and would have probably more if I hadn’t rebooted my workstation in Mid-December.

Somehow this hunting for new versions and eagerly waiting for every new (pre-)release makes me really fidgety sometimes. And my understanding for people doing this for there whole userland or even operating system has grown, but I still prefer to have stale but stable software on all my productive machines, even on my laptop — just with some few and handpicked excpetions.

The third but less thrilling thing I’m following are nVidia drivers for X. Since the free nv driver of X.org doesn’t support (and not only just doesn’t know) my graphics card yet and nouveau isn’t ready yet, I run the binary only and closed source driver from nVidia, waiting for that one release which supports Xen since I really would like to run a Xen guest with Debian Unstable for testing purposes and package building on my laptop. Until then I have to content myself with the much more unwieldy QEMU respectively KVM.

Anyway, I’m very happy with the T61 and Debian Stable and can easily connive at the few not (yet) perfect issues like missing Xen support by nVidia, broken ad-hoc mode in the wireless card, no internal card-reader (as announced in the Neptun specifications) and no native serial port.

Some useful links regarding the subject of this post:

• Linux Weather Forecast
• Opera Desktop Team
• Nouveau: Open Source 3D acceleration for nVidia cards
• ThinkWiki

Now playing: Jean Michel Jarre — Rendez-vous à Paris

No more NDA for events hosted at Google Zurich? //at 21:38 //by abe

I first heard about the Open Source Jam Zurich somewhere at BlogCampSwitzerland 2.0 (which was more a TechCrunch7 than a BlogCamp — why did the organisators call it BlogCamp?) and subscribed to its Google Group.

At Linuxday.at, hansmi (who seems to be assimilated bywork for Google) gave me a flyer about Open Source Jam Zurich. And while reading it, I noticed that it will be held at Google’s Zurich office. Remembering the need for early registration for one of the recent Webtuesdays because of signing an NDA being necessary to get into Google’s office, I asked him, if I need to sign an NDA if I want to take part at Open Source Jam Zurich. He acknowledge it and so I returned the flyer and forgot about the Open Source Jam Zurich.

Today Gürkan told me, he was at Open Source Jam Zurich at Google and he didn’t need to sign any NDA. He also told me that he knows other people which didn’t take part either because of the expected the need to sign an NDA. I was puzzled.

Did Google really started to realize that “Open Source” and “Free Software” doesn’t fit together with “Non-Disclosure Agreements”?

I hope so, because this would make it possible to come to all future Webtuesdays — my favourite local geek event — and not only to those not taking place at Google.

The usual suspects //at 18:08 //by abe

Click here

Thanks to Elmar Heeb for the idea.