LaTeX Transcript of Records

As I want to go to Dublin this year and I have to apply at the DCU. I have to list everything I did so far in my university and I asked our secretary whether we have english transcripts, because having them officially  translated is really expensive. She sent me a Word document which I was supposed to fill out. Of course, I was not satisfied at all, because the document looked terrible.

So I decided to write an equivalent in LaTeX (compiled PDF). I learned a lot about multipage tables and multirow cells 😉  Because I want to share my knowledge and don’t want you to spend two days on that as I did, you may feel free to use it for whatever you like 🙂

page-001

page-002

page-003

Update: New link to Transcript (with embedded TeX Source).

26C3: Here Be Dragons

Well well, the next Chaos Communication Congress has been officially announced *yay*! This years motto will be Here Be Dragons.

This motto is not as bad as I intuitively thought. It reflects the current political situation pretty well: It seems as if the politicians are actively avoiding knowledge in the area of IT.

HERE BE DRAGONS

You should consider to come by as well as sending in a paper! You have time until 2009-10-09 to submit your proposal via Pentabarf.

I don’t know if I can make it, but I’ll certainly try 🙂

Bericht zur KIF

Ein kurzer Nachtrag zur Pressemitteilung, die ich ungern so im Raum stehen lassen moechte. Zum einen gibt es genug Kritik am Grundgesetz selber und zum anderen sind ein paar Worte zur Dortmunder KIF nötig.

KIF37.0 Logo

Ein zusammenfassender Bericht zur KIF befindet sich im FSR Blog. Ich habe nicht das Gefuehl, dass dem noch mehr hinzuzufuegen ist. Der ist zwar nicht so schoen zu lesen, wie der vom letzten Mal, aber fuer Erst-KIFfels gut geeignet um einen Eindruck zu bekommen.

Zum organisiatorischen vor Ort: Die Dortmunder Orga war ziemlich unentspannt. Ueberhaupt scheint es in Dortmund einen Regel-Fanatismus zu geben: Beim Betreten eines Busses muss mensch zu jeder Zeit sein Ticket vorzeigen, der Busfahrer haelt auch mitten in der Nacht nicht ausnahmsweise mal an einer Zwischenhaltestelle an und im Schwimmbad muss mensch nicht nur beim Betreten, sondern auch beim Verlassen seine Zugangsberechtigungskarte vorzeigen. Das hat uns in unserer Demo-Vorbereitungs-Phase ziemlich behindert: Weil wir die Rechner nicht mal eben auf dem Tisch verschieben konnten, die Tackernadeln wohl ein extrem wertvolles Gut waren und es insgesamt irgendwie schlechtes Karma gab, haben wir viel von unserer Vorbereitungs-Zeit mit dem Finden von Alternativplaenen verbrannt. Besonders geaergert hat mich, dass die Orgas eine schriftliche (sic!) Bestaetigung der (muendlich angemeldeten) Demo haben wollten. Nur um sicherzugehen, dass das alles rechtens sei. Weil ich mit den Polizisten vor Ort, also in der Innenstadt, verabredet war, bot ich an, dass ja ein Orga mitkommen koenne, weil so ein Gespraech von Polzist zu Anmelder beweist ja wohl ziemlich gut, dass alles mit rechten Dingen zugeht. Aber darauf wollte man sich aus unbekannten Gruenden nicht einlassen.

Demo in der Stadt

Ob die Grundrechtsdemo ueberhaupt so schlau war, ist eine interessante Frage. Zwar wird unser Grundgesetz viel gelobt und gepriesen, aber es gibt durchauch kritische Stimmen, die unser Grundgesetz aus verschiedenen Gruenden schlecht finden. Zur Geschichte unseres GGs gibt es bei Telepolis einen informativen Artikel. Zur spannenden Kritik schreibt das Magazin auch und ich finde, es gibt wirklich einige interessante Punkte. Ich koennte diese jetzt aufzaehlen und windige Akademiker machen das wohl auch so, aber ich glaube, dass die original Zitate die beste Quelle des Wissens sind 😛

Trotz der Kritik finde ich, dass die Bewusstseinsschaffung gut und wichtig war. Unser Grundgesetz mag zwar nicht das Beste sein, aber ohne verbriefte Grundrechte moechte ich lieber nicht leben.

KIF 37.0 Demostriert für den Erhalt der Grundrechte

Informatikstudierende demonstrieren

Am Samstag, dem 23.05.2009, wurde das Grundgesetz 60 Jahre alt. Aus diesem Anlass fand sich auch in Dortmund vor der Reinoldikirche eine Gruppe kritischer Studentenvertreter zusammen und demonstrierte für den Erhalt der Grundrechte. Insbesondere die aktuellen Vorstöße zur Zensur des Internets bereiten den Teilnehmern der 37,0. Konferenz der Informatikfachschaften (KIF) große Sorge.

Handeln statt Wegsehen, Loeschen statt Sperren
Handeln statt Wegsehen, Loeschen statt Sperren

Abbau der Grundrechte

Der Vorstoß zum Aufbau einer umfassenden Kontrollinfrastruktur zur Beschränkung des Zugangs zu Webseiten sei aufgrund der Verbesserung des Kinderschutzes gerechtfertigt, so das Familienministerium. Dies würde erstmalig eine Sperrung von unliebsamen Internetinhalten in sämtlichen Bereichen des öffentlichen Lebens ermöglichen. Ebenso werden Grundrechte unter Anderem durch die Vorratsdatenspeicherung und das BKA-Gesetz eingeschränkt. Betrachtet man diese Entwicklungen in ihrer Gesamtheit, so ist ein fortschreitender Abbau der verfassungsrechtlich garantierten Grundrechte festzustellen.

Grundgesetzlesung

Aufgrund dieser Entwicklungen und anlässlich des 60. Geburtstags des Grundgesetzes fühlte sich eine Gruppe engagierter studentischer Bürgerrechtler dazu verpflichtet, auf diese Probleme hinzuweisen. Dazu versammelten sie sich vor der Reinoldikirche, um mit Grundgesetzlesungen und Transparenten auf die gefährdeten Artikel der Verfassung aufmerksam zu machen. Besondere Beachtung fand hierbei Artikel 5 des Grundgesetzes, welcher durch die aktuellen Pläne zur Blockierung des Internets gefährdet sei.

Dialog mit den Bürgern

“Wichtig war uns, im Dialog mit den Bürgern herauszuarbeiten, dass die Bekämpfung von Kinderpornografie auch schon jetzt ohne die Einschränkung der Grundrechte möglich wäre”, so Tobias Müller, Informatikstudent und Anmelder der Versammlung.

Zensur droht

Hinzufügend merkt eine weitere kritische Studentin an: “Von der Leyens Idee einer durch das BKA  aufgestellten Sperrliste könnte auch Webseitenbetreffen, die keine Kinderpornografie beinhalten. Es gibt  eine Möglichkeit einer öffentlichen Kontrolle. Wir sehen daher die Gefahr einer nach Artikel 5 ‘nicht stattfindenden’ Zensur.”

Demonstranten in der Innenstadt

Über die Konferenz der Informatikfachschaften (KIF): Die Konferenz der Informatikfachschaften (KIF) ist die halbjährlich stattfindende Bundesfachschaftentagung Informatik. Die 37,0. KIF findet vom 20.-24.
Mai 2009 an der TU Dortmund statt.

Taxi from Hamburg to HAR2009

Pre-Sense is sponsoring a bus ride for up to 30 people to the HAR2009! The way back to Hamburg is sponsored as well. Also, you can win two HAR tickets! 🙂

HAR Plakat

It’s very kind of that young company to sponsor that trip and thus enable young hackers to meet with the brightest people in the IT-Security area. I wonder if they hope that some of these young hackers will take one of their open positions in the future 😉

Anyway, feel free to register for the bus ride or win a ticket. The details can be found at http://www.pre-sense.de/har2009.html.

Private Censorship in Germany

Last Friday, 5 major ISPs signed a contract to commit themselves to forge DNS answers for names given by the federal police.

According to this article (which probably has it’s information from heise) Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone/Arcor, Hansenet/Alice, Telefonica/O2 and Kabel Deutschland are voluntarily implementing the censorship through DNS. The signing parties share 75% of the german ISP market. According to Netzpolitik.org, Freenet, 1&1 and Versatel have denied to even talk about this censorship if there isn’t a legal foundation, i.e. a law which explicitly requires the ISPs to implement the censorship. While I don’t know the contract and according to the press conference, it remains secret. But it must be more or less like the leaked draft.

So the ISPs now have to implement DNS filter within six months and have to update the filter as soon as the federal police sends them a new list of to be blocked domains. The weird and absurd thing is, that *nobody* is allowed to access this list (because illicit content is explicitly referenced)! So you can’t control what exactly is banned and whether political enemies are censored as well. So it happened in Finland: A site, discussing the censorship, is on the list itself!

In the same period Wikileaks published the Finnish Internet censorship list. The Finnish National Bureau of Investigation has requested executive assistance from United States, but it is not known what precisely has been requested – whether the concern is only removing the list or whether they are trying to find out who leaked it. The list still includes the critical Finnish anti-censorship site lapisporno.info.

But, making it harder to access “child pornography” justifies the restriction of the constitutional rights, right? Well. Firstly, we mustn’t use “child pornography” when we want to discuss this issue seriously. We should use “documentation of child molesting” or something more technical. Secondly, we see, that it’s pretty simple to circumvent thus it’s only slightly harder to access the desired information. So it helps pretty much nothing in blocking the access, *but* offends 75% of the german internet population. I don’t consider this proportionate!

But the less a person watches children being molested, the less children she’ll molest, right? Because they get addicted and everything… Well. Besides the fact that we’re talking about a sexual disposition and not about drugs of any kind, this is just a claim with no justification whatsoever. An equally good argument is, that doing that virtually actually *prevents* people from doing that in real life. Also, the content available on the net is decades old, which might testify, that there is no need to produce more and thus newer content! By actually blocking access, you might risk people demanding newer stuff and a big market emerges.

Also, no child is molested through the internet. This is probably always done in the families! So blocking access doesn’t save a single child. Instead, fighting the roots would help. scusi analysed, where the blocked domains are actually hosted. It turns out, that pretty much every blocked domain is in a legislation that allows prosecution of child abuse. Including various servers in Germany! I propose, that it’s easier, more effective and less dangerous to actually ask the ISPs to shut the domains down and to prosecute the owners of these sites. Instead, the attitude of “once it’s blocked, we don’t have to care about anymore” is encouraged. Of course that doesn’t help anything, because the content is *still there* and people can circumvent cencorship to access it!

It is obvious, that other interest groups, like the music industry, will ask and fight for adding sites they don’t like to that blocking list. The technical implementation doesn’t and can’t know what’s “right” and what’s “wrong”. It blocks what it’s told to. So with that censorship being deployed, you introduce a general censor mechanism for pretty much everything you desire. Today it’s child pornography, but it is clear that this’ll change, like e.g. in Australia where a dentist has been blocked as well…

While I tried to argue against the official reasons for the “access blocking”, other people did it as well. There is a good article at Netzpolitik, which actually destroys nearly every exiting argument. Of course, heise has a pretty good article, too, which I really urge you to read.

What now? Well, first of all, you can quit your current contract with your ISP or sue them. Then you can use alternative dns server. As of writing, the list includes

  • 85.214.73.63 (anonymisierungsdienst.foebud.org)
  • 204.152.184.76 (f.6to4-servers.net, ISC, USA)
  • 2001:4f8:0:2::14 (f.6to4-servers.net, IPv6, ISC)
  • 194.150.168.168 (dns.as250.net; anycast DNS!)
  • 213.73.91.35 (dnscache.berlin.ccc.de)
  • 80.237.196.2
  • 194.95.202.198

Of course, the parliament has free access and universities shall have unlimited access, too, so you might want to use their DNS servers as well, e.g. 132.187.1.1 or 129.187.5.1.
But again: The point is not, that the technical measure is nearly useless to filter content. The point is that censorship infrastructure is rolled out *now* and that it can (and my prophecy is, that it will) be (ab)used for other content as well.

For further information, there is  herdict.org which maps the current cencorship situation worldwide. For Germany, you might want to have a look at de-zensiert.de or ak-zensur.de.

What about a consensus DNS resolver you install locally? It would ask, say, three different DNS servers and responds with the answer given the most. It could show a warning widget if it recognizes inconsistencies or if a DNS server fails to answer. The user then knows, that something’s fishy and can act appropriately, i.e. update the DNS server list or ask his provider whether it censors.

To summarize: The current  child pornography histeria is based on assumptions that are evidently wrong or can’t be proved. The methods to fight against child abuse have no meaningful effect besides deploying a general purpose censoring infrastructure (and help the people involved to improve their public image). Nobody is allowed to check whether the access block list includes any non illegal entry and political enemies can thus be eliminated. Circumventing is (still?) easy. We can further improve anti blocking mechanisms.

GemCraft 2 – Chapter 0

*Yay*! Armor Games released Gem Craft 2 – Chapter 0! I absolutely loved Gem Craft 1 and I couldn’t wait for the next round of that fabulous game. I don’t do much games on my computer in general as I have much better things to do, but I couldn’t stop playing Gem Craft.

It’s a fantastic Tower Defence with nice sounds, graphics and an amazingly entertaining gameplay. The major drawback is, that it’s flash based 🙁 (I wonder whether one could make swfdec to save the state of a flash game, like a virtual machine in QEmu…) I haven’t tried the new game extensively yet, but I’m sure that this game will cost me the next weekends 😉

If you like Tower Defence games, you’ve got to try CreepSmash as well. It’s an open and free multiplayer Tower Defence written in Java. It lacks nice graphics and sounds (and security 😉 ) but it’s definitely amusing to plan and play against other (real) player.

Happy playing!

LINUX VIRTULIZATION KERNEL DEVELOPER

Imagine a job as a Linux Kernel Developer; now imagine this job inside of Microsoft. Well, it looks like Hell has frozen over, if that sounds like something impossible and you like doing the impossible and you want to be part of an exciting change, than this job is for you.

see the original post. (The typo in the title was copy&pasted from there…)

I love the “looks like Hell has frozen over” part 😀

Got Linux? Trade MP3s for chocolate :)

If you happen to live in Germany and incidentally like chocolaty things, you might already have seen that you are eligible to download 20 MP3 files, with every bigpack Hanuta you buy. At least that’s what the ads say.

You are supposed to visit http://www.20songsgratis.de/ which doesn’t even run properly in my browser. It demands JavaScript, but even if you allow JavaScript for three domains, it wants to run a flash file… After managing that, I was  supposed to download and execute a strange Win32 binary. I was fed up and I searched for a contact address. I didn’t succeed in first place, but as I know that Hanuta is made by Ferero, I searched their website. The webform didn’t accept my email address because it thinks that “+” is an illegal character for email addresses *sigh*.

So I wrote that I assumed I could download MP3s somewhere but it’s not possible because they only offer a strange smelling binary and how I could get my music now. Of course they have to give it to me because they advertised it and didn’t say what is needed to get them.

After a few days, a nice woman called me and was very sorry that this MP3 thing doesn’t run with Linux and next time they’ll look after it and she was again very sorry. Then she offered me a chocolate package as kind of a refund ^^ Of couse I didn’t say no *yummie*

So, if you got this Linux thing and want some chocolate, go out and buy these Hanuta packs and complain to Ferero 😉 It’ll also help to bring Linux to the peoples mind.

Ferero Box

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
This work by Muelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.