eric joins the future

Something that shows what can happen when we start recording all communications can be seen when looking at the trial, where two bandidos (german rocker gang) are accused of having killed a hells angel (another rocker gang). They have been found guilty yesterday. There is no murder weapon. Nobody has seen the murder itself. There are no fingerprints or DNA traces at the site of crime. Why where they found guilty? They have a reason (they are in the wrong rocker club), that there are rumors that they guy wanted to leave the Hells Angels doesn’t count. And their mobile phone records show that they have been around the site of crime during the week before the murder… I don’t know if they did this or not, but getting prosecuted because you have been near a place where someone got killed? Ouch. Not to mention that this data is not from this year, so it wasn’t collected with the “Vorratsdatenspeicherung”. Why did their mobile phone provider collect this data? It is not necessary for billing purposes.

putting stuff into a blog to remember it seems like a good idea, especially if you couldnt figure stuff out after some google searches…

On a male ps/2 keyboard connector the pins and (more important) wire colors are the following:

yellow - clk   |o U o|   res 1
 black - gnd   |o   o|   vcc - green
 white - data   \o o/   res 2

The loose ends contain the shielding…
Sidenote: the green wire might look pink to colorblind people

why you should never compile stuff as root…
wanted to bulild the oracle linux test stuff, didnt work, wanted to compile stuff in the wrong directory, quick look into the makefile reveals that it expects ${SRC_DIR} to be set to the sources directory (wtf?), too bad i didnt scroll further down to read this…

if test “x${BUILD_LOC}” != “x/”; then \
rm -rf ${BUILD_LOC}/*; \
fi;

Yeah, if you forget to set ${BUILD_LOC}, the make clean (invoked by the usual make) will delete your drive… (unless youre not as dumb as me and build as a user,… then just this users stuff will be gone…)

The linux kernel is getting better and better, of course you all know this This post
is about some of the more recent stuff happening. Regressions are now watched actively (see http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9243) and made sure that most of this gets fixed before a new stable kernel gets released. If no patch gets made in time, the causing commit is usually reverted and everything works still fine, so there is yet another reason to test -rc kernels. If you are scared wait for -rc3, by then usually most of the serious stuff is ironed out. Another nice thing is the http://www.kerneloops.org application, which idles on you computer and if an oops occurs it is submitted to the website, so the developers can keep track which problems occur and try to fix the ones occuring very often. Hint: Trim your /var/log/messages before installing, because the tool will parse it and also submit previously happened oopses. I forgot I had the tool installed on my test box, and two oopses i wanted to try to fix myself got fixed pretty fast before I had the chance to take a closer look. Whats also cool is that section mismatch errors seem to be taken serious now, they happen when you try to access stuff that gets discarded after loading a module. For example if there is a function which is only used during initializiation, the programmer can mark it and the kernel discards it after this. If this function gets called from another piece of code, which runs later, you run into trouble. The section mismatch warnings tell you about such stuff during compile time and it seems Sam Ravnborg wants to convert them from warnings to build errors in the near future (http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=119962855012765&w=2).

Had to recheck my spam setup, I kicked out fuzzyocr since it brought no extra benefit and noticed that most of the time i spent waiting for my mails was used by network lookups in differenet lists. So i startet filtering in two stages, lokal stuff first then the network related stuff. Since I made this change, 49 spam mails got caught using the fast lokal stuff only, 3 with the network related checks and only two slipped trough. The ones that slipped trough or needed the network based tests were handled badly by the spamassassin awl feature. Its a public mailinglist, that also gets legitimate mail, so the awl lowers the score for every message coming from there What i also did was cleaning up the awl database a bit using check_whitelist, this brought the entries in the list down from 17877 to 1524, didnt time it, but feels faster On the wordpress side spam got worse, get I am going to install recaptcha soon.

Yeah, i havent blogged in a while,… not much time lately to hack around There has been to much political stuff, real work, university, stuff at the kreativfabrik and the local chaos computer club and of course the rest of private life. Besides watching DVDs and doing the usual kernel testing i didnt spend much spare time with the computer. Just wanted to let everyone know that I am still alive

I finally found some time to read the summary about a testproject in mainz. The german gouvernement tried several biometric camera systems and they all failed. The summary talks about 60% recognized persons during the day and 30% during the night… wow. The main ideas to improve the ratio include installing more escalators (everyone on them faces nearly the same direction) and more eye-catching advertisements, so people automatically watch in the right direction. I can see the news: “read more ads to protect germany…” A third approach is using 3D models of the faces, lets see when we have to add those to our passports…

A week after the first crypto partition crashed, the newly created one crashed too… Yeah, i wanted to make a backup _after_ everything was restored, so you can figure out why there is a new gpg key Fingerprint is 16AC 009E 2587 D27E 5870 AB78 0D88 1E56 0224 0EC7, you can get it at This time I have a backup, and stopped using cryptfs for my /home for now

My new box is up and running, I even found my old muttrc again on an old box. Some things are still missing (like the bayes training for spamassassin, but this will work out over time Using a 64Bit plattform on the desktop sometimes feels a bit strange (still have to get used to the asm format when debugging some stuff) but so far I am pretty impressed about the speed. Since I had no backups at all for my /home, I had to create a new GPG key , fingerprint is 28B9 2CDF 48C3 80F5 3E12 CB92 EA92 9FF3 1A03 50CD.

damn,… lost the mainboard for my desktop some days ago, collected all the change i had and got myself a new box. I was too dumb when migrating my /home from the old crypto partition to the new one, and used mv instead of cp, turns out I cant mount the new partition anymore… there goes my mail, bookmarks and everything else