Bono and U2 were pissed as hell. Before they had the new record (called ‘No Line On The Horizon’ for those who care) in store some songs were already leaked to the internet. Bono was stampeding with rage. “What bloody motherf*cker leaked our f*cking tunes?!!”. He called all personnel together. No one was to leave before the leak was found. And ohh boy… was that guy going to get hurt. Bono would dismember his balls for leaking the songs. Imagine all countermeasures that are taken to prevent leaks. All personnel is screened. Recordings are stored encrypted. Only Bono knows the passphrase. Who ever leaked the songs did this on purpose, so much Bono knew for sure…. And finally the source of the leak was found. Get the tweezers out… Bono will never sound the same, some people would say he sings about three tones higher.

En weer valt een goede vriend van mij, dit keer Emiel van Rooijen, in de prijzen. Voor het schrijven van een recensie/review over de Eclipse Ganymede release behaalde Emiel de 2e prijs, een eclipse jacket. Het artikel van Emiel gaat over DTP (Data Tools Platform) een platform voor database development.

Gefeliciteerd Emiel!

Ik vertrouw erop dat je ons binnenkort de ogen uit komt steken met je flashy, 100%-man wear, eclipse jack. Een eclipse jack wordt omschreven in de Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy als het op één na meest bruikbare voorwerp in het sterrenstelsel. Niet alleen wordt het jack op iedere planeet als modieus en stoer kledingstuk beschouwd tevens dient de drager gezien te worden als een man waar rekening mee gehouden dient te worden. Daarnaast is het jack een open-uitnodiging voor alle feesten die er her en der in het sterrenstelsel gehouden worden. Het meest bruikbare voorwerp blijft natuurlijk, onbetwist, de handdoek.

Ik heb nog nooit wat gewonnen, geen prijzen, geen awards… behalve dan de award van Wowbagger die me uitriep tot meest domme wezen in het sterrenstelsel dat rondloopt op twee benen. Ik overweeg sindsdien amputatie van één van mijn twee benen. Uw eigen wowbagger belediging krijgt u hier.

Oh dear. I messed up my apache/php5 installation and without me noticing it I have been down all night. Well who cares anyway? Hope you had a good night’s sleep. Blog is up and running again.

Gotta be more careful when relentlessly updating my system to the latest bleeding edge of software versions. Apparently there is a missing dependency between libphp5 and libltdl. So updating libtool kills libphp5.

Wil jij ook iedere dag een paar nieuwe gratis laptops? Dan moet je bij de Amerikaanse douane gaan werken op een vliegveld. Zij mogen namelijk laptops en andere electronische apparatuur confisqueren voor onbepaalde tijd. Dus tegen de tijd dat er een nieuw modelletje voorbij komt kun je ‘m zo aanpakken van de verbijsterde reiziger. Wat zegt u? Ben je mal? Natuurlijk hoeft er niet een concrete verdenking tegen die specifieke reiziger te zijn. Gewoon aanpakken en inpikken.

Wat zou de douane nog meer mogen naast de laptop inspecteren? Mag men software installeren? Keyloggers? Andere spyware? Zijn daar überhaupt regels voor? Het is wel zeker dat er een integrale kopie van uw harde schijf gemaakt mag worden. Volgens interne richtlijnen moeten deze kopieën na bestudering vernietigd worden. Kopieën van aangetroffen identiteitsdocumenten worden wel bewaard. Ongelofelijk in hoeverre je vrijheid beperkt wordt met als doel deze “vrijheid” te beschermen. U kent het wel, het bekende “terrorisme bestrijding fabeltje”. Lees dit artikel in de Washington Post maar eens.

Hoe kun je je hier effectief tegen beschermen? Je hele harde schijf encrypten? Ben je verplicht een eventuele passphrase af te staan? En als je de encryptie sleutel nu eens echt niet kent? Ik bedoel stel dat je de (grote) key op een USB stick hebt staan? De USB stick heb je nodig om de laptop te kunnen booten. Je kunt de stick apart naar de VS transporteren (desnoods via post). Of misschien dat je de key ergens kunt downloaden als je eenmaal in de VS bent (met je telefoon ofzo). Goede ideeën zijn welkom in de comments.

Most software patents suck. They are simply a high level description of something you could create “transfer information from one system to the other by electronic means”. Yeah right! The Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favor of imposing new restrictions on the scope of patentable subject matter set forth by Congress in §101 of the Patent Act. Process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they “result in a physical transformation of an article” or are “tied to a particular machine.”

This might have a huge impact on all current software patents as well. Even Google’s pagerank patent is at stake. Read the full article at the Patently-O Patent Law Blog.

I’ve posted many rants against DRM already and will continue to rant when needed. In this case Nate Anderson wrote an article which is a convincing statement against DRM. Yahoo! Music, a not very well known online music store, closes shop and will bring down the DRM keyserver as well. So all of the poor sods who bought music through Yahoo! Music will not be able to play their songs anymore. That’s DRM for you. Thanks DRM. Thanks Yahoo!

What have we learned? Don’t put your trust and money in DRM protected goods. It’s like the local car dealer goes out of business and starts taking back all delivered cars from their customers. “Sorry we’re broke. We’ll have to revoke your right to use the car that you bought. Hand over the keys. NOW!”

Today is the ninth annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. So today is an excellent day to mail your system administrator and thank him or her for the lack of storage in your mailbox.  For screwing up the daily backups so only the full backup of last month could be restored losing weeks of valuable work. For blocking useful internet pages. For stripping important attachments from your incoming mail. For revoking permissions on your user account that makes work next to impossible.

This is just the point of system administrator day. In general every encounter a user has with a system administrator is typically in case of problems. The system administrator is associated with problems. So remember every day you don’t have to call on the system administrator he’s doing a good job keeping the infrastructure up and running. Appreciate that.

Worried about where MySQL is heading? Do your applications rely on a fast, easy and low-footprint database? Then maybe, just maybe, drizzle is the thing for you. Drizzle is about building a database designed for the typical Web usage patterns for a database. It is being designed for massive concurrency on modern multi-cpu/core architecture. The code is originally derived from MySQL. Checkout the WIKI. Drizzle is the shizzle, fo shizzle ma nizzle.

The yearly Pwnie Award nominees are selected. The Pwnie Award is an annual awards ceremony celebrating and making fun of the achievements and failures of security researchers and the wider security community. Many categories are there from “server-side bugs” to “Most Epic Fail” and even “Lifetime Achievement Award”. Pick your favorite now. The winners of the Pwnie Awards will be announced on August 6, 2008 at a ceremony at the BlackHat USA conference in Las Vegas.

Now here’s a nice video in which some German hackers explain how they analyzed and hacked the Mifare chip that is about to be used in the chipcard for Dutch public transportation. Although each chip has a unique ID the Germans show how they can alter the key so it card behaves as another card with another unique ID. So the ID can’t be changed but using the key a card can be cloned. They will publish full details somewhere next year. As they say it: “start migrating now”. Video is about one hour.

Here’s a nice compilation of hilarious bugs in various computer games. The trend is towards realistic physics so characters are not pre-rendered but drawn based on the physical model of the game. Not all game programmers are Einsteins.

Today I came across a small article that mentioned that the Data Loss Database is taken over and will be maintained by the Open Security Foundation. Ignorant as I am I didn’t even knew there was such a database. It holds all known cases of data loss world wide. Take a look at that and see how many cases are reported. Once again the only question that comes to mind is: when will we ever learn?

Unfortunately linux evangelist and publicist Joe Barr has passed away at the age of 63. There is an in memoriam at Linux.com. His blog is still up and cynically his last article is a goodbye to Bill Gates. Joe Barr gained momentum and fame with his magazine “The Dweebspeak Primer” available here. If I’m wrong and there is a heaven then it will run Linux pretty soon.

Most of you will know that I’m not a fan of MS Windows, well actually not a fan of MS at large. Sure you can have endless hours of joy playing solitaire or other games on you windows platform, it’s all fine with me. You can write a letter, do some accounting and stuff like that. Windows is stable enough to support you daily needs. My dislike of Windows comes from its use in server environments that are supposed to run reliable for months and months. Unfortunately Windows is being used in mission critical environments as well. Even medical equipment.

I don’t know about you but if I’m on intensive care and my life depends on some piece of equipment not doing its “blue screen of death”-routine I would get pretty worried. Now here’s a list of worst uses for MS Windows from a worried person calling professionals to think about the platform they are using…

Een tijdje geleden was in Parijs Blizzards’ World Wide Invitational. Blizzard lanceerde daar een nieuwe diablo. Ook was er voor de pers gelegenheid om een indruk te krijgen van StarCraft II. Blizzard heeft al laten weten dat we tenminste tot 2009 moeten wachten op StarCraft II. Tot die tijd: (p)review op tweakers.net