Horizontal buissenss with M$

This is a funny way of describing the OSS/M$ war. (German you could use Google, but i doubt the fine sense for words will be translated :-( ).

Via Real Life

By mrtoto at 15:56h| 0 Kommentare | Comment this

 

Browsing standards

Well as you'll probably notice, I (finally) validated this site for XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2. While doing so I took a look at this site using every browser I could get my hands on.
As there are: Mozilla Mac, Mozilla Firebird, IE 5.2 Mac, IE 6 SP1 for Windows XP, Opera 6.02 Mac (Why isn't there a actual version?), Safari 1.1 (of course ;-).
Now I can understand all those complains about the standard compatibility of modern browsers. Just look at this:
Ok, I designed the Page using Safari (or, to be more precise the WebKit preview in SubEthaEdit), so the page looks like I intended in Safari.

Now here goes Mozilla Firebird, who renders very nice and (almost) like I intened:

Mozilla does even better than Firebird (note the RSS icon, which is made up using div and span

IE for Mac does (and here I was suprised) does a good job:


Opera (in the old 6.02 Version) does bad, but I also tested a 7.x version, which does a lot better, but I got no screenshot of that:
 

And now after I showed how it should look I'll show how IE 6 SP1 for windows XP does it's job and this ist why it doesn't suprise me that most Company websites are not "state of the art" XHTML but some bad HTML-something. this clearly is nothing to blame the webdesingers for. You can only blame this:
.

Update: Oh what hell of a day; it really has to be bad to make me confuse </img> with </image>

By mrtoto at 12:42h| 0 Kommentare | Comment this

 

We are RIAA, resistance is...

Will we see this in every new movie - like this ads which tell us: If you will caputre any of this move, even with you 640x480 crap like mobile phone digicam, we will shot you, sue you and shot you agin!" which are displayed in the beginning of every movie since the beginning of 2004.

I guess they really miss their old chain of comerce: Make the movie, sell it in the US, sell it in Europe, wait a lot of time, rent the movie, wait, sell it on Video/DVD, wait sell it to the TV stations for a lot of money.

Here is just another bump of news concerning that. When do even the RIAA/MPAA/etc. bosses learn: If you sue the people who pay your rents (and cars, and madonna's dog and britney's tits and...) it won't help your buisseness. Don't threat your customers like criminals, make them want to buy your stuff. What you are creating is a even bigger image problem than you already have (ever listened to the comments of people while the "Hard, but fair" type ads run in the cinema? The music/movie industry has got a big image problem). All you need to do is make your customers believe taht we don't pay the design chair of a lable bosses office, when we buy the CD of our famous artist. We want to pay the artist, and give a small part of that to the people who make the cover, the hardware (eg. CD) or the ads; we don't want to give them the major part.
It is as simple as that. Why can't they hire an avarage 6th grade teenager, he would tell them whar they do wrong. Maybe they should read the "Evil Overlord's handbook".
If you want to dominate the world, then do it right!

Btw. the rest of this movie is funny to.

By mrtoto at 16:53h| 0 Kommentare | Comment this

 

This made my laugh

I recived this video (Attention non broadbanders - 4.46MB MPEG1) via E-Mail today.

This made me laugh! Remindes me about all those videos that were passed arround, before the dotcom-bubble exploded in 2001. (Does anyone remember the alien singing "i will survive"?).

By mrtoto at 00:36h| 0 Kommentare | Comment this

 

Even Big Brother uses Mac ;-)

This article on SecFocus cought my eye.

Dave had some surprises up his sleeve as well. You'll remember that I said he was using a ThinkPad (running Windows!). I asked him about that, and he told us that many of the computer security folks back at FBI HQ use Macs running OS X, since those machines can do just about anything: run software for Mac, Unix, or Windows, using either a GUI or the command line. And they're secure out of the box.

So Big Brother runs Mac - almost ironic considering the 20th aniversey of a Computer whose story began in an ad campaign with an ad which uses the big brother theme ;-)

Dave also had a great quotation for us: "If you're a bad guy and you want to frustrate law enforcement, use a Mac." Basically, police and government agencies know what to do with seized Windows machines. They can recover whatever information they want, with tools that they've used countless times. The same holds true, but to a lesser degree, for Unix-based machines. But Macs evidently stymie most law enforcement personnel. They just don't know how to recover data on them. So what do they do? By and large, law enforcement personnel in American end up sending impounded Macs needing data recovery to the acknowledged North American Mac experts: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Evidently the Mounties have built up a knowledge and technique for Mac forensics that is second to none.

I can hear somone in Redmond sing "Blaaaaaame Canada! Blaaaame..." -- almost.

Via IT&W

By mrtoto at 14:07h| 0 Kommentare | Comment this

 

The rocky way to security in email comunication

The road to my personal e-mail server seems to be rocky...

uw-imap config is just the start...

I started by trying to accsess the mailbox of a user whom I created for this very purpose on this Debian Linux system (hail to apt-get btw.)
Considering that emailis probably the most used internet service everything seems to be based on rather antique mechanisms. For example almost everybody uses POP3 which is a very unconvinient protocol (ever tried to keep the eMail database of two computers synced using POP?). So I decided to go with IMAP. Setting up IMAP isn't really problematic if uw-imap is your weapon of choice, but considering that I frequently use email over potentially unsecured and public networks (campus WLAN or coffe house WLAN etc) I wanted to add more security using MD5 authentication and SSL.
Setting up MD5 is simple (just write the desired usernames/passwords seperated by tabs and linebraks into /etc/cram-md5.pwd)
Setting up SSL in theory is simple, too. In theory...
In the real world you need to have a certificate placed in /etc/ssl/certs/imapd.pem. because this server is only for my personal use I can setup my own CA to sign this certificate (I guess I can trust myself - at least most of the day ;-).
This sounds easier than it is.
What do we need to do:

1. openssl genrsa -des3 -out privkey.pem 2048 - generate a private RSA key (no passprase is very convenient - but less secure of course). You should secure the private key via file-permissions now.
2. openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -out imapd.pem -keyout imapd.pem -days 3650 - Create the key for the imap Server.(granted, 10 years is a lot of time you can use less)
   So much for the server part
3. Now you should install the imapd.pem in your Mail client or the OS of your choice (For OS X Mail this is the way to do it - In Mozilla you just need to open a connection to https://mail.server:993 and install the cert)

For my taste this is a little bit too complex, no wonder everyone is useing unencrypted mail.
So much for uw-imap - exim is next...this is going to be fun...

By mrtoto at 13:40h| 0 Kommentare | Comment this

 

Black market

"The MP3’s on a full 40GB iPod have a retail value of $10,000. An iPod weighs in at 160 grams, so that’s about $60 gram or approximately the street price of cocaine."

From New RIAA via IT&W

They got more funny stats, but this clearly made me laugh :-)

By mrtoto at 13:53h| 0 Kommentare | Comment this

 

Get out of the Outlook trap

For everybody switching from Windows to Mac (or any other OS or even to another Windows Mail client), transferring mails (with attached files) from Outlook to Mail.app, Entourage or Thunderbird or whatever they like to use has always been difficult at least (yes, I did it several times).
The great Mac OS X Hints website had very usefull tip today wich could ease this pain a lot.

By mrtoto at 19:02h| 0 Kommentare | Comment this

 

IMAPSSLMD5CRAM - Huh?

I found a neat howto about configuring a imapd for SSL & MD5CRAM, the only question is why isn't the SuSE 8.2 binary compiled with

make lnp PASSWDTYPE=pam SSLTYPE=unix

By mrtoto at 21:41h| 0 Kommentare | Comment this

 

One for the night - Postcard mail

About e-mail, encrypion and why noone uses it

Starbucks makes good coffee indeed. Yes expensive, but good.
And ofcourse they all have WLAN (powerd by T-Mobile - I did I mention that I hate mangenta). Because T-Mobile is afraid that WLAN will eat up their UMTS margin and bacause all Mobile Providers seem to think, that we will pay their gigantc prices for data traffic (just look at the GPRS prices).
So to push their WLAN service it is free again (from April-November 2003 you had to pay for WLAN at Starbucks - in this time I can only remeber one person actually using the WLAN - they don't get it Internet is just a additional gimmick, people will preferr the coffe house whick has it, but they will not pay for it.)
Free WLAN means that there are actually people using the WLAN - most of them don't seem to know about the securety issues (although they have checked the "there is no privat informaton" button). This means people are sendig out e-mail - over a non-SSL connection of course.
This is not ver suprising, although most (free mail, and thats what people are using) providers are offering SSL-encryption people don't use it. Even if it is offerd for free (at least for POP, but you can still sniff all passwords and you can still read every outgoing mail like a postcard) you can't blame anyone for not using it - most "users" do not know anything about what a POP server is or that it is unencrypted. And if you ask them: "hey, do you know, that everyone here at Starbucks, and even the people in the office at the opposite side of the street can read all of you mail and even get you password?" Most people respond like: "Ohh, but who want to get my password, I don't get any interesting e-mails. I don't care."
Well I guess for that you can blame the people or the people who tought those users how to use email and the web. The point is that if I don't care if the door of my home is locked, everyone will blame me that someone went into the front door and took my stereo away.
So please no complaints about that.
The only thing you can complain about is that the email providers don't seem to care either. I tried to find one provider who would offer me a SSL POP3 and SSL for SMTP together with secure authentification (something like MD5 Chalange/response at least) for free - it doesn't cost anything mor than offering the same without security, but you have more, uhm,...security.
That one thing I don't understand: they don't offer all of those things to the people who actualy pay them for their mail-accounts. Too bad for them, they have one customer less.
But I always wanted to get root-server for keeping my mail and hosting my website, so thats what I'll do.

By mrtoto at 21:19h| 0 Kommentare | Comment this